Category: government

extrajudicial

Vote for Democrary #51

(Photo by Lucas Sankey on Unsplash)

Not the post I expected to write this morning.

The Trump administration continued its assault on the Constitution and the rule of law yesterday by using our elite military forces to kidnap Venezulan leader Maduro and his spouse and bring them to the United States, ostensibly to be tried for drug trafficking charges. This follows months of bombing boats and killing crew members coming from Venezula and other Central/South American countries, also ostensibly tied to drug trafficking.

These actions appear to break both United States and international law.

What should happen is that warrants or charges should be issued and arrests made, not bringing in the military or killing people without trial.

In the case of Maduro and his family, charges should have been brought with an arrest taking place if he left his country. This is the usual protocol followed with national leaders, as we see with cases of war crimes. (One of the terrible things about Trump inviting Putin to Alaska last year is that Putin is under indictment for war crimes and should have been arrested upon entering the United States, but was not.)

I don’t know what the evidence is against Maduro and whether he will be convicted at trial. In the past, the United States Department of Justice did not indict on serious charges unless they felt sure they had enough evidence to convict but the Trump Department of Justice has hollowed out many of the veteran prosecutors and has had a number of high profile cases fall apart because they have not had proper evidence before filing charges.

It’s obvious, though, that Trump’s aggressive behavior against Venezula is not about drugs. If Trump was serious about jailing drug traffickers, he would not have pardoned former Honduran president Hernández, who was convicted on drug charges and serving a 45-year prison sentence in the US.

Instead, this seems to be about power and money. Trump plans to “run” Venezula for the immediate future and bring in his fossil fuel patrons to take Venezulan oil. You may recall that Trump asked for millions of dollars in campaign funding from the fossil fuel industry for his 2024 campaign and this move in Venezula would be the latest handout to benefit them.

The Trump administration is claiming this was a law enforcement action rather than a military incursion, trying to skirt the Constitution which states that only Congress can declare war. I don’t know what will happen with this because the Republican majority has been reluctant to insist on exercising their Constitutional duties.

I am worried that Trump has started a war with Venezuela that will further destabilize the country. Maduro was acting as president despite having lost the last election. The apparent winner, Edmundo González, was forced into exile because the military still backed Maduro. Maduro’s vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez, should assume the presidency but will probably be considered illegitimate because she was elected along with Maduro. Most countries were already sanctioning Venezuela because Maduro was still acting as president despite having lost the election. I’m not sure how they will react to Trump saying he is going to “run” Venezuela. There may be action in the United Nations.

What I can say is that I think Trump’s action was unconstitutional, illegal, and unwise. I hope that he will be held to account, along with the Cabinet members and other people involved, but Congress does not inspire confidence in this regard.

It’s hard to predict what will happen, so I won’t try, but I wanted to be clear that I think this action against Venezuela was wrong.

This post is part of Linda’s Just Jot It January. To join in, please visit here: https://lindaghill.com/2026/01/04/daily-prompt-jusjojan-the-4th-2026/ for more information.

2025

Vote for Democracy #50

(Photo by Lucas Sankey on Unsplash)

I, along with millions of others in the United States, faced January 2025 with dread, knowing that Donald Trump would be inaugurated on January 20th. Many of us had read Project 2025 and feared what he would do once back in office.

The reality was worse than the fears had been.

The level of corruption, lawlessness, and unethical behavior has been staggering, as has the complicity, cooperation, and feigned ignorance of many big corporations, media, Republicans, and the majority of the Supreme Court.

Still, I am more hopeful in January 2026 than I was last year.

Many judges in the lower courts are ruling against the administration’s power grabs. A scattering of Congressional Republicans are joining with Democrats to oppose some of Trump’s wishes. Lawyers are stepping up to defend people harmed by Trump’s actions. Some in the media are standing firm for speaking the truth and investigating what Trump wants to hide. Some in academia, medicine, economics, law, and other fields are loudly spreading the truth.

What gives me the most hope, though, are the millions of Americans taking action in defense of our democratic values of equality, decency, and fairness. Many have attended protests, both large and small, in 2025 and plan to continue in 2026. We write and call our representatives with our views. We try to protect those being persecuted or marginalized. We feed the hungry. We look out for public health.

We speak the truth and demonstrate our love for our country.

It’s not that I expect 2026 to be any easier under this president, but I know that even more people will speak out and we will begin to reverse the damage Trump and his many minions are doing to our nation.

Deep breath.

Let’s go!

This post is part of Linda’s Just Jot It January. Join us! Find out more here: https://lindaghill.com/2026/01/02/daily-prompt-jusjojan-the-2nd-2026/

One-Liner Wednesday: FDR on economic progress

“the test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”
~~~ Franklin Roosevelt, second inaugural address

Join us for Linda’s One-Liner Wednesdays! Find out more here: https://lindaghill.com/2025/12/03/one-liner-wednesday-i-dont-think-this-is-mathing/

shutdown aftermath, etc.

Vote for Democracy #49

(Photo by Lucas Sankey on Unsplash)

I’ve been struggling with health stuff again and unable to organize my thoughts well enough to tackle a post on the overwhelming state of affairs in the US but will make an attempt.

There was not really a path for the record-breaking government shutdown to have a good outcome, so it didn’t. The Trump administration cruelly shut off food assistance, even though there were funds available to continue. It did, however, highlight the truly terrible statistic that 1 in 8 people here struggle to get enough to eat. The vast majority of these are children, elders, disabled people, or employed adults. Many employers do not pay wages that are sufficient to cover the basic cost of living, so workers and their dependents need government assistance and/or charity to have enough food. This also means that, even after a lifetime of employment, many retirees don’t have enough income to survive and were never able to save enough to have a cushion for their retirement years. It’s a sign of how warped our society has become that so many are hungry in the richest country in the world. At least in the agreement to reopen the government through January 20, funding was secured for food benefits through September 30.

Meanwhile, it is unclear if the health insurance subsidies for Affordable Care Act marketplace plans will be extended. As people are trying to sign up for 2026 plans, the rates from the insurance companies have risen sharply without the subsidies in place, sometimes doubling, tripling, or worse, which will leave millions uninsured. This, in turn, will drive up insurance rates even higher, as hospitals and doctors will raise prices for people with insurance to try to stay afloat. More rural hospitals, which are already strained, may be forced to close. It’s disgusting that our country does not treat health care as a basic right, denying care to anyone without good insurance and/or mounds of cash.

There has been a lot of talk about who bears “blame” for the shutdown. To my mind, the fault lies with the Repbulicans in both the legislative and executive branches. The budget process should work through the Congressional committees to have the appropriation bills passed and in place for October 1, when the new fiscal year begins. Instead, Repbulicans insisted on ramming through their own proposals rather than negotiating with Democrats and Independents to craft appropriation bills that could pass under regular order. Even when Democrats tried to make proposals, Congressional Republican leaders and the President refused to negotiate. The Speaker of the House went so far as to not even call the House into sessions for weeks, time that should have been spent crafting budget bills so that they didn’t have to rely on short-term continuing resolutions to keep the government open.

Another major problem is that the Trump administration has not been executing laws that Congress has passed. How can Congressional Democrats and the general public trust that the Trump administration will spend the money that Congress allocates when they shamefully cancelled life-saving funds for USAID and other agencies and programs, even ignoring court orders?

There is a Constitutional way to deal with this, impeachment of the president and other members of the executive branch by the House and conviction by the Senate, but the current Congressional Repbulicans won’t take action against Trump, even when he is illegally usurping powers granted to Congress, not the President. Unfortunately, this traps the country in this hurtful, dysfunctional state until, at least, the next election.

It is possible that the Republicans could lost the majority in the House even before the midterm elections next November. If more Repbulicans resign, as Marjorie Taylor Greene plans to do in January, and seats are left open for a time period or if Democrats flip some of those seats, the Repbulicans could lose their majority and a new Speaker would be elected. A Democratic majority could launch investigations and might be able to find enough Repbulican senators to pass bipartisan legislation to better serve the country.

Meanwhile, concerned citizens will continue to protest, boycott, and raise their voices to call for their rights, liberty, and values to prevail, in line with our Constitution and laws. We have sunk so low in the functioning of our national government that it will be a long, hard slog to recover, but we will try. It will be difficult for other countries to ever trust us again, given the immense harm that Trump has perpetrated on the world. All the more reason to get to work now.

SoCS: alarm bells in the US

Vote for Democracy #48

(Photo by Lucas Sankey on Unsplash)

I’ve been experiencing life here in the United States with increasing alarm.

The cruelty, lawlessness, and incompetence of the Trump administration continues to accelerate while the suffering here and abroad continues to mount.

I will spare you a stream-of-consciousness list of all the component parts of this catastrophe, but the destruction by Trump of the East Wing of the White House presents a decent metaphor – lie about what you are planning and rush in and wreck things.

Millions upon millions of people here are fighting back to save our democracy and have a chance to re-build it and slowly repair to the extent possible the global damage inflicted but we haven’t been able to turn the tide yet. I don’t know how long it will take but we won’t give up.

Joyce Vance published her first book this week, entitled Giving Up is Unforgivable: A Manual for Keeping a Democracy. It’s what we need to do.

We won’t give up.
*****
Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week is “alarm.” Join us! Find out more here: https://lindaghill.com/2025/10/24/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-oct-25-2025/

One-Liner Wednesday: free speech

“Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.”
~~~ Benjamin Franklin

This wise observation brought to you as part of Linda’s One-Liner Wednesday series. Join us! Find out more here: https://lindaghill.com/2025/10/22/one-liner-wednesday-he-laughed/

October 18 No Kings rallies

Vote for Democracy #47

(Photo by Lucas Sankey on Unsplash)

Millions of people in the United States plan to attend peaceful protests, rallies, and marches tomorrow, Saturday, October 18, 2025. The theme is No Kings and it is in support of the democratic principles of the United States and against the current administration which has grown increasingly autocratic. There are thousands of events scheduled across the United States with more occurring internationally in solidarity. You can find locations here.

Tomorrow’s events follow on the April 19th No Kings! events which turned out several million people. It is expected that even more people will turn out on October 18 as the Trump administration has grown even more extreme and defied court orders on deploying troops, immigration, cutting government employees, and refusing to execute laws and spending authorizations passed by Congress.

These events are planned to be non-violent and are meant to uphold our democracy. Although the Republicans in Washington are saying the No Kings rallies are about “hating America,” that is totally untrue. It’s about loving our country and upholding our highest ideals of equal rights, equal protection, and equal opportunity for all.

Sadly, my health situation will keep me from attending my local No Kings event in person, but I will be supporting them through my thoughts, letters to my representatives, advocacy through organizations working to uphold democracy, and through my words here at Top of JC’s Mind and among my various circles of friends and family.

Are you involved with the No Kings event? Please share in the comments if you are so moved!

One-Liner Wednesday: Paper Clip Resistance

my paper clip bracelet

Following the example of Norwegians under Nazi occupation during World War II, some people in the United States have started wearing paper clips as a sign of our unity and our resistance to the erosion of our democracy.

Join us for Linda’s One-Liner Wednesdays! Find out how here: https://lindaghill.com/2025/09/24/one-liner-wednesday-why-2/

It’s Sun Day!

Today, September 21, 2025, is being celebrated as Sun Day in multiple locations in the United States, with a few locations in other countries joining in.

The brainchild of Bill McKibben, long-time climate evangelist, Sun Day is taking place around the time of the equinox and celebrates solar power, which is now the cheapest source of power on earth. And, yes, you can power your town with solar even at night, thanks to batteries and other energy storage mechanisms. Also, giving a shout-out to wind power, which is sun -related because it’s the sun’s differential warming of the earth’s surface that gives rise to wind. Wind energy is another way to provide power when the sun isn’t shining.

There are events organized by many partners in hundreds of locations, including concerts, e-bike and EV rallies, marches, speakers, technology tours and information booths, and art exhibits. I want to give a special shout-out to the event in my state capital, Albany, organized by my beloved Third Act Upstate New York working group. I wish that I could be joining them in person, but distance and my health situation are keeping me close to home.

My observance of Sun Day is confined to this post, but my celebration of solar power is ongoing! After a several years’ transition, our home and most of our transportation is powered by the sun. We weatherized our 70-ish-year-old house and adopted energy-efficient lighting and appliances. We installed a hybrid heat pump hot water heater and a geothermal heating and cooling system, enabling our disconnecting from the methane system, which had been delivering fracked gas that has caused so much pollution and sickness for our Pennsylvania neighbors. We drive a 2017 fully electric Chevy Bolt and a plug-in hybrid Chrysler Pacifica minivan, so we only use gasoline when we need to take the van on a long trip.

Because we have large shade trees on the south side of our home, we weren’t candidates for rooftop solar, so we own panels at a solar farm. Over the course of the year, we generate enough kilowatt-hours to cover our needs. Currently, we pay about $20/month to the power company for distribution and about $28/month to the company that rents the land for the solar farm and maintains our panels. It’s really great to have such low energy costs and it’s thanks to the sun!

I was happy to see solar power expanding, thanks, in part, to the energy provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act passed under President Joe Biden and New York’s Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act. The implementation of programs under these laws were helping to expand access to solar energy, especially for lower-income folks. Unfortunately, President Trump has curtailed many of those programs and Governor Hochul and her administration are way behind schedule in implementing the CLCPA.

Even without subsidies, solar energy is still cheaper to install than fossil fuel energy, even though fossil fuels are still heavily subsidized, so the hope is that economic factors will prevail and solar will continue to expand. In some countries, like Germany, it’s become common to have solar panels that can be hung from a balcony railing and plugged into the electrical system of the home. Utah recently became the first state in the US to allow this. If more states adopt this approach, solar will be able to spread more quickly because it would available to renters and homeowners who don’t have an appropriate rooftop. Granted, you can’t power your home with a small panel like these, but you can reduce your bills and help reduce strain on the grid.

The expansion of cheap solar power is also a boon in places that don’t have a reliable electric grid available. For example, Pakistan has seen a huge uptick in solar power. In the United States, solar is an opportunity to provide power to remote locations, such as some reservations, that currently don’t have any electricity available. As we saw during the pandemic, these locations also did not typically have a source of clean, safe drinking water. Solar power can be used to power pumps for water wells, leading to much better health and quality of life for residents.

So, hurrah for Sun Day and for the sun powering our lives! I’m grateful that every day is Sun Day at our home and want to thank all that are working to make solar power available to ever more people around the world.

Freedom of Speech

Vote for Democracy #46

(Photo by Lucas Sankey on Unsplash)

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

That is the text of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.

The Attorney General, the Vice President, the President, the Chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and everyone else in the government would do well to re-read it and observe it.

The court system has ruled over and over that “hate speech” and flag burning are protected by the First Amendment and that press report are not subject to government censorship.

Yes, here we are with the Attorney General saying the administration would target hate speech. The Justice Department tried to re-characerize the remark as meaning they would target speech that incited violence, which can be illegal, but that was not what she had said or appeared to mean.

In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, the administration wants to investigate anyone critical of Kirk or his views, even though they have no legal grounds to do so because people’s right to free speech is guaranteed against government interference by the First Amendment. For those of you not familiar with the structure of the US government, Congress makes the law, the executive branch executes the law, and the judicial branch judges if the laws are in accordance with the Constitution and other statutes.

Note that the freedom of speech right is in regard to government interference. Private entities aren’t bound to allow free speech. For example, if someone makes an uncivil or inflammatory comment on my blog which I then delete, I am not violating the First Amendment because I am not the government and have the right to control what happens on my platform. (For the record, while I encourage respectful debate here at Top of JC’s Mind, I have on a rare occasion removed comments for using foul language or for spreading disinformation.) There was an instance of a copy shop employee refusing to print a flyer regarding Kirk. While the business owner could choose to sanction or fire the employee, the government has no right to investigate on free speech grounds.

The administration upped the ante a few days ago when the FCC Chair publicly pressured ABC affiliates to stop airing comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show because of a comment he had made regarding the right’s actions after Kirk’s murder, implying that not doing so would harm them in getting approvals and licenses from the FCC. This caused a couple of large media ownership groups to say they would suspend airing the show and ABC/Disney then suspending production. It’s unclear if the show will return or not. This situation does appear to violate the First Amendment because a government entity intervened to inhibit Kimmel’s free speech rights.

To make matters worse, President Trump is again threatening freedom of the press, as well as free speech, by saying that entire broadcast networks should be disbanded because they run stories that are critical of him. There is a real fear that media companies will continue to cave to pressure from Trump and his administration and stop broadcasting facts and opinions that run counter to Trump’s viewpoint.

While most Republicans have been either backing Trump or staying silent, a few were shaken enough about the concept of hate speech – or opposition speech – not being protected by free speech provisions that they are speaking out. I’m not sure if they are standing on principle or if they fear what might happen to them when Republicans are no longer in power, but it’s good to see some of them willing to oppose the Trump administration when it is acting against our Constitution.

I also appreciate that having some Republicans speaking out will reach people who only consume ultra-concservative media. Everyone needs to realize that there are threats to free speech and free press so that we can make moves to protect our First Amendment rights. Some people are boycotting companies like Disney that are curtailing free speech by bowing to pressure from the administration. Many are supporting independent journalism sources, such as PBS/NPR.

It’s important for all of us to speak up for our rights. I plan to continue doing that here and wherever I find myself. I also plan to be on the lookout for further attempts to erode our rights and silence dissenting voices. We have to be careful that the United States doesn’t have its media coopted in the way it was in Hungary.

We also need to be sure that we don’t fall into the administration’s trap of calling any opposing viewpoints “hate speech.” If I say that I think it’s wrong to deport people who are in the process of getting green cards or who have refugee or other protected status, that is protected free speech. It is not hate speech.

I do try to heed the call in my faith to love everyone.

I refuse to engage in hateful speech or behavior.

I wish everyone felt that way.