A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Photo Illustration: Pixabay Hi, there, Constant Reader. Well, it's Saturday, May 2, and it's late morning here in my corner of Florida. The current temperature is 71℉ (22℃) under mostly sunny skies. Looking at the forecast, it looks like it's going to be a warm, sunny day, with temperatures expected to reach a high of 84℉ (29℃), dropping at night to a low of 63℉ (17℃). No rain is expected to fall in our area today. Well, here we are in the fifth month of 2020, and we Floridians are still hunkering down in our homes due to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Sadly, the Sunshine State is governed (for lack of a better word) by the Republican Party, and our governor, Ron DeSantis is a Donald Trump loyalist who is rarin' to reopen the state for business ASAP. This is not an attitude unique to our state; other Southern (and Republican-dominated) states like Tennessee and Georgia are reopening some businesses, although this is pretty much asking for trouble, as ...

Slipcover art from Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker's Multi-Screen Edition Blu-ray. © 2019, 2020 Buena Vista Home Entertainment and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) Well, it's Sunday, March 29, 2020, and it's the last weekend of a tumultuous month unlike any other since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against America. Once again, the entire country is facing a danger that's posed not just to human lives, but to the values that many of us hold dear - civility, decency, moral courage, and a belief that we as a nation can unite despite partisan divisions and persevere in the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. Unfortunately, unlike those dark and scary times after the Twin Towers fell and part of the Pentagon was scarred by the impact of an American Airlines Boeing 757 hijacked by Al Qaeda terrorists, when a mediocre Republican President named George W. Bush managed to rally the nation and prepared to strike back at our enemies, the ship of state is rudderless,. Most of...

Illustration Credit: Pixabay Another message to my conservative friends in South Florida and elsewhere, especially those who are die-hard loyalists of Donald Trump: Dear Friends, Do you remember those long-ago (or seemingly so) days in 2015 and early 2016, during the Republican Presidential primary season, when it looked like Donald Trump might, just might, become the presumptive nominee of your party? We warned you then: "He's not fit for the Presidency. He is a con man. A bigot. A notorious liar and braggart. He has no experience in government. He is abrasive and spiteful. A Trump Presidency will be disastrous." You dismissed us. You laughed at us. You bought your red MAGA caps (made in China, by the way) and called us "snowflakes." "Communists." "Libtards." You mocked us for wanting to avoid putting a rude, crude, and inept "businessman" in the White House. You had the gall to post photos of Melania Trump and opine th...

Chart Credit: Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU)  On the last week of March 2020, the United States of America reached a dark milestone in the novel coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic: the number of confirmed cases in the country exceeded those in China for the first time. As of 7:57 AM on Friday, March 27, there were 85,996 reported cases in the U.S. and its territories (including Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. 1,300 persons have died from COVID-19, including 365 in New York City alone, over the past three months. And as more cases get reported due to more testing and more people die due to the uncoordinated and even lethargic response by the inept and morally bankrupt Trump Administration, those numbers are likely to spike upward before they stabilize and then gradually slope down sometime in mid-spring. Clearly, the current President of the United States, Donald Trump, is not up to the task of guiding this nation in a major...

Unbelievable. In the same week that Texas' Republican lieutenant governor Dan Patrick suggested that grandparents should sacrifice their lives in order to save the country and President Donald Trump rosily predicted that the war on the novel coronavirus will probably end in time for Easter, Glenn Beck piled on with his own idiocy. According to the Huffington Post and Media Matters, the popular right-wing commentator and author apparently shares Patrick's apocalyptic vision of older Americans going out to the workplace while their children and grandchildren stay at home, even though the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) have determined that COVID-19 is more likely to kill older people who become infected. Per Huffington Post's story : “I would rather have my children stay home and all of us who are over 50 go in and keep this economy going and working,” he said in comments posted online by Media Matters. “Even if we all get...

Just when you thought Donald J. Trump, the 45th President of the United States, could sink no lower in his levels of incompetence, the Buffoon in Chief is signaling his impatience with the medically-necessary steps to limit the spread of COVID-19 and is making irresponsible predictions that the pandemic will end "before Easter." At a televised"town hall" arranged by Trump's favorite conservative media outlet, Fox News, the man who once said that the coronavirus pandemic would not have a serious impact on the U.S. and that the Democrats were exaggerating the gravity of the situation for political gain during an election year was irritated and, at the same time, making rosy predictions about when America could go back to business as usual. Per the New York Times:   President Trump said on Tuesday that he wanted to reopen the country for business by Easter, on April 12, despite widespread warnings from public health experts that the worst effects of the co...

So now we've come to this. As President Donald Trump questions the wisdom of putting into place medically-necessary measures to protect Americans from the world-wide coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic because they're "doing more harm than good" to the economy, his Republican acolytes are clamoring for an end to quarantines, closures of businesses, and a return to normal activities. It's no secret that the GOP has long had a reputation for being the party of Big Business. The alliance between the Republican Party and what we now call the "One Percenters" began sometime after Reconstruction and was solidified by the time of the 1912 Presidential election, the race that split the party's pro-business wing (led by incumbent William Howard Taft) and its more progressive one (led by ex-President Theodore Roosevelt). In that intramural battle royale, TR and his adherents ended up forming a third party (the Bull Moose Party); as a result, a weakened Taft...

To my conservative friends who are posting false comparisons between the Obama Administration's handling of the swine flu outbreak in 2009 and the current Administration's handling of COVID-19 on social media: Stop it. When the world experienced the swine flu pandemic, Barack Obama was just settling in as President. The first cases were reported by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in late March, around the same time that the Obama Administration was dealing with the disastrous state of the economy, which had been battered by the Great Recession of 2008. It took the federal government less than a month to declare a public health emergency, but because the novel Influenza A/H1N1 was a new strain, it took the medical community several more months to get a handle on the outbreak and its spread. President Obama declared a National Health Emergency on October 24, 2009. In all, the CDC estimates that at least 60 million Americans were infected, 274,000 were hospitalized, an...

Image by Miguel Padrinan, via Pixabay We Said, They Said: An American Tragedy He's unfit for the job, we said. He's incompetent and dishonest, we said. "But her emails..." they replied. He's a fuckup, we said. "But our 401Ks are doing so well!" they chanted. Now. COVID-19. DJIA below 20,000. We told 'em so. © 2020 Alex Diaz-Granados

Photo Credit: Pixabay This question was originally asked by conservative memberTrevor Hamlen on Quora as: Since President Trump was a lifelong Democrat before running for president and he polished his interpersonal skills during his formative years, would the Democrats take ownership for the very behaviors they claim him to possess? My reply:  Oh, boy. It is really sad to see just how ill-informed you must be about Donald Trump, based on the wording of your question. So many distortions, so many mistaken conclusions. So, as a public service, I’ll try to educate you on the realities of Donald Trump’s political affiliation and how he changes parties to suit his whims. Let’s get started, shall we? First of all, Donald J. Trump has  never been  a “lifelong” member of the Democratic Party. In the mid-1980s, for instance, Trump registered as a Republican voter with the Department of Elections in Manhattan. He remained a Republican until 1999 when he registered a...

Typical anti-Obama political illustration. Graphic Credit: The People's Cube On Quora, Jeff Reno asks: Has there ever been a time in history when a U.S. President has been treated with less respect by the opposition party? My reply:  If you are a Trump supporter (and I’m willing to bet that you are), I’d like to remind you that Donald J. Trump is not the first President that has been treated with scorn, dislike, and even disrespect. As a matter of fact, I’m willing to state that all 45 Presidents in U.S. history, including George Washington, have been targets of derision, insults, rumors, or accusations of wrongdoing. The political rivalry between the early Republicans (the original name of the Democratic Party) and Federalists was intense, and adherents of both parties often insulted the leadership of “the other side,” using vivid and vitriolic language that would make the Russian troll farm contractors sigh with envy. The first three Presidential Elections (1788, 1...

On Quora, an anonymous Trump supporter asks: Will you secretly vote for Trump even though you are a life-long liberal/centrist? My reply: No. Why should I? First of all, Donald J. Trump is perhaps the worst person elected to the Presidency in my lifetime; his personal behavior (both public and private), his actions as Chief Executive, his Administration’s policies, and his Cabinet picks have lowered the standing of the United States in the eyes of the world. I do not like the man  or  what he stands for, so why should I vote for him and betray my core values as an American citizen? Second, there’s no way on Earth that I will vote for  any  Republican candidate at the national level, considering how low the Republican Party has sunk in its bid to win a “permanent majority” in Congress and win control of the Supreme Court for the so-called “conservative movement.” When the Legislative Branch of Congress’ upper house is led by a man who is publicly unwilli...