December 17, 2025
A response to Kelly Scoles and Pat Collins:
Hello everyone,
Kelly, your concern that I gave short shrift to Pat’s comments last week is undeserved. Or, if that is true, it was not due to disinterest but lack of time. I’m always engaged with both of your opinions, just not in agreement very often.
I don’t know much about Hegseth’s family influence upon the Dept. of War, but can you enlighten us with some facts, or must you continue to speculate? My point in making that analogy was only to show Trump and Grant as fighters.
As for Trump’s domestic achievements, I could cut and paste the well-known list, but it would stampede readers away. Here’s a few hints: Taxes, pipelines, 20-million illegal trespassers, crime, destroying Iran’s nuclear facility, saving female sports from male trans freaks, and ending the morale-killing, un-American equity-inclusion-diversity scam. Most people understand these actions to be Donald Trump’s domestic policy achievements.
So, I still salute Trump’s domestic victories, but I must absolutely condemn his shameful treatment of the sovereign, peaceable, Christian nation of Ukraine, also historically older than Russia. Trump must also correct his grossly false public accusations of President Zelenskyy, of Ukraine, and of who started the war, which has already killed close to two million men, women, and children. Find photos of Ukrainian child victims on Jake Broe, online – and weep. The war is now longer than WWII, with comparatively little news about it. There is no way to stop the war without crushing Russia by destroying its petroleum industry – which Ukrainians are achieving with remarkable skill. I still characterize Trump as a sort of idiot savant, idiot side being foreign policy.
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Trump’s expletive-laden descriptions of illegal aliens refer to those who are killers, rapists, thieves, and terrorists. How many of them would you like to keep?
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On the economy, I have no solution. The first house I bought in Ventura in the 1960s cost me $65,000. It was a small, 2-bdrm.- post-WWII home in a beautiful, safe, quiet, family area. That house now sells for $400,000. I do not have a cure for this disease. I believe when the average working person can no longer buy his own house America’s future will be in grave danger. That time may have already come.
As for that ballroom at the White House - if paid for by private funds, and is truly needed for large meetings, I see no harm. I do hate, however, all that excess slathering of gold leaf in the Oval Office and elsewhere. At the Putin hideout all things are (stolen) gold. Somehow so much fresh gold makes us look cheaper, like Putin.
Responding to Pat Collins:
Hi Pat,
Thank you also for acknowledging my sincerity. We have much in common in our Judeo-Chrisian understanding of today’s world. Yes, discernment, always discernment, it’s serious business to be thought of in humility. End of sermon.
“Urgency and hope,” right again. Urgency without hope is just panic, despair, and defeat, which has nothing to do with Christianity. While I don’t believe it’s the end, I do believe it’s the beginning of a spectacular new era.