Are we great? Are you proud?

Life in America, 2026

A friend who lives in subsidized, rent-controlled housing tells me that crippled elderly residents in her building who had been receiving $200/month in food stamp benefits (SNAP) have now seen their monthly benefits cut down to $24/month. How would anyone buy groceries to last an entire month—what could you buy?—with $24?

On the other hand, there is plenty of money in Washington to be spent on erasing dignity and history and replacing it with glaring white and gold and monuments to vanity. The travesty of the new decor in the Oval Office wasn’t enough, even with the expensive fiasco of the reflecting pool “renovation” and subsequent damage, which was preceded by the outright destruction of the East Wing of the White House. Now it is the turn of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, its grey granite to be painted white. Whatever we are told it is going to cost, we can be pretty sure the eventual price will be a multiple of the first number announced. The gift plane from Qatar? That “free” plane? How much are we taxpayers now on the hook for?

And now a certain member of the Cabinet wants how much more money to pursue a war that we were told was “won” after the first week? Ninety billion more, not ninety million more. He must need a few bucks to test soldiers' testosterone levels, too, since that's one of his big priorities. I mean, gender-affirming care like that costs money, too.

But elderly, disabled people living in poverty—why should our taxes to go helping fellow Americans in need, when so many wealthy individuals and corporations have not yet reached the trillionaire level? If the poor were deserving, they wouldn’t be poor, would they? It’s all a matter of priorities and values, isn’t it? Each of us shows our priorities and values by which politicians and policies we support.

Want more? How about this? There is plenty of money for tracking down law-abiding, tax-paying immigrants and slapping them into tax-sucking private prisons. But not enough money, the Department of Homeland Security thinks. They want a lot more. 

And the ARCH???!!! There is no way I can add anything to that without profanity, so I’ll stop.

Oh, wait! I forgot data centers! You think you can keep them out of your community? You think local control means anything to the current administration? Read this. 

And How About Those Tariffs?

There are emails I don’t read but delete as soon as I see the subject heading. One such group are the messages offering me tens of thousands of dollars to use in my business. No, not loans, just “quick cash!” I’m lucky but also hard-working, and neither desperate nor stupid.

It turns out (I heard this ghastly story on NPR while in my car, the only time I listen to radio news) that there is a whole new “industry” offering quick cash to small business owners who don’t have time to wait for approval on a bank loan or don’t qualify for a bank loan because they have no track record. I put “industry” in scare quotes because predatory financial schemes like this are exactly that: predatory rather than industrious. The people create nothing for others but poverty, and such mob-like operations should be seen as outright criminal, but at present they are within the letter of the law. 

I repeat: The money offered is not technically considered a loan—for whatever bizarre, legal labyrinthine rationalization that provided that loophole—and so there is no limit to the interest that can be charged or how often payments are demanded. 

Not technically loans, they are called Merchant Cash Advances, and they function for businesses similar to the way “payday” loans function for individuals. You need money now! Today! You don’t have it! You’re desperate! Here it is, yours for the taking!

How does this relate to tariffs?

Many small businesses import products or parts from overseas, and tariffs on these goods must be paid at the port of entry before the goods are released to the business owner, so what can you do if you have orders to fill and need to get your hands on the products to deliver orders to your customers? In one instance, three cash advances totaling $950,000 somehow turned into a debt of $1.2 million. Read the full story for yourself. It’s the nightmare behind today’s tariffs, the horror story no one wants to admit being sucked into.

Now, the $64,000 Question (though with inflation, the dollar amount needs to be multiplied): 

Which of the above is the worst story? 

The Man from Plains

President Carter attended high school here.

 

You often hear it said: “Funerals are for the living.” For years, whenever I experienced anticipatory grief over the inevitable death of President Jimmy Carter, I couldn’t imagine him having a huge state funeral. He was such a modest, unassuming man, not the kind of person to take on the trappings of royalty or to exalt himself personally in any manner. His concentration on negotiating for the release of hostages instead of his re-election campaign in 1980, for example, may have helped him (along with the hostage crisis) lose a second term in the White House, but he was never in doubt about the priorities of that time. 

 

Political ambition is necessary in a political campaign, but Carter’s was not egoistic ambition. Rather, he saw a job that needed doing and that he believed he could do. I have written before today about Jimmy Carter’s presidency and how I see it. The words of Stuart Eizenstat, Carter’s chief domestic policy advisor, go far beyond my own and are worth reading carefully. But every tribute at the state funeral for President Carter in Washington, D.C., was moving. Ted Mondale read the words his father, former Vice President Walter Mondale, would have spoken had he not preceded Carter in death, words he and Carter agreed best summed up their four years of the Carter-Mondale White House: “We told the truth. We obeyed the law. We kept the peace.” 

 

The first Carter news conference I watched when he was president astonished me. People from the press asked him questions – and instead of evading the questions, he did his best to answer them! 

 

Obeying the law – shouldn’t that be a necessary basic assumption for any man or woman fit to sit in the Oval Office?

 

President Carter went beyond keeping peace by pursuing it for other parts of the world, notably the Middle East. 

 

Since mine is a TV-free house, a friend who knows my longstanding devotion to Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter invited me to her house to watch the funeral, a state event with all the pomp and dignity and ritual owed to a man who probably had greater integrity than any other occupant of the White House in United States history. And the point was made that Jimmy Carter himself had planned his funeral, speakers and music selections and all. 

 

It wasn’t long into the service that I realized why. He wouldn’t have done it for himself. After all, he was not in the audience, and, as I say, he was never a president to showcase himself as royalty. No, it was for us. His funeral was for the American people. He knew we needed it. And he was so right. We needed his reminder that we are one country and need to love our neighbors as ourselves.

 

Do you believe in miracles? Are you a dreamer? Or do you think that only hearts like mine, already yearning for the integrity of our 39^th president, would or could be moved by the tributes spoken in memory of this good, good man? I want to think that words of praise for Jimmy, like the man himself, might open hearts and turn them toward the good. 

 

Accomplishments are important, and Eizenstat among others listed many of President Carter’s, but the very least, I maintain, that we must ask of anyone coming to preside over our country is this: 

 

We told the truth.

We obeyed the law.

 

Keeping the peace is undoubtedly harder--perhaps not always possible--but any human being has it in his or her power to tell the truth to the American people and to obey the laws of the land. We cannot do better than to honor the legacy of this great man by following his example.

Carter's boyhood home, Archery, GA