fred has a way with words;

Great. Just ever-lovin’pea-pickin’ great. In LA some sixty thousand people–who really knows?–sleep on the sidewalks, in tents, cardboard boxes, sleeping bags, or not much of anything. Others live in their cars. The same in San Fran, Seattle, St. Louis. There being no bathrooms, they defecate as the urge hits, and where. What choice do they have? Some are junkies, others crazy, many just with no jobs or jobs that don’t pay enough for a room. 

 Meanwhile Biden sends billions to Ukraine, lots of billions, our billions, while America crumbles within. A corrupt, senescent, second-rate lawyer mysteriously empowered to bankrupt his own country to benefit a corrupt, dirtball country of no importance to America. 

 How is this possible? Why do Americans tolerate it? 

 Because they have no choice. Americans have no influence over their government except in things that do not matter to that government. 

 Recently my stepdaughter Natalia, Mexican, went to Austin to visit friends. She returned and pronounced America a truly odd country. All the houses were the same, so how could you find your way home at night? And there were lots of people, she said, living under bridges and on the sidewalks. This she thought strange. She had never seen such a thing in Mexico. In twenty years, neither have I. 

 Meanwhile Biden sends fortunes to Ukraine. How is this? Couldn’t we have an American President? Just once? Someone who cares about people in his own country? No prospect of this is in sight 

 In America there are people, lots of them, who don´t have enough to eat, or barely do. Appalachia, the Rust Belt, the rural Deep South. I wonder whether Biden has enough to eat. I wonder whether he cares that many of his citizens do not. No, come to think of it, I don’t wonder. But he cares, cares deeply, about Ukraine. 

 America crumbles, but Biden is going to rebuild Ukraine. Our trains look like something out of Turner Classic Movies. The passenger versions, across the continent, are nice, slow but appealing as period pieces. Chatanooga Choochoo, all that. They are also primitive and badly maintained. We have had four freight derailments in a month or so. .......more........