The caravan of Central Americans has been moving through Mexico. Many have reached the border. Some tried to rush the border and were turned away with tear gas. A few have tried to compare this incident to Hitler gassing millions of Jews. They had no problem when the same thing happened on President Obama’s watch in 2013.

I feel sorry for those in the caravan. The blame lies with the organizers. They had to know it wouldn’t work. The cost to feed and care for all those people is tremendous. I suspect a lot of donations have come from those more interested in a photo op than the welfare of the people involved.

Like it or not, we cannot let people rush the border. We don’t know who is in the group. Undoubtedly, some were criminals. I can’t understand how a parent could use their children as a shield. I suspect that was done to get a better story.
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There is a lot wrong with our immigration laws and how President Trump is applying them. Using these poor people to get headlines will only increase the political divide, making it even harder to affect change.
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General Motors recently announced that they will be cutting their North American workforce by 15% by the end of next year. Both white-collar and blue-collar workers will be affected. They will also discontinue six car models.

This was in response to several changes affecting the auto industry. They compete with companies that have substantially lower labor costs. People aren’t buying nearly as many sedans as they used to. They need to prepare for a future with electric cars and driverless cars. Finally, they are being hurt by President Trump’s trade war with China. This hits GM particularly hard since they sell a lot of cars in China, including 80% of the Buicks sold worldwide.

Automakers have a long history of not making changes until they are in trouble. I applaud GM for being proactive.

President Trump sees it differently. He said he “was very tough” with the GM CEO and warned that they “were playing around with the wrong person”. If he really wanted to save those jobs, he could have arranged a meeting. All this hostility has accomplished is to feed his gargantuan ego.

This gives out the wrong message. Who would want to build a plant here and face the wrath of the most powerful person in the world if they ever have to close it.
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Trump, the Republican Party and the country would be better off if he could gain some self-control. After nearly two years in office, he shows absolutely no signs of changing.
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There were several candidates this week. Hillary Clinton is continuing to blame others for her loss. Apparently the media was insufficiently biased. Watergate conspirator John Dean talked about how Trump has gone further than Nixon. Then there were those that found A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving to be racist.
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The winner is New York Mayor Bill de Blasio. In an interview, he talked about his “socialist impulse” to have the city totally control all real estate. He seems to think it’s a good idea to force homeowners to sell property for less than market values and landlords to rent at far below their cost. He would certainly start a building boom; in Connecticut and New Jersey. New York City wouldn’t see anything built that was bigger than a doghouse.

​Far too many people feel that they have little to be thankful for. Some think their world is rotten because the wrong person is in the White House. Others can only see the bad in things. Many seem to wish for a simpler time. They often look at the 1950’s as such an era.  To them it was a carefree time symbolized by Elvis, Eisenhower and I Love Lucy. The reality was a little different.

We hear a lot about all the problems today. Back then we worried about atomic war. I can remember being told to get under my desk and cover my head if a bomb went off.

You might miss today’s technology. Black and white televisions got three channels and you had to walk to the set to change them. To make a phone call, you talked to an operator. Computers were room sized machines. You might have enjoyed some of the cars but there were no seat belts.

You also would have to forego modern medical advances. Cancer was considered a death sentence. I remember the swimming pool closing due to a polio outbreak.
If you were a woman, your career choices would be very limited. You could be a nurse but not a doctor, an executive secretary but not an executive.

If you were black, the situation was much bleaker. If you lived in the South, you were subject to harsh segregation. If a white person killed you for being “uppity” no jury would convict them. Even if you lived in the North, you likely were stuck in a menial job.
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My grandmother used to say “Those weren’t the good old days, those were the bad old days”. She sure was right.

I’m surprised it took three weeks, but President Trump is this week’s winner. As is often the case, he was provoked but carried things way too far. I am referring to his comments about France and President Macron.

Macron’s comments were so outrageous that any president would respond. He called for Europe to create their own military to defend itself “with respect to China, Russia and even the United States”. Over the last century we have spent hundreds of billions (or more) to protect Europe from the Kaiser, Hitler, the Soviet Union and now Putin’s Russia. We have paid an even more precious cost in the death of several hundred thousand men and women. Europe doesn’t pay its fair share of the NATO cost. Now they want their own military and, even worse, consider us a potential enemy.

Trump rightfully lashed out against Macron’s provocation. He was criticized by CNN, apparently on the theory that everything he does or says is wrong. Trump then went way too far as he often does. He went after Macron and France, even making reference to France’s surrender in World War Two.
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We all know that Trump is outspoken. The problem is that he has no off switch. What we saw on display this week is the same man who attacked a war widow and tried to tie one of his political rival’s father to the Kennedy assassination. You would think he would have a little self-control but he sure isn’t showing it.
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Congress is working on a bill that would prohibit President Trump from firing Robert Mueller. It has support from both parties. Jeff Flake says he will vote against all judicial nominees until the bill is passed.

They may have good intentions but it is a bad idea. The President should have the right to fire any political appointee in the executive branch. If they could prevent one president from firing one person, they could tell a new president that he can’t fire anyone, even if they belong to the other party. That may sound far-fetched but it actually happened. Congress passed a law forcing Andrew Johnson to keep Lincoln’s cabinet even though they were conspiring against him. This is what led to his impeachment.

The law is also unnecessary. There are indications that the Mueller team is wrapping up their investigation. Besides, Trump has to know that firing Mueller would effectively end his presidency.
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We are a government of laws, not men. The Constitution is the law of the land. We should honor it and not try to weasel our way around it like when the Obama administration argued that not buying insurance was interstate commerce.
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Amazon’s quest to find a second headquarters has come to an end. It will be split between New York City and Northern Virginia adding 25,000 jobs in each location. The New York deal was put together by Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio.
Most places would jump for joy to land such a deal. Instead, Cuomo and de Blasio have come under fire for the subsidies they gave Amazon. The far left opposes the idea of any subsidy to business, especially one headed by a billionaire.
Some of the comments are quite interesting. One thought more jobs would be created by forgiving student loans. That would certainly increase short term spending but have little or no long-term impact. Others didn’t want any company that wasn’t in line with their ideology. One person objected to having high-paying jobs since that would increase housing prices and presumably add to the number of homeless. My favorite quote was from a union leader who thought Amazon should pay New York for the privilege of locating there.
I don’t know if New York gave Amazon too good a deal, but that’s not really the point. This will create a building boom in a part of Queens that has seen better days. Companies that deal with Amazon will locate nearby. Businesses will open to cater to the employees.
In 1980 New York was the second most populous state. Texas and Florida have passed it. A recent survey had California nosing them out as the worst state in the country in which to do business. This does not bode well for their economic future. If those who only care about hurting businesses, and the rich that own them, the state will begin to look more and more like Detroit.
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There were several candidates this week. The winner was Glenn Devlin, a Houston juvenile court judge. He lost in Tuesday’s election. The following day a number of juveniles appeared before him. He asked them if they planned to kill anyone. When they said no, he let them go and bitterly remarked “This is obviously what the voters wanted”.
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There is no place in the justice system for judges who throw temper tantrums rather than follow the oath they took. I applaud the citizens of Houston for getting rid of him.
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Today we should remember all veterans who served. I would like to focus on those who fought in World War 1.

It is hard for us to understand what it was like back then. I once read that at the start of the war two-thirds of Americans had never traveled outside the county in which they were born. Now they were going across an ocean to fight in what was then called the World War. It was particularly brutal with trench warfare and poison gas. Many never came home. Others were never the same mentally and/or physically. Some saw a bigger world with more possibilities than they had imagined. One such man was a farmer named Harry Truman.

Those left behind were very patriotic. Sometimes that led to attacks against German-Americans. I have some letters my grandmother wrote. She was willing to lose her brothers and wished she could go as well. She turned a bedroom into a shrine with American flags and pictures of her brothers.

Everything changed a century ago today. An armistice was declared. Our soldiers were returning home. It marked the emergence of America on the world stage.
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Now they are gone. The last surviving soldier died in 2011. We have seen a lot of wars since then. Hopefully the memory of their service will live on.
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There was a time when some men seem to assume that women were poor helpless creatures. I find it hard to believe anyone still thinks that way today. Sadly, some do. We are hearing women making this assumption about other women. Hillary Clinton talked about women who voted Republican because they are afraid to stand up to the men in her life.

The latest proponent of this idea is a woman named Michelle Ruiz. Her aim was on white women. She complained about them voting Republican. She accused them of voting against their interest. Evidently the only thing women should be interested in is free contraceptives and easy access to abortion.

She had several interesting theories. One was that they don’t care about anyone else because of their white privilege. She thought that they may be doing whatever their husbands do. My favorite is that they were brainwashed by Fox News.
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Presumably Democrats want to retake the White House in two years. That means they need to attract more voters. Insulting them is a strange way to go about it.
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