Thoughts of a retired physician

  The federal indictment of Donald Trump ( 37 felony charges all told ) will result in perhaps the most significant criminal trial in American history. Trump faces 31 counts of retention of classified government documents and associated charges of lying to federal officers, obstruction, etc. This is at the same time he is the leading candidate for the GOP nomination for president in 2024. As I type this, election day 2024 is a mere 505 days in the future. If you thought the 2020 presidential election was contentious, you’ve seen nothing yet. It seems clear to many that Trump’s desperation to be the nominee and to win now relates to the strength of the case the DOJ has brought. If you have not yet done so, regardless of your political stance, read the indictment in full, then think about what it alleges. The primary purpose of a president is to keep America, its people, and its Constitution safe. The evidence to be presented in court seems to me to be incredibly damning. Yes, I have fri

  In two days Donald John Trump, malignant narcissist, sociopath, and all-around lousy excuse for a human being, will appear in Federal court in Miami, Florida, charged with 31 counts of violating the Espionage Act as well as 6 counts related to his lengthy efforts to conceal his criminal actions. Having lost his civil case against E. Jean Carroll for rape and defamation (which Trump, in his usual way, is appealing ) and as well as a 34-count felony indictment brought by Manhattan Alvin Bragg in the hush money affair with a porn star, Mr. Trump seems to be in a bad way legally. But sociopaths and narcissists soldier on. Trump appeared at two events (in Georgia and North Carolina) to audiences proclaiming his innocence and how he was a victim of weaponization of the government against him. The adoring audiences in those former states of the Confederacy ate it up, whoopin and applauding. Exactly how often does his criminality and malfeasance need to be revealed for this low-life to

I am putting together our next Current Events session here at MC and I decided it was good to look at decisions made by SCOTUS in the past year. Not because they are good decisions (they aren’t) but because they illustrate how SCOTUS, now with a Trump-created conservative majority, is taking it upon themselves to be the experts in areas of science and medicine. They are doing this, of course, because of ideology, not because they suddenly got a Ph.D. or an M.D. In 2007, SCOTUS ruled that the EPA had authority to regulate carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act. It was not until 2015, however, that the EPA directed states to develop a plan to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. Several states (notably West Virginia) and the coal industry immediately filed suit. In 2016, SCOTUS then blocked the Clean Power Plan which was then (surprise!) scrapped by the Trump administration. In their decision of 30 June 2022 , SCOTUS gave the reason that the so-called “major questions doctr

Short and simple after several weeks off. Invoke the 14th Amendment. Stop terrorists in Congress from destroying democracy. They failed on January 6. Do not allow them to succeed now. Have a great day.

  The first Earth Day was 22 April 1970 – 53 years ago yesterday. I had just finished my classes at Pitt and was set to graduate in May. I was back in Reading and gathered with friends at a celebration of what my generation (the Boomers) felt to be important because we were helping to save the planet. The world population was estimated to be 3.7 billion and the U.S. population was 203 million . The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 325 parts per million . We had not detected a hole in the ozone layer. There were 200 million motor vehicles in the world and 118 million of them were in the United States. How naive we all were in 1970. If one looks at the comparable numbers today, we are an immensely different world. Way more people, way more vehicles, way more carbon dioxide in the air. It wasn’t that we did not recognize what was happening in 1970. It was because it was easier and a lot more fun to go about our business in a manner that not only continued to pollute