Image by “Possessed Photography” on Unsplash.
Forgottenman sent me the link to a video that confirms my worst fears about AI.
Go HERE to see his blog and hear it for yourself!
Interesting Video about AI. Don’t Miss This One!!
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Connections for Lens Artists Challenge.
Click on Photos to Enlarge
I always thought that at some point I would have children, but by the time I finally found the man I wanted have them with, I was thirty-eight, and he already had eight living children. Four of these children were under the age of eight when we met. When I married their dad, I married them, too. This poem was written at a time when, as inept as I was at entertaining small children in an L.A. condo, I still believed in a sort of magic wherein stepfamilies could connect to become become real families.
Connections
Your daughter breaks her arm and something breaks with it.
She becomes manageable.
Her laugh, softer now sometimes.
She loves writing with her other hand.
Her broken one grows fingernails for the first time
which we manicure once a week.
Sometimes, I drive home slower
on the nights I know we’re going to have the kids,
hoarding a few more minutes alone.
My key in the lock brings them, wanting games at once.
You, exhausted, irritable on the sofa,
wanting them yet wanting them gone.
In a movie, Mary Tyler Moore saying
she can’t love the son who needs her love too much.
Can’t love on demand?
Dirty fingernails, torn knees on Levis—
Our rag-a-muffins,
driven down to our city life
where they demand the mall.
Not the way I pictured it.
They call me Mom immediately after the wedding.
I scrub their fingernails,
put medicine on cold sores,
tell Jodie not to wear those torn-out pants to school anymore.
The other kids, I say, will talk—
what my mother would have said to me.
When I tell them at the office
about the homemade Easter decorations
hung on our refrigerator,
about the one that reads “to Mom,”
Jim says he prefers Elliott’s stories.
When I tell them that the littlest grabbed my knees
and hugged and said, “I just love you,”
the clever crowd around the copier groans.
I’m not a mother, they all understand,
and once a week, I barely get good practice in.
But when your daughter breaks her arm,
I try to find a spell to stick us all together—
paper, scissors, colored pens.
I say, “Try to keep the glue off the dining room table.”
I say, “Try not to drop the magic markers on the floor.”
“Take off your shoes when walking on the white sofa.”
The China Bulldog was a finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Awards
Books2024. New Generation Independent Book Award Finalist:
The China Bulldog And Other Tales of a Small-Town Girl
(Prose, poety and images of growing up in a small town in South Dakota. )
I just discovered that my book The China Bulldog (Available on Amazon and at Diane Pearl’s)
was a finalist for the 2024 New Generation Indie Book Awards in the Memoir category.
If you think Biden has not accomplished anything, please read this post by Annie Asks You that I’m reblogging.
Paper Shoes for Ragtag Daily Prompt, June 8, 2024
Paper Shoes
I’m folding me some paper shoes
so I can walk away the blues.
The love poems I cannot recall
I’ll scuff off as I pass the mall.
Someone will find my words all shredded–
how you wooed and won and bedded
one so young and so naive
that she could not help but believe
words pilfered from a Hallmark store
that you had often used before.
All those lovelorn lines obscured.
All that loneliness endured.
On Main Street I will shed my heart—
that part of me you tore apart.
All the lines I wrote about it,
all the times I grew to doubt it.
Your words the heel, my words the sole,
the sidewalks will consume them whole.
All the futile poetry
that passed once between you and me
ground into the pavement where
perhaps two lovers will find it there—
the words like seeds that hung around
hoping for more fertile ground.
Love sprouted from a used-up word
might strike some others as absurd,
but I like to think perhaps
our use of them was just a lapse.
Repeated by those other voices
who choose to live by other choices,
all those words that we now rue
might work for lovers who are new.
For the Ragtag Daily Prompt, the subject is Paper
Some Vital Information on Who Best Serves the Everyday American. Read This!!!
Image by SJ Objio on Unsplash
If you are considering voting for Trump in spite of all of his past illegal actions because he is “such a good businessman,” please read Heather Cox Richardson’s “Letters from an American” below and then subscribe to her free newsletter. Subscribe for free to Heather Cox Richardon’s daily letter here: heathercoxrichardson@substack.com
Two big stories today that together reveal a broader landscape.
The first is that the Bureau of Labor Statistics today released another blockbuster jobs report. The country added 272,000 jobs in May, far higher than the 180,000 jobs economists predicted. A widespread range of sectors added new jobs, including health care, government, leisure and hospitality, and professional, scientific, and technical services. Wages are also up. Over the past year, average hourly earnings have grown 4.1%, higher than the rate of inflation, which was 3.4% over the same period.
The unemployment rate ticked up from 3.9% to 4%. This is not a significant change, but it does break the 27-month streak of unemployment below that number.
The second big story is that Justice Clarence Thomas amended a financial filing from 2019, acknowledging that he should have reported two free vacations he accepted from Texas billionaire Harlan Crow. While in the past he said he did not need to disclose such gifts, in today’s filing he claimed he had “inadvertently omitted” the trips on earlier reports. ProPublica broke the story of these and other gifts from Crow, including several more trips than Thomas has so far acknowledged.
Fix The Court, a nonprofit advocacy group that seeks to reform the federal courts, estimates that Thomas has accepted more than $4 million in gifts over the last 20 years. As economic analyst Steven Rattner pointed out, that’s 5.6 times more than the other 16 justices on the court in those years combined.
These two news items illustrate a larger story about the United States in this moment.
The Biden administration has quite deliberately overturned the supply-side economics that came into ascendancy in 1981 when President Ronald Reagan took office and that remained dominant until 2021, when Biden entered the White House. Adherents of that ideology rejected the idea that the government should invest in the “demand side” of the economy—workers and other ordinary Americans—to develop the economy, as it had done since 1933.
Instead, they maintained that the best way to nurture the economy was to support the “supply side”: those at the top. Cutting business regulations and slashing taxes would create prosperity, they said, by concentrating wealth in the hands of individuals who would invest in the economy more efficiently than they could if the government interfered in their choices. That smart investment would dramatically expand the economy, supporters argued, and everyone would do better.
But supply-side economics never produced the results its supporters promised. What it did do was move money out of the hands of ordinary Americans into the hands of the very wealthy. Economists estimate that between 1981 and 2021, more than $50 trillion dollars moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.
In order to keep that system in place, Republicans worked to make it extraordinarily difficult for Congress to pass laws making the government do anything, even when the vast majority of Americans wanted it to. With the rise of Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to the position of Senate majority leader in 2007, they weaponized the filibuster so any measure that went against their policies would need 60 votes in order to get through the Senate, and in 2010 they worked to take over state legislatures so that they could gerrymander state congressional districts so severely that Republicans would hold far more seats than they had earned from voters.
With Congress increasingly neutered, the power to make law shifted to the courts, which Republicans since the Reagan administration had been packing with appointees who adhered to their small-government principles.
Clarence Thomas was a key vote on the Supreme Court. But as ProPublica reported in December 2023, Thomas complained in 2000 to a Republican member of Congress about the low salaries of Supreme Court justices (equivalent to about $300,000 today) and suggested he might resign. The congressman and his friends were desperate to keep Thomas, with his staunchly Republican vote, on the court. In the years after 2000, friends and acquaintances provided Thomas with a steady stream of gifts that supplemented his income, and he stayed in his seat.
But what amounts to bribes has compromised the court. After the news broke that Thomas has now disclosed some of the trips Crow gave him, conservative lawyer George Conway wrote: “It’s long past time for there to be a comprehensive criminal investigation, and congressional investigation, of Justice Thomas and his finances and his taxes. What he has taken, and what he has failed to disclose, is beyond belief, and has been so for quite some time.” A bit less formally, over a chart of the monetary value of the gifts Thomas has accepted, Conway added: “I mean. This. Is. Just. Nuts.”
As the Republican system comes under increasing scrutiny, Biden’s renewal of traditional economic policies is showing those policies to be more successful than the Republicans’ system ever was. If Americans turn against the Republican formula of slashing taxes and deregulating business, those at the top of the economy stand to lose both wealth and control of the nation’s economic system.
Trump has promised more tax cuts and deregulation if he is reelected, although the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office recently projected that his plan to extend the 2017 tax cuts that are set to expire in 2025 will add more than $3 trillion to the deficit over the next decade. In April, at a meeting with 20 oil executives, Trump promised to cut regulations on the fossil fuel industry in exchange for $1 billion in donations, assuring them that the tax breaks he would give them once he was in office would pay for the donation many times over (indeed, an analysis quoted in The Guardian showed his proposed tax cuts would save them $110 billion). On May 23, he joined fossil fuel executives for a fundraiser in Houston.
In the same weeks, Biden’s policies have emphasized using the government to help ordinary people rather than to move wealth upward.
On May 31 the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced that it will make its experimental free electronic filing system permanent. It asked all 50 states and the District of Columbia to sign on to the program and to help taxpayers use it. The program’s pilot this year was wildly successful, with more than 140,000 people filing that way. Private tax preparers, whose industry makes billions of dollars a year, oppose the new system.
The Inflation Reduction Act provided funding for this program and for beefing up the ability of the IRS to audit the wealthiest taxpayers. As Fatima Hussein wrote for the Associated Press, Republicans cut $1.4 billion from these funds last summer and will shift an additional $20 billion from the IRS to other programs over the next two years.
Today the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued five new reports showing that thanks in part to the administration’s outreach efforts about the Affordable Care Act, the rate of Black Americans without health insurance dropped from 20.9% in 2010 to 10.8% in 2022. The same rate among Latinos dropped from 32.7% to 18%. For Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders, the rate of uninsured dropped from 16.6% to 6.2%. And for American Indians and Alaska Natives, the rate dropped from 32.4% to 19.9%. More than 45 million people in total are enrolled in coverage under the Affordable Care Act.
President Biden noted the strength of today’s jobs report in a statement, adding: “I will keep fighting to lower costs for families like the ones I grew up with in Scranton.” Republicans “have a different vision,” he said, “one that puts billionaires and special interests first.” He promised: “I will never stop fighting for Scranton—not Park Avenue.”
Subscribe for free to Heather Cox Richardon’s daily letter here: heathercoxrichardson@substack.com
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Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/06/07/may-jobs-unemployment/
https://www.cnn.com/business/live-news/jobs-report-may-06-07-24/index.html
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/07/jobs-report-may-2024-us-job-gains-totaled-272000-in-may.html
https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-gift-disclosures-harlan-crow
https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-money-complaints-sparked-resignation-fears-scotus
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/22/trump-oil-industry-campaign
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/11/us/politics/trump-biden-affordable-care-act.html
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SteveRattner/status/1798749555002941930
gtconway3d/status/1799122270037713027
gtconway3d/status/1799123230772568563
BidenHQ/status/1799098652297769271
A newsletter about the history behind today’s politics by Heather Cox Richardson Over 1,500,000 subscribers.
Fibbing Friday, June 7, 2024
Image by ShutterstockFor Fibbing Friday the challenge this week is:
1. What is a codpiece? A fish’s six-shooter
2. What is a doublet? A very small set of twins.
3. Who wears the hose? The head fireman.
4. What is a gauntlet? A very skinny head of romaine.
5. What’s kept in the moat? Nothing. There’s no room for any mo at the moat.
6. Where is the portcullis? Portcull is no longer here. It has been culled.
7. Who wields the battle axe? Batman
8. Where is the draw bridge? At the entrance to the art academy.
9. What is a catapult? The cata pult the mouse out a his hole and eata it.
10. What is a flagon? It’s on a flag pole.
Words and Music for dVerse Poets, June 2, 2024
Words and Music
I like words that sizzle. I like words that pop.
When it comes to words I find that I can never stop.
Words that bubble are a gas. They float like a balloon.
Some rat-a-tat like snare drums. Others hum like a bassoon.
Onomatopoeia makes a lyric rich.
It hums along the melody, itching every itch.
The clanging of the cymbals, the clinking of a bell
assure us that the verbs they’re given suit them very well.
for dVerse Poets
Image by Simon Ormsby on Unsplash
“Unruly Words” for The Sunday Whirl Wordle 657
Unruly Words
This poem wants to dangle or take a giant leap.
I can hear it whirring as it wakens me from sleep.
I think that it’s been restlessly dancing in my dreams,
clicking on its castanets and bursting at its seams.
It may want to be a song, and thus the castanets.
Let’s hope this is the noisiest that this poem gets!
I like my poems whimsical and gentle like a sneeze.
Instead of words that storm and fuss, I prefer a breeze.
I grant that poetry has stirred others to their fate,
but poems that are too preachy tend to irritate.
Please talk to me in gentle words that put me at my ease,
for in this angry world it’s harder to find words that please.
For The Sunday Whirl the prompt words are: clicking whimsical leap poetry songs be whirring dangling fates talk grant storm (Image from a free image generator–couldn’t resist, but I promise not to get carried away with this!)
Annie
You must wonder why after so many posts on Annie, I have suddenly not mentioned her at all. Thanks to Forgottenman, you probably already know that she passed away yesterday and I really appreciate all who have expressed sympathy for Annie’s death. Later I would like to do some further posts revealing her last adventures, but I’m not ready right now to do so.
R.I.P. Sweet Annie.
