Newsom makes his move

California Governor Gavin Newsom adjusts trans-athlete policy.

He is attempting to get right with public opinion.

No more "it is just a few people, ignore it, not a real problem."

Now Democrats are beginning to recognize that there is a principle at stake.

Democrats thought the trans-athlete issue would go away if they stuck to their original instinct, which is to defend the vulnerable (i.e. trans-athlete) against prejudice. Trump made this a point of political courage for Democrats. Surely, Democrats disagreed with Trump. Surely, Democrats must stand in opposition to Trump's transphobia.

The Democratic position has been deflection and minimization. Democrats admitted that, yes, a few male-to-female trans athletes competed in high school and college sports, and a few of those excelled, but the very idea of creating public policy because of a few outliers seems wrong. It would be legitimizing a Trump point of attack. It would be giving in.

Gavin Newsom, like Massachusetts U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton in an interview in February, changed positions. Both openly said that male-to-female trans athletes competing as females is wrong. It is unfair. It can be dangerous to women. It can permanently damage women's athletics. They oppose it.

I think they are right. They are politically right, by putting themselves on the side of the vast majority of public opinion. They are morally right, too, by taking a step that not only protects women's spaces, including athletics, but it is a position that is in the best interests of trans people.

Democrats have analogized the trans-athlete issue to the same-sex marriage issue. Same-sex marriage faced some strong opposition for decades, but as people got accustomed to the idea, and as Massachusetts and other states implemented it, it became widely accepted. It just took some time. A key element of that acceptance was tolerance.  Americans ended up taking a live and let live attitude. A same-sex marriage by people next door did not affect the marriage of opposite-sex couples. People could treat it as we would the choice of others to be anything that is statistically unusual, e.g. be a Mormon, run ultra-marathons, or believe crystals cure cancer. That neighbor does not claim some special privilege.

The same is true for the vast majority of people choosing to transition their gender, except in one dimension. A male-to-female athlete, in an athletic competition against biological females, may well have an edge, based on the changes that take place with male puberty. The trans athlete is asking to have that advantage ignored. The whole idea of a women's league is that everyone in it shares the same natural advantages and disadvantages. They are all women. We expect competition to be fair.

Humans have a notion of fairness. It is built into our laws and morality. A male-to-female athlete breaks that notion of fair play. A Democrat who defends participation of male-to-female athletes -- or who dismisses it as too-infrequent-to-matter --  is justifying unfairness. Any example of it is too many. It is the principle of the thing. Either you want fairness or you don't. 

The orthodox Democratic position minimizing trans athletes competing as women comes at an especially bad moment in our country's political history. We see widespread backlash against identity-based preferences, whether it be for previous victims of prejudice -- Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, women -- or it be beneficiaries of preferences -- legacy admissions at elite universities. 

Democrats need to read the room. Americans don't like identity preferences. 

A Democrat need not voice support for discrimination against trans people or even trans athletes. Indeed, they can openly express support for helping everyone in America lead their best life. Live and let live. But they can identify male-to-female competitive athletics as a place where they insist on fair play, so -- no -- male-to-female athletes cannot compete in women's leagues.

Gavin Newsom is letting his hair go salt-and-pepper. He is trying to change his look from "Hollywood" into "statesman." With a change in look comes a change in message. I don't consider this a flip-flop. I consider it wising up to reality.

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Oligarchy

The Wall Street Journal criticizes Trump. 

We are installing an oligarchy. 

Oligarchs don't care what The Wall Street Journal thinks.

Below is the introduction page to the WSJ's online opinion section on Wednesday. 

Notice something? The editorials are sharply critical of Trump.

The "Trump Tariff Whacks Trump Voters" editorial calls out Trump's hypocrisy in claiming to help people the tariff will, in fact hurt, writing "The President also professes to love American farmers, but he apparently loves tariffs more." It concludes by saying "Mr. Trump’s tariff spree is the triumph of ideology over, well, common sense. Let’s hope the President soon comes to his senses." Harsh words.

The JD Vance editorial looks at how Vance attempted to walk back his insult of the UK and France, and concludes that those allies, not Vance, are correct.

The Zelenskyy editorial credits Zelenskyy's "grace note" of apology but openly questions whether Trump will have the intelligence to take the win and do what is right for America, Ukraine, and the world.   

The fourth editorial continues the critique, saying that the court that Trump created is failing to do its job.

We see a split between populist Fox News and corporatist WSJ. It is a split between people who watch news and people who read news. It is a split between the "forgotten American" and the people who forgot them. Rupert Murdoch owns both properties. Fox News viewers insist on a cheerleader, not information. The Wall Street Journal readers tolerate a little truth, so long as it is pro-business and useful.

The claim that prior to Trump there was only one party -- a status quo corporate party -- had some truth to it. The parties divided on issues like abortion, race, gender, unions, whom to tax, and how generous to be with a safety net, but the mainstream establishment of American businesses work with both parties. That system wants stability and predictability through rule of law. That system responded to the push and pull of appeals from advocacy groups from all sides, liberal, conservative, pro-gun, anti-gun, Planned Parenthood and Right to Life. Legislation emerged from that mix. The WSJ had influence in this system.

The 2010 Citizens United decision set off an avalanche of money in politics. At first, it empowered the "donor class" of both Republicans and Democrats. Now Citizens United disempowers them, because the scale of money in politics changed. A few mega-billionaires replaced mere multi-millionaires and single-digit billionaires. 

In 2016 Trump said he didn't need other people's money. He would drain the swamp. Now he welcomes the biggest creatures in the swamp and allies with them. Oligarchs have giant fortunes and are willing to put them to use to win favor with Trump. Trump rewards friends. He isn't coy about that. Trump sent a message when multi-billionaire Jeff Yass, who owns a significant stake in TikTok's parent company, made multi-million dollar gifts to Trump and other Republican candidates. Trump promptly switched positions on TikTok, and is refusing to enforce the law that requires it be shut down. People get the message: Trump will break the law to help his friends. 

We have entered a new era of quid pro quo. Businesses wised up. The ABC television network let Trump win on absurd defamation claims. It isn't a bribe, not exactly. It's a $15 million settlement of a made-up claim. 

We have a new form of government: oligarchy. A few powerful business people work in cooperation with government, each giving the other what they want. Oligarchies are unstable. It is never really clear if the political leader leads the oligarchs or that the oligarchs lead the politician. People see the exchange of influence, and if they are happy with their circumstances, the form of government might persist. But eventually, amid some moment of war or recession or pandemic, the public rises up in revolution.

We have not yet established a full-on operating oligarchy, but we are watching one get established. If Murdoch wants to stop that, The Wall Street Journal is the wrong medium. Few MAGA voters read it. They watch Fox.

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Covid: A physician looks back

Five years ago this week the country shut down in response to Covid.

It isn't enough to be correct. Leaders need to be persuasive, too. 

After all, this is a democracy.

Yale School of Public Health: After vaccines, more Republicans died.

Yesterday I wrote that Democratic policies on Covid may have saved my life. During 2000 to 2002, blue-state governors emphasized protecting the vulnerable, and seniors are the primary vulnerable group for the Covid virus. (Present tense. Covid is still around.) Democrats were punished politically for that policy. Business and school closures, physical separation, masks, and vaccination mandates were an intrusion on our freedom. Democrats kept the policies in place longer than a majority of Americans had patience for. Americans wanted to manage their own risks. Democrats heard a phrase turned back on them: "Our bodies, our choice."

Possibly no American president in history had the oratorical and leadership skills to have rallied the country to sacrifice for the team's health, at least not once we realized that the risk of hospitalization and death was low for the young and middle aged. We are Americans. Liberty and justice for all. Live free or die. Ability to persuade was not one of Biden's talents.  

Physicians have written me in the past 24 hours, reiterating Covid data. There was a common theme: In a pandemic we are in this together. We need to cooperate. And the interventions we tried worked -- not perfectly -- but they worked. They saved lives. Wasn't that the point?

Bruce Van Zee was one of those physicians. He started a Substack blog, where he posts when something is on his mind: https://substack.com/@bvzcvz

Guest Post by Bruce Van Zee

I am a retired physician who was involved in the leadership of a local non-profit (Jefferson Regional Health Alliance) when the pandemic struck. I was struck by the misinformation being presented to the county commissioners and the resultant resistance to public health measures by some of them. Here are a few issues to note on both sides of the public health debate:

1. The CDC picked the six-foot distancing rule without much scientific evidence. It was a good faith effort to prevent transmission, but probably flawed.

2. Peter is correct that the CDC was disingenuous about masking. They should have said up front that the first priority for the limited supply was health-care providers.

3. That being said, there is no question that masks are and were effective in decreasing spread -- not nearly 100% but significantly. If you find a hospital or health care provider who says otherwise, you need to find a new provider.

4. Contact tracing by public health departments turned out to be fruitless; people were reluctant to share their contact history with someone they didn't know over the phone and there were not enough public health folks to follow through anyway.

5. Vaccines: Vaccine resistance plus an unhealthy and older population (compared with other countries that fared better) were major reasons for the high mortality in the United States. One vaccine, Johnson & Johnson's, did have significant side effects; some cases of Guillain-Barre syndrome and cases of clotting disorder. But the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines were remarkably safe, despite the growing disinformation online. One of the few correlated side effects, myocarditis in young men, was generally mild and seen less frequently than in the disease itself. Right wing sources often cite the VAERS database maintained by the FDA and CDC inappropriately claiming a host of side effects and deaths. But the VAERS is an early warning system that requires providers to report any symptom or illness within weeks of any vaccine so there can be investigations into causality. Since millions of doses of mRNA vaccine were given once it was available, you can imagine that in the next few weeks and months some of those people might get sick or even die. But when investigated and statistical analysis was applied, there was no evidence of causality.

Do the vaccines work? Absolutely, but not perfectly. Since Covid is acquired through inhalation, the nasal and throat are first infected and can produce cold-like symptoms like any respiratory virus. But what the vaccine does is prevent serious illness, hospitalization, and death. During the peak of the pandemic, August of 2021, Asante Rogue Regional Medical Center had 182 of its 378 beds occupied by acutely ill Covid-19 patients. We were the sickest population in the country that month.

*** 93 percent of the 182 patients were unvaccinated.

*** 96 percent or the 53 patients in our ICU were unvaccinated.

*** 100 percent of the 21 patients on ventilators were unvaccinated, and most died.

So here's my question to the political right: I understand your devotion to protecting the vulnerable unborn. Where is that same compassion to protect those vulnerable to Covid (or other respiratory illness)? Is it too much to ask that you wear a mask in public? Is it too much to ask that you help establish herd immunity so that others are not infected?

In my mind, there are two reasons to refuse Covid vaccines, or other well-vetted ones. One is ignorance and the other is selfishness. Selfish, because if you know they protect, you are betting that others will undergo the minor inconvenience and risk to establish herd immunity so you don't have to.

 

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Long, long Covid

Democrats are still feeling the effects of Covid.

Democrats emphasized public health. 

The public preferred emphasizing freedom.

Anti vaccine-mandate demonstration

Five years ago this week the U.S. woke up to the fact that Covid was dangerous. Maybe really dangerous. 

With hindsight, we realized that it was dangerous to elderly and already-sick people, but only rarely to the young and healthy. Between March 2020 and August 2022, the U.S. had nearly 1.2 million more deaths than expected, with approximately 635,000 in the first year and 544,000 in the second year. We measure "excess deaths" above the trend line of expected deaths because the exact cause of death became a matter of partisan controversy. We know extra people died of something, presumably Covid.

America made missteps early in the disease. Moving Covid-infected people into nursing facilities in New York and New Jersey spread the disease to a vulnerable population. 

Church choirs seemed to be a vector for spreading disease. When people sing, they exhale with force, spreading disease. Bans on choir practice sent an unintended message that the health authorities -- characterized as over-educated, secular-humanist, busybodies -- were anti-God.

There was a rush on masks, one so great that front-line health care workers couldn't get them. In the early weeks health authorities told the public not to acquire masks, so that they would be available for healthcare workers. That sent a mixed message: Don't get masks, then do get masks. That damaged the credibility of health advice. 

Teachers unions exercised their clout. Don't send teachers into classrooms filled with 30 little disease-carriers, unions said. Health policy got a reputation for responding to political power. 

Democrats made a policy decision whose political effects linger. They emphasized protecting vulnerable people. Democrats "socialized" the risks, making rules that forced everyone to take steps -- vaccinations, social distancing, mask-wearing -- to protect one another.  Blue-state governors shut down schools and kept them shut. They inconvenienced people and hurt children. Red-state officeholders went the other way.

Two archetypes emerged. Democrats became the tyrant party.  Republicans were the live-free-or-die party. The self-reliant party. The protect yourself, but don't expect others to do it for you, party. Republicans decided that the disease wasn't that dangerous, that natural immunity from getting the disease was the best protection, and that there was nothing to be done worth the damage to business and schools caused by closures. A spirit of defiance against authority emerged, one that paralleled Trump's defiance of election results, legal process, and regulations. 

Piss on Oregon governor Kate Brown

Mask-free Republican gathering

The political parties reversed polarity from the late-1960s era of protest against the Vietnam War. Republicans were the defy-authority, do-your-own-thing party.

Americans became impatient with Covid's inconveniences. Covid protocols paralleled top-down rules of proper behavior regarding gendered pronouns, harassment in the workplace, and the DEI agenda. It was all of a piece and it involved everyone. The idea is that Democrats bend over backwards to protect vulnerable people, be they a Covid-vulnerable senior, a male-to-female trans athlete, or an immigrant here without papers. 

Democratic Covid policies expanded the pool open to MAGA resentment. What about us normal, healthy folks? Us normal people who want to go to church? Us normal, White, Christian, heterosexuals, born here in the USA? Democrats don't care about us. We get screwed. As Trump's campaign put it in the final weeks:"Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for us."

I am 75 years old. Democratic policies in Oregon may have saved my life. But they weren't good politics. A majority of people my age voted for Trump.

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Canada responds to the tariffs.

      "I don't start this tariff war, but we're going to win this tariff war. . . . My good friend, the governor of Kentucky, is losing his mind right now. I said you had better talk with your president."

     Doug Ford, Premier of the Canadian Province of Ontario.

90 second clip of Doug Ford

President Trump has taken on a big task. He is attempting to make a category change in the thinking of Americans.

 A category change isn't just a change from apples to oranges, in which Canada fits into Americans' category of "foreign countries," along with France, Germany, and Australia. That is a difference within a category.

Trump is attempting to change the very notion of Canada from essentially the USA, a place that is essentially "us" into "them." In my own mental categories, Texas is us, but with a special style coming from a cowboy legacy and oilpatch present. Alabama is us, but with that legacy of Confederacy slaveholding and residual racism. When I am thinking about Alabama as a place with a Toyota factory, Alabama is us. When I hear Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville talk about school vouchers or prayer in schools, I think barely-us.

Canada, especially the English-speaking Great Lakes province of Ontario, fits into my mental category of us, but rather more similar to Oregon than are Texas or Alabama. Canada is technically foreign, but with a quirky and amusing pronunciation of the word about as aboot, but otherwise us. It seemed presumptuous and rude -- but not entirely crazy -- when Trump suggests Canada might be a 51st state. As Trump put it, it was just a line on a map.

Ambassador Bridge connecting Detroit, Michigan and Windsor, Ontario. It is the busiest international crossing in North America

Trump's tariff operates in the opposite direction, like having a foot on the accelerator and brake both. Ontario's premier Ford spoke up for Ontario and Canada. No to the USA, yes to Canada. Buy Canada, he said. He is the wall-builder and protector. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a kinder and gentler liberal, is speaking as I write this. "Canada is polite," he said. Notwithstanding its gentle reputation, he said it will respond to protect itself.

To the dismay of Democrats, Trump's political instincts keep him well connected to his populist base. We are picked on! We are disrespected! We are the victim of bad trade deals!  But I suspect a Canadian tariff will prove to be a political error for Trump. He has been successful in selling his idea of America as a victim of bad deals with foreigners. And yet the U.S. and Canada are operating under a trade agreement Trump himself authored; but that fact isn't the important one. What is important is that few Americans consider Canada as particularly foreign or a real threat. "Blame Canada" a punch line, in a South Park movie. 

Laughable

The idea of Canada as good and safe and mostly us will be difficult to dislodge. 

The people who could screw up Canada's best protection against a tariff war would be Canadian politicians. Canadians expect and demand their politicians show some Canadian pride, and that they defend Canada against the American tariff war. There is an American audience, too. Canadian leaders must communicate that it is a reluctant soldier in this war, and we aren't enemies, now or ever. That is what Americans have thought for generations -- or more accurately it is what we have presumed. We don't think hard about Canada. Why would we? 

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"Good riddance to Europe, Ukraine, and Zelenskyy, too"

The anti-establishment left may consider Europe to be a like a bad girlfriend: expensive and troublesome.

Trump knows how to ditch them.

"Go on and go, walk out the door
Turn around now
You're not welcome anymore."

The U.S. got too "European" for many Americans, including some who spent years in the anti-establishment left. People who distrusted J. Edgar Hoover, the Dulles brothers, General Westmorland, Nixon, and big banks are still around and still suspicious of conventional wisdom. 

The establishment "international order" still exists in the minds of Western European governments and among Democrats who hope to restore the pre-Trump world of Clinton, Obama, and Biden. Greta Thunberg may have been the straw that broke the camel's back for some in the anti-establishment left. They saw a spoiled teenager scolding the adults who pay the bills. They see a goody-goody, globalist, green Europe, living in a social welfare dream-world made possible by the military defense shield paid for by the American taxpayer. And from this perspective, Zelenskyy is another fraud, getting hero worship for trying to survive in a hopeless situation, one that puts the U.S. at risk of war with Russia.

I received a letter from a long-time correspondent. I suspect he thinks his old friends -- me included -- have been too rough on Trump. He wrote me saying that Europe is like a bad girlfriend at the tail end of a relationship. Songwriters understand that situation.

"I Will Survive" was a Gloria Gaynor disco hit in 1978:

I've got my life to live
And all my love to give and
I will survive
I, I, I will survive

Trigger warning for the cocooned: Don't be shocked. The correspondent says things that perhaps 45 percent of our fellow Americans think, or would be happy to think if Trump led them in that direction, which is why the Oval Office performance by Trump and Vance was possible, maybe even inevitable.

An Anonymous correspondent writes:

Europe is like a flaky girlfriend. She's pretty. You love many aspects of her personality, you balance it off against the downsides, and as time goes on you get more tired of her. But she seems to be good company, she has a good job as a travel agent but kind of flits from job to job. She makes at least a credible contribution to family expenses, despite bouts of a few months unemployment as she flitters from one travel agency to the other with all of her squabbles with coworkers and customers. 

You are also getting sick of her self-righteous politics, with her frivolous claims to right of  privacy, the right to be forgotten on the Internet, no AI without stalling tactics in the name of guardrails, windmills, and green power fantasies, and always dreaming about defunding the military so the money could be spent to support four-day workweeks, long vacations and early retirement. We are the rich uncle who they denigrate behind our backs at every family gathering.

That's how Europe is, kind of a high-maintenance pain in the ass losing her looks, exercising self-destructive judgment in all the penniless foreigners she is always hanging around. They themselves never seem to have jobs. They are hangers-on with weird religion and unbelievably sexist attitudes towards women what with making them all cover their faces and heads, and with deep sympathy for countrymen who are pushed over the line and chop off a priest's or teacher's head from time to time. For some reason the girlfriend likes these kind of people, and even gives some of her money (which always feels like your money) to them as she virtue-signals about diversity as she gives you shit that you are too White and establishment. She gets titillated when Greta Thunberg squeals "How dare you!" 

At some point you get tired of this girlfriend. After all, you never married her, she seems to get you into more trouble than she's worth, and to be frank, you're sick enough of her to give her an ultimatum to get her act together or get out. 

That's how we are with Europe and it certainly is how I feel. I'm sick of the Western Europeans and their immigrant bullshit, their incessant infighting with Hungary and Poland over how their courts are supposed to be, and now they have dragged us into this fight for their dictator friend Zelenskyy, who literally does not have to run for reelection so long as the war is going on. Imagine if Trump did not have to hold an election so long as he kept a war going on. 

The relationship with this girlfriend has become so untenable and ridiculous that we need to tell Europe to shut the fuck up. Let Putin take his Eastern Ukrainian provinces and move on. We are not going to fight this fight for you, Trump has said, thereby averting the threat of nuclear war, because once Trump told Zelenskyy and Europe "you're on your own," Putin no longer feels a threat. He won't have to worry about any more sophisticated American weapons coming at him. He knows that Europeans are and always have been cowards, except for the UK, and they are not going to do shit about it. Friday, at the White House, Trump probably ended the war. Trump was willing to give Zelenskyy something for it, and with a little bit of credibility, but the goofball Zelenskyy, in his ridiculous trite costume, tried to appeal to the cameras, and got himself thrown out of the White House. 

Zelenskyy is finished as a leader, and Ukrainians know they have to get rid of them. It's time to call him on his bullshit, hold elections and throw the dictator out of office. Let him leave with all the money his cronies and family stole, and vote in some conservatives who are going to let Big Brother Putin have a lot to say about how Ukrainian national and local governments are run. End of story.

 

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Easy Sunday: A look back, a look forward

It is Easy Sunday. Relax. Let's take a moment to open our minds to new possibilities.

I wrote in August, 2019:

"I asked Seth Moulton what he was doing in the race. He said he plans to be president. 

'Watch for me in eight years,' he said."

This blog has an archive of every post I have written going back to 2015. It is at the home base for this blog: https://peterwsage.blogspot.com. There is a search box at the upper right.

Moulton in Iowa, 2019

Readers may have heard of Seth Moulton. He gained national exposure when The New York Times reported on an interview with him: 

"Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face,” said Moulton.  “I have two little girls,” he continued. “I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

He got the criticism that is an essential pathway to becoming a national leader.  A top aide quit. Local Democrats protested, including the Bay State Stonewall Democrats who represent the LGBTQ community; their leader said Moulton was "100% wrong." No one remembers praise by friends. People do believe a politician is authentic when someone on one's own team criticizes. We look to see if he caves, or if he defends his view. Steel sharpens steel. A leader emerges by saying things that change opinions within one's group. 

Moulton was a three-term representative from Massachusetts when I wrote about him in 2019, in a post titled Seth Moulton is well positioned to defeat Trump. Now it is five terms. He graduated from Harvard College. He served four tours in Afghanistan as a Marine officer. He was awarded a Bronze Star, and left service with the rank of captain. He has a dual Masters from Harvard Business School and its JFK School.

He fits the "manliness" test that Republicans are throwing at Democrats. He looks solid and square-jawed. He broke into national consciousness by taking the role of "protecting females," the archetype role of males.

I wrote six years ago that Moulton would not be the nominee. The scrum of candidates was huge, and Moulton got lost in the crowd. I did say he had potential:

Moulton is Biden, only better, without most of the things people don't like about Biden. Moulton is young, without the gaffes, without the vote for the war in Iraq, without the enemies built up over five decades. . . . He has policy positions that are in the sweet spot of Democratic and national popularity: liberal but not socialist, somewhere between that of Biden and Kamala Harris. He doesn't criticize wealth; he says we should celebrate success and work to be sure everyone has the opportunity to find it.

College classmates from Massachusetts told me then that Moulton had a bit of a "young man in a hurry," reputation and that he came across as too perfect in checking all the boxes to accelerate his presidential ambition. Biden saw to it that there could be no 2024 Iowa caucus or New Hampshire primary for Democrats. A 2028 election will be the eight years.

Is Moulton the next great Democratic leader? Time will tell. But readers should be aware of him. He is doing what candidates do. I get a newsletter update from him every week.

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Oval Office Blowup

Trump: You're not in a good position. You don't have the cards right now. . . .

Zelenskyy: I’m not playing cards --

Trump: You are playing cards

U.S. President Trump thinks this is a world in which the dominant powers negotiate between themselves to arrange the roles of smaller countries in their region. 

Trump expected a grateful supplicant who knew Ukraine had lost the war, yet was continuing a hopeless fight. Ukraine President Zelenskyy thinks his country is on the front lines, spilling blood to protect Western democracy. 

The meeting was probably a net positive for Trump's popularity, and certainly so with his MAGA base, even as it sent shudders through diplomatic circles around the world. This photo tells the story: a proud JD Vance, who got to deliver his zinger, accusing Zelenskyy of showing disrespect; Secretary of State Marco Rubio sat stone-faced.

Ukraine's problem is that Trump prefers Putin's Russia to Ukraine, and it is bigger than Ukraine. Trump presumes that Ukraine is utterly dependent on U.S. military aid and ought to act accordingly.

Bruce Van Zee is representative of a national wave of angry, indignant opposition to Trump. My in-box is full of analysis and commentary about the meeting, almost all negative about Trump. Bruce Van Zee's is a good example of that opinion. Frustrated Democrats want to DO something about Trump. Boycott somebody. March somewhere. Raise angry questions at town halls held by Republicans. Some Democrats are becoming "content creators" on TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Reels, BlueSky, and Twitter/X. For those who prefer to write, there is blogspot, WordPress, and increasingly Substack, where a majority of my readers now get this blog, sent by email.

Bruce Van Zee is a retired physician, a nephrologist. He lives in Medford, Oregon. He calls himself a "Never Trumper." He began sharing his thoughts during this second Trump term in his new blog on Substack. He allowed me to re-publish his post from yesterday. He would welcome new subscribers.

Click here 

Readers wishing to follow him can click above to go to his own Substack site and subscribe.

Guest Post by Bruce Van Zee

I cannot believe what I just saw with my own eyes…..but then I remember feeling the same way on Jan. 6. Today, Trump and Vance berated Zelensky for telling the truth; that Putin does not keep his word and has broken agreements with Ukraine before. Since Trump bears personal malice towards Zelensky because he had the temerity to refuse a meritless investigation into Biden during the 2020 campaign, Trump lashed out and attacked him (again) less than two weeks after falsely calling him a “dictator” and the aggressor in the Russian -Ukrainian war.

Of course, any responsible head of state would be able to put their personal feelings aside in view of the greater importance of the fate of the Ukrainian people, the international order, our record (more or less) of supporting free and oppressed people and opposing thugs and dictatorial regimes over the course of the last 80 years.

No more. Our Narcissist-in-Chief is incapable of separating what he perceives as good for him and what is good for the country. We have seen this movie before. Painfully, too many times. As a further exclamation point as to where Trump’s mind was, his parting shot in the Oval Office was, “This makes for good TV.” No thought as to the disaster in international relations his tirade had caused.

Adding ironic absurdity, he accused Zelensky of “risking WWIII”. But the real risk of widening the war is the instability in the international order his abandonment of Ukraine represents. If I were a resident or government official in, say, Germany, or Poland, or countless other countries that have depending on America’s deterrent, I would not only dramatically scale up my defenses, but seek the ultimate deterrent, nukes. Nuclear proliferation would not be good for the prospects of world peace; I think we can all agree on that.

Zelensky may well now resign, not that he should, because he told the truth. But he is a leader who recognizes that his nation and his people are more important than himself. I dearly wish America had such a leader.

Folks, we need to do something, I wish I knew what, but a single day of boycotting Walmart, Amazon, etc is not enough. Ideas??

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The Trump Doctrine

We aren't protecting peace and democracy in Europe anymore. 

Now we are splitting Ukraine and sharing it with Russia. Russia's share is ownership of the current territory of eastern and southern Ukraine. The U.S. share is a royalty interest in the minerals extracted from the part that remains.

Here is the full text of the U.S.-Ukraine agreement, published in The Kyiv Independent. The agreement so far is an agreement-to-agree, not an agreement. Details come later. 

Agreement

The agreement is hard to decipher, but I think it means this much:

***The two countries will create a fund, and Ukraine will contribute 50% of the monetized income from the sale of any newly-developed mineral resources. 

***The two countries won't encumber or dilute the fund, nor sell part of it to third parties.

***The fund links U.S. interests to Ukraine's survival and prosperity.

***Ukraine acknowledges the American expense in assisting Ukraine's defense against the Russian invasion. The U.S. recognizes Ukraine having voluntarily given up its nuclear weapons at the urging of the U.S.

I see three big takeaways from this agreement.

1. It is a reflection of the new American policy, the Trump Doctrine. It asserts the primacy of hard power and like-for-like transactions in foreign policy. Trump doesn't care about squishy, sentimental, rules-based agreements. Any nation's borders are negotiable, just like everything else in business and war. A nation's borders are whatever a country can defend at any given moment. Borders and territory reflect relative strength, not justice or history or treaties or lines on a map. Therefore, there is no shame or guilt in a country abruptly changing its policy as it adjusts to shifts in relative power of itself and others. 

2. This isn't entirely bad for Ukraine; an opinion I recognize may surprise and disappoint some readers. I fully acknowledge that the new Trump doctrine is amoral, cynical, and that it is playing with dynamite. The Trump doctrine of constantly shifting borders, partnerships, and trade agreements creates multiple points of unending conflict. It is a dangerous, possibly fatal mistake in the world's 80-year effort to avoid nuclear annihilation. But, given that Americans elected Trump and that the Trump Doctrine is in effect, then partnership with Ukraine, where the U.S. has a financial stake in Ukraine, is better for Ukraine than the alternative, in which Ukraine is a black hole of endless war and expense. Trump would readily abandon a bad "investment," one with ongoing costs and liabilities. But now the cost of Ukraine's defense is different. Our Ukraine "investment" now has gained an upside for America businesses.

3. The sudden shift in American policy was a wake-up call for Europe. Europe has the potential to act like a great power. Europe can be a commercial and military peer to China and the U.S. Inertia in the Atlantic alliance, with America as senior partner, permitted Europe to be a perennial dependent. We may regret this change in status, and so might Europe. Europe may fall back into rivalries and war. That is their history. The U.S. will miss the European alliance. The U.S.is a more formidable rival to China when in close trade and military partnership with Europe. The old Atlantic partnership was out of date and better reflected the realities of the 1950s and 1960s than the realities of today. It was always a risk for Europe that a Trump-like American leader would come along. He came. 

I think the chances of a nuclear war in the next decades are much, much higher now than they were a year ago. The realpolitik goal for a dozen or more countries in a you-are-on-your-own world is to get nuclear capability and bioweapons. Each needs that ace in the hole.  And if a neighbor or rival might get those weapons, then any one country must get them, and get them first, and then use them first, upon plausible threat of attack by another. 

Americans voted for this, whether they knew it or not. It is 1914 all over again.

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The Happy Hunting Ground of Southern Oregon

"This land is your land, and this land is my land
From California to the New York island
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me."
       Woody Guthrie 1940

Southern Oregon Indian tribes are fighting over turf. 

The local regional university, Southern Oregon University, has a prescribed Land Acknowledgement Statement. It begins:

We want to take this moment to acknowledge that Southern Oregon University is located within the ancestral homelands of the Shasta, Takelma, and Latgawa peoples who lived here since time immemorial. These Tribes were displaced during rapid Euro-American colonization, the Gold Rush, and armed conflict between 1851 and 1856. In the 1850s, discovery of gold and settlement brought thousands of Euro-Americans to their lands, leading to warfare, epidemics, starvation, and villages being burned. . . .

The notion that this was the rightful and permanent home of the Shasta, Takelma, and Latgawa from the beginning and until displaced by White settlers, is a premise. It might be true. But the geography of tribes in Southern Oregon suggests a different, more contentious past. Humans are in constant movement in an effort to find and control better fishing and hunting opportunities, even if it is currently controlled by another tribe. I presume it happened in the past in Southern Oregon because it is happening here today. The various tribes are fighting over turf, a fight played out with lobbyists, lawyers, strategic donations to politicians' campaigns and non-profits, with governors and state legislatures, in Congress, at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and in the courts. They are fighting for the right to earnings from gamblers, the modern-day equivalent of deer, elk, and salmon.

Tam Moore has been a journalist for seven decades. He is a Vietnam veteran and a former Jackson County Commissioner. He has observed and reported news for KOBI television and in print for the Capital Press. He lives in Medford, Oregon.

Tam Moore at 90

Guest Post by Tam Moore

Folks living in Medford, Oregon may wonder whose land it really is. On January 10, 2025 the U.S. Department of Interior on declared that 2.4 acres of land part of the Coquille Indian Tribe’s reservation. It is one of three decisions by the assistant secretary for Indian affairs issued in the closing days of the Biden administration that clear the way for tribes – once disbanded by federal order, now restored – to open gambling facilities on lands a significant distance from their ancestral homelands. 

The Department of Interior’s Medford decision is under legal challenge in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., where one of the other two casino sites was litigated before being granted. Interior rests the Medford decision on the 1998 Coquille Restoration Act, which authorized the tribe to serve its members living in a five-county service area – Coos, Curry, Douglas, Jackson and Lane counties.

Interior found that law gives the secretary of interior “trust land acquisition authority within the service area.”  The Tribe’s headquarters and exiting casino are 168 highway miles from Medford.

 

Here’s a map from the 1976 Atlas of Oregon which shows by language group and geographic territory, where tribes were located in 1850.

That’s a critical benchmark year for all tribes, because as White settlers swarmed into Oregon Territory – statehood came in 1859 – native peoples were dispossessed. By 1857 the government ordered all indigenous people west of the Cascade Mountains to either the Siletz or Grand Ronde Indian Reservations. 

The Coquille ancestral lands were in the coastal river drainage of the same name and some of the streams and sloughs of Coos Bay. They never had a reservation; the Treaty of 1855 removed the Coquille to the Siletz Reservation. But tribal records show many folks didn’t go and remained living in their aboriginal territory. The Coquille opened a casino, “The Mill” in 2000 on a site next to Coos Bay. In 2012 they purchased a Medford bowling alley and adjoining land, applying for the federal designation finally issued nearly 13 years later. Interior found that revenues from The Mill “are no longer able to keep pace with needs of the Tribe.” In addition, the Coos and Lower Umpqua Tribes opened a competing casino three miles from The Mill. 

Tribal casinos in Oregon and on its borders:

 

The January 10 Interior decision touched off quick moves by the Coquille. Their warranty deed transferring the bowling alley to the United States was presented to the Jackson County Clerk at 10 a.m. on January 13.  By January 14 when Rogue Valley Times visited Roxy’s Bar and Grill located in part of the former bowling alley, electronic gaming machines were on site and being played. Interior didn’t publish its record of decision in the Federal Register until the next day. 

Below: Players gamble on Class II gaming devices at the planned site for The Cedars at Bear Creek casino. Photo by Buffy Pollock, Rogue Valley Times.

The public record isn’t clear on when, or if, the tribe has filed a license with the Federal Indian Gaming Commission for the additional location. That law requires the Bureau of Indian Affairs, when considering new gambling site applications, to consult with other tribes and governments in the region—“the Secretary shall consult with tribes and appropriate  state or local officials. . . .”  

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