Why Do I Do This to Me?!?

 

My New Year’s Resolution should have been to not read the news first thing in the morning.

Or last thing before bed.

Or any time in between.

Is it any wonder my blood pressure is so high!?!

Okay, maybe it’s the Rum too.

But seriously! Did you see what the felon president did yesterday? He circulated a memo “pausing” all federal money flowing to grant and loan programs.

That means medical research, university research has ground to a halt. Pell Grants are not available for college students. Nutrition programs like WIC and SNAP have been shut down. The Medicaid portals are off-line. Funding for Head Start, which served 778,000 children last year, will be paused, along with Meals on Wheels, which feeds 2.2 million seniors each year.

Captain’s Note: If you’re wondering about the price of eggs, the Avian Flu (H5N1) is pretty much taking care of that.

“Can he do that?” you might be wondering.

According to his Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, it is legal; it says so right there in the memo.

The correct answer is “yes” and “no”.

No, a President may not stop the flow of money that has been properly authorized by Congress. The Constitution (remember the Constitution?) gives Congress and Congress alone the authority to appropriate money.

Furthermore, the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act forced upon signed by President Nixon in 1974 says a President cannot pick and choose which programs to fund, clearly stating this is the responsibility of Congress.

Captain’s Note: The 1974 legislation also created the Congressional Budget Office, which is authorized to provide nonpartisan budget and economic information to Congress.

Some say the felon president wants to launch a legal challenge to overturn to the Impoundment Control Act, which would give him authority to take the “power of the purse” away from Congress.

A heavy-handed power-grab that the spineless Republicans in Congress seem to be okay with.

Fortunately, the Impoundment Control Act was ratified in 1975 by a unanimous Supreme Court decision saying Congress may set an upper limit which may not be exceeded but a President cannot pay less than authorized. We’ll just have to see what the felon president’s Supreme Court will do.

On the other hand, a President is allowed to “pause” payments for up to 45 days if there is cause, and s/he can work with Congress to rescind the appropriation. But if Congress refuses, the money must be paid out as designated.

Press Secretary Leavitt says this is just “temporary”, to give the administration time to determine if all these federally-funded programs meet the President’s [hate-filled] agenda of abolishing DEI (Diversity, Equity & Inclusiveness) and clean energy initiatives.

“The American people elected Donald J. Trump to be President of the United States and gave him a mandate to increase the impact of every federal tax dollar,” Matthew Vaeth, acting director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), wrote. “The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve.”

Captain’s Note: The felon won the election by 1.55% of the popular vote. That hardly constitutes a mandate!

The Captain is unsure how feeding hungry children and seniors does not improve their day-to-day lives.

So can we expect these programs to be fully funded 45 days from now?

Probably not.

The felon president doesn’t seem to care what the Constitution and existing laws say, and no one in Washington seems willing or able to hold him accountable.

And with assholes like Rich McCormick (R-GA) in the House of Representatives, there doesn’t seem to be much hope of that. McCormick, in an interview on CNN today, assailed the “Free Lunch” program. He accused the recipients of “sponging off the government!” 

“Why aren’t they out there getting a job!”

The interviewer calmly reminded him that most free-lunch recipients are too young to get a job.

Captain’s Note: McCormick was elected to the House in 2023. By 2024 he had already had an affair with fellow Representative Beth Van Duyne (R-TX), ending his 11-year marriage with seven children.

Not surprisingly, both Republicans are still serving in Congress.

Many recipients of these federal grants were caught totally by surprise by the president’s memo. Press Secretary Leavitt insisted advanced notice was issued, but the memo came out quickly because the president just discovered the U.S. was “about to send $50 million to fund condoms in Gaza.”

Seriously?

As Jim Wright of Stonekettle Station points out, everything the felon president has done to date has been to hurt people. Young. Old. Black. White. Democrats. Republicans. Doesn’t matter.

And Jim has little sympathy. “You voted for this.”

So here we are, a week after the inauguration. People wonder “Can it get any worse?”

Actually, yes. Yes it can.

And it likely will.

Buckle up, buttercup! We’re in for a long, bumpy ride.

 

 

I'm Back!

 

Admittedly, my regular readers of Banana Winds have probably given up on this ol’ Captain. My last post here was July 2024. I suspect many thought I was lost at sea or gave some other creative explanation for the long absence.

In reality, the Captain became a land-lubber. Life at church and home was peaceful, the nation under President Biden was relatively calm, and the former President was getting his comeuppance in one courtroom after another – although it was dragging on interminably long. 

It was like we were in a second “Golden Age of Piracy”, in which we could enjoy our plunder in relative peace and safety. 

But after one failed performance in a televised debate with the Republican candidate [the former president, a convicted felon, who will remain unnamed here], President Biden was badgered into stepping aside to let someone younger run. The Vice President, Kamala Harris, seemed like the obvious choice – and Dems initially rallied around her – but being female and dark-skinned worked against her. Plus, being tethered to the White House as she was, she was unable to criticize the sitting president or successfully cast her own vision for the nation.

So, despite being a convicted felon, rapist and grifter – and an overall despicable person – the former president was re-elected. The Republican Party has a slim majority in both the House and Senate, and he appears to have a majority of the Supreme Court in his pocket as well.

This does not bode well for our nation.

 Since he would only have four years in office this time (although they are working on changing this too), his cronies had been hard at work since his last presidency to craft an agenda that could be initiated quickly and reshape the nation to benefit them. Following the inauguration, he sat behind the Resolute Desk and signed more than 200 pre-written “Executive Orders” – royal decrees from the dictator-wannabe, some of which are mean-spirited, some of which are unconstitutional, and some of which are just plain stupid.

One EO declared a “National Emergency” at the southern border, which enabled him to send armed troops to help secure the border from the immigrants seeking a better, safer life. It didn’t matter that illegal crossings are at a much lower rate today than they were during his first term in office.

A related EO authorized the rounding-up of undocumented immigrants and deporting them (in theory back to their countries of origin). That document also gave ICE permission to enter schools, churches, and hospitals to arrest immigrants.

Another EO ignored the Constitution’s guarantee (14^th amendment) that anyone born in this country is a U.S. citizen. This drew immediate lawsuits from across the nation.

 It has been noted that his administration has removed from the White House website the page containing the words of the U.S. Constitution as well as the page explaining the separation of powers between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. 

Among the more ridiculous includes an EO renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America”; the EO orders map-makers to draw up new maps with this designation. Others have made better suggestions.

He also signed an EO re-naming Denali to its former designation of Mt. McKinley.

He wants to buy Greenland (still not for sale) and wants to take control of the Panama Canal, using military force if necessary.

He has decreed that from now on there will only be two sexes in America – male and female – as determined by what they are at conception.

Captain’s Note: He does not know that “at conception” we are all female; male markers don’t emerge until weeks later.

He signed one EO repealing an EO dating back to 1965 requiring federal contractors to employ a diversity of people, and he plans to fire all employees in the federal DEI offices. 

(Yes, this was a real campaign billboard in 2024...)

His first action, however, was to pardon some 1,100 people convicted in participating in the January 6 riot in which he attempted to overturn the 2020 election. It was a blanket pardon, which meant those convicted of seditious conspiracy and even the most violent in that group were immediately released. 

Lest we forget...

Everyone knew this was his plan, but Republicans in Congress kept saying, “Surely he doesn’t mean the violent offenders.” 

The Police Unions, which endorsed him in 2016, 2020 and 2024, are outraged!

The phrase, "FAFO!" comes immediately to mind...

As for consumer prices, he has demanded a tariff be placed on goods imported from Canada and Mexico and has threatened Russia with tariffs as well. That will only increase the cost to U.S. citizens, but he doesn’t seem to understand that; he really thinks he us punishing the other countries!

And the price of eggs – well, that is skyrocketing as Bird Flu is wreaking havoc on the chicken industry. But one of his EOs prevents the CDC and FDA from making public statements about anything until his pick for head of Health and Human Services is confirmed.

I could go on, but I know many of you are educated people and read the news reports yourselves… from reliable sources.

Now yer Captain will grant that every elected president has the right to re-shape the nation as he and his party envision; that is what elections are about.

Captain’s Note: That is also one factor which created piracy in the first place!

But as he dramatically and unilaterally deconstructs the United States government, he has yet to cast a compelling vision for what the future will look like, leaving most of us to envision a dystopian future of oligarchs running the world and the rest of us just scrapping to get by.

One might ask, “Is that enough to get a semi-retired pirate Captain off the sofa and engaged once again in the battle for our future?”

Perhaps.

But what drew the Captain back into the battle was the kerfuffle surrounding the worship service at the National Cathedral on January 21, the day after the inauguration.

This worship service is a tradition following the inauguration of a new president. The Right Reverend Mariann Budde, Episcopal Bishop of Washington since 2011, delivered the homily. It was solid, biblically and theologically sound. 

The Captain would refer you, good readers, to Jesus’ sermon on the mount, among other passages.

In the Bishop’s message she calmly addressed the new President, saying, “Millions have put their trust in you. And as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy on the people in our country who are scared now.”

Captain’s Note: By that she meant the LGBTQ+ communities, immigrants, and refugees, knowing of the president's intentions.

Later that night the president flew into a rage on his social media network, calling her a “radical left hardline Trump hater”. He said the service was boring and uninspiring, she was “nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart”, and he demanded an apology. The next day his minions chimed in, accusing the Bishop of “attacking” the president. One GOP Representative declared she should be added to the list of those being deported!

The Bishop, not a stranger to controversy, has replied in press interviews that she will not apologize for asking someone to be merciful.

Amen!

But what really sparked the Captain’s ire and drew me back into this battle though was a statement from Franklin Graham.

Franklin is the son of the famous evangelist Dr. Billy Graham, who was a somewhat respected “Pastor to the Presidents” many decades ago. Franklin, for a time the black sheep of the family, was placed in charge of the Billy Graham Evangelical Association and later took the reigns of Samaritan Purse. At 72, he yearns for that limelight his father enjoyed. 

Rising above the cesspool of evangelical leaders who have pandered to this president since his first term in office, Franklin was called upon to offer a prayer at the Inauguration, in which he lifted up the new president as gift from God to this nation.   

Then, following Bishop Budde’s homily (and the president’s outcry), Franklin spoke out publicly, calling her a liar: “She is a socialist, activist, LGBTQ+ agenda, and that’s, you know, so she’s wrong. So these are activists, and no question, they hate Trump. I don’t know why they hate Trump. Trump stands for truth.”

He called for “the powers that be” to replace her as the pastor of the National Cathedral - trying to be the bully that the president is.

Fortunately, that's not how things work.

In response, the Captain would first ask Franklin to point out where Jesus opposed having mercy on anyone.

Second, Franklin’s ministries rely on donations from others to proclaim the gospel and serve needy people around the world. Franklin, that’s socialism.

And finally, how can you not see that the last thing this president stands for is “truth”? How can a supposed “man of God” not see that?

So begrudgedly, the Captain is back.

Mostly because if I don’t have an outlet for the outrage that is already building up within me (after less than a week under the new president), either my head or my heart will explode.

And that would be painful.

And ugly.

Mates, I will try to season Banana Winds with light hearted posts and lusty wenches from time to time, but I warn you now there will be a lot more rants to come.

Continuing to follow me here will be left up to you.