Reality bites: Trump and Vance aren't buying Zelensky's Joan of Arc routine

Yesterday, President Vladimir Zelenskyy arrived at the White House to sign a mineral rights deal with the United States. This deal was intended to be a prelude to a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia, and the media was on hand in the Oval Office for the signing.

Zelensky apparently saw the event as an opportunity to chide the Americans for what he regarded as inadequate support for his nation in its war with Russia. Thus, the little Ukrainian showed up at the Oval Office wearing his signature pajama combat fatigues and a What-have-you-done-for-me-lately attitude. Zelensky told President Trump and Vice President Vance that he wanted to end Ukraine's war with Russia but only on his terms, which included an open-ended American security guarantee for Ukraine in perpetuity.

Unfortunately, Zelensky overplayed his hand. The meeting imploded in heated recriminations, and Zelensky left the White House without signing the mineral rights agreement. 

The Democrats--never known to pass up an opportunity to bash Trump--chastised the President for mishandling the meeting and for failing to fully back Ukraine in its war with Russia. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy bluntly accused Trump of being "a lapdog" for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Here's my take on this imbroglio. First, the Trump White House should not have allowed the media to view the mineral rights signing event, given the possibility that Zelensky would go off script and embarrass the President.

Second, as several commentators noted, Zelensky failed to read the room. He woefully miscalculated when he lectured President Trump and VP Vance in front of the TV cameras.

Nevertheless, this little kerfuffle will blow over, and the Trump administration will eventually get a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine. Negotiations often have heated moments when one party or the other breaks off talks and stalks out of the room. Nevertheless, as football coach Darell Royal famously observed, you gotta dance with who brung you. Zelensky arrived at the Russian war with the U.S. by his side. Put another way, President Trump pays the orchestra, and he gets to call the tune.

"Laws are like sausages,' Otto Bismark is said to have remarked. "It is best not to see them being made.” For good or ill, Americans and the world got a glimpse of the messy negotiations to end Ukraine's disastrous war with Russia. We saw how the sausages get made, and it wasn't pretty.

I have confidence in Trump and Vance to end the bloody conflict in Ukraine. I believe a patriot must support our President as he tries to to bring peace and security to Europe.

Now is the time for the Democrats to set rancor aside and support Donald Trump as he deals with Zelensky and Russian President Putin. To undermine our popularly elected President during these delicate peace negotiations is to promote more bloodshed; in my mind, it is treason.

Trump wants to quit taxing Social Security benefits: Does anybody have a problem with that?

 I shop regularly at Trader Joe's and often see older people stocking the grocery shelves or managing the cash registers. They look old enough to be drawing Social Security checks. I often wonder whether these people work because they enjoy working or because their Social Security income is inadequate and they need the money.

Social Security income isn't taxed if the recipient has no other income. However, single people with income exceeding $25,000 (or $32,000 if married and filing jointly) must pay taxes on their Social Security benefits.

President Trump proposes to make Social Security income nontaxable, which would be a significant economic boost for older Americans who are drawing their Social Security and working at low-wage jobs in the service industry. 

Many policy wonks oppose Trump's plan because they say affluent retirees would benefit the most. 

To which I say so what? Low-income wage earners don't care how much wealthy Americans pay in taxes as long as their own tax burden decreases. Moreover, Trump's proposal to stop collecting taxes on Social Security can include a phase-out provision that excludes high-income retirees from receiving the tax break.

Other critics say Trump's proposal will hasten the day when the Social Security Trust Funds become insolvent. Most of these doomsday prophets had nothing to say about the money wasted on the Ukraine war or the USAID's fraud and abuse. No, they only worry about the government's solvency when a plan is proposed to give some tax relief to American seniors forced by inflation to cancel their retirement by taking low-wage service jobs.

About 67 million people receive Social Security benefits based on age. Most recipients receive modest Social Security checks; the average monthly benefit is only $1976. In these inflationary times, few can survive if their sole income is their Social Security check. 

Nevertheless, 25 percent of American seniors get 90 percent of their income from Social Security. No wonder many elderly Americans have been forced back into the workforce.

As I have said, Trump's proposal to stop taxing Social Security benefits will be good for older Americans who are working low-wage jobs to supplement their Social Security income. I'm in favor of it.

If the federal government needs to replace the lost revenues that result from Trump's tax relief scheme, it can start taxing the rich at a higher rate. Or maybe the Feds can shrink the federal budget by stopping the Ukraine war and the fraud and abuse in several federal agencies--most notably USAID.

Photo credit: Justin Sulivan/Getty Images

I'm from the government, and I'm here to help: A flawed scheme to save an island community from the rising sea

 Anyone exploring Louisiana's coastline knows climate change and rising sea levels are real. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Pelican State has lost 1,900 square miles of coastland since 1932. It continues to lose the equivalent of a football field every 100 minutes.

Thousands of Louisianians are being forced from their homes due to rising ocean water and skyrocketing property insurance rates. The federal government has offered various kinds of assistance to these beleaguered people, including Flood Mitigation Assistance grants to enable some homeowners to elevate their houses above the ever-encroaching water.

Unfortunately, the feds can't fix all our climate problems, as a recent story in the Baton Rouge Advocate illustrates. 

Advocate reporter Alex Lubben recently wrote an informative story about Isle de Jean Charles, an island community off the Louisiana coast. A casualty of the rising sea level, the island shrank from 35 square miles to a single square mile in recent years. 

Most of the Jean Charles population are members of the Jean Charles Choctaw Nation, and many moved to the newly created community of New Isle, located forty miles inland. A $48 million grant enabled 37 new homes to be built at New Isle for these "climate refugees,"  and the grant also paid for the New Isle dwellers' homeowners insurance for five years.

A happy ending, right?

 Unfortunately, many of the grant beneficiaries are unable to pay their property taxes and insurance. One New Isle resident said he planned to sell his truck to pay $4,000 in back taxes on his new home.

Let's do the math on this federal do-good project. Grant administrators spent $46,600,000 to build 37 homes--more than a million dollars per home. The Jean Charles islanders got the homes for free but many can't afford to maintain them. 

It would have been cheaper for the federal government to have given every Jean Charles household a million dollars and let them build or buy their own homes. But that model won't work either.

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, 330,000 Louisiana homes will be at risk of chronic flooding by 2045 (as reported in the Advocate story). That's a fifth of all Louisiana households. Will the feds give all these homeowners a million bucks each to obtain new lodging? Not likely.

Disaster looms for thousands of Louisiana homeowners who live on the Gulf Coast, and the cost to move all these people inland is prohibitive. This a problem that the federal government can't fix.

One thing seems clear. In the coming years, only rich people will be able to live on the Gulf Coast, people rich enough to pay skyrocketing property insurance. If you're not rich, don't move there.

Photo credit: Times-Picayune and Ted Jackson

Ottawa promotes a silly scheme for fighting climate change: Don't warm up your car on frigid days!

 I lived in Anchorage, Alaska, when I was a young lawyer. After experiencing a couple of Alaska winters, I thought I knew all about cold winter weather.

Then, I flew to Fairbanks for a one-day business trip in February. That's when I learned that winter in Anchorage is like a summer vacation in Florida compared to winter in the Alaska interior.

I rented a car from Hertz, and a Hertz agent drove me to my assigned vehicle, where my car's engine was already running. The agent advised me not to turn the engine off for any length of time but to keep the vehicle running for the whole day.

I drove into downtown Fairbanks and saw all the cars parked along the street had exhaust fumes spewing out the tailpipes. Nobody turned their car engines off! 

Why? Because the odds are good that a car won't start if left in the open for a couple of hours when the temperature is minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit.

I hear it gets cold in Ottawa, Canada, in winter, cold enough for wise motorists to let their cars warm up for a few minutes before venturing out on the roads. Nevertheless, the practice of warming a vehicle adds a bit to pollution.

The City of Ottawa recently passed an ordinance making it unlawful for the town's motorists to pre-start their cars for more than sixty seconds to cut down on carbon pollution.

I confidently assert that the citizens of Ottowa will ignore this law until hell freezes over. I also predict that deaths from carbon monoxide poisoning will increase as winter drivers surreptitiously warm their cars in closed garages.

Almost everyone accepts that our climate is warming and that industrialized societies should take prudent steps to reduce pollution. But let's be sensible. 

Billions of dollars have been invested in electric cars, yet these vehicles have downsides. One commentator noted that if an electric vehicle is fueled by electricity generated at a coal-fired power plant,  "it could be worse for the climate than a modern hybrid that still uses [a combustible engine]."

If we want to reduce our nation's carbon footprint, why don't we do the simple things first? Let's eliminate the drive-through windows at fast food restaurants rather than allow motorists to idle their cars for 20 minutes while waiting for their orders. Let's make overweight Americans park their gas-guzzling SUVs and waddle inside the local McDonald's for their Big Mac and fries.

As for Ottawa's ban on warming up cars in winter, I wish the city good luck. I wouldn't comply if I lived in Ottawa. I don't think many Americans living in the Frost Belt would comply, either.

Perhaps Canadians are more law-abiding and compliant by nature than Americans and will consent to drive to work on frigid winter mornings in coffin-cold cars. But I doubt it.

Fairbanks in winter. Photo credit: Andrew Dier.

What's in a name? President Trump should not have renamed Mount Denali

I lived in Anchorage, Alaska, as a young man. On clear days, I would see Mount Denali, North America's highest peak, rising to the north more than 100 miles away. 

Almost no one in Alaska refers to this majestic summit as Mount McKinley, although that was its official name for nearly a hundred years. Why would they? Denali is an Athabaskan word meaning the Great One, and President William McKinley had nothing to do with the mountain or with Alaska, for that matter.

In an act of bureaucratic hubris, the federal government renamed Denali to commemorate President McKinley in 1917, but Alaskans never got on board. In 1975, Governor Jay Hammond formally requested the  U.S. Department of the Interior to reinstate the mountain's name as Denali.

Unfortunately for the Alaskans, President McKinley hailed from Ohio, and an Ohio congressman opposed the change. Then, in 2015, 40 years after the feds received Governor Hammond's request, Sally Jewell, President Barack Obama's Secretary of the Interior, did the right thing and changed the mighty mountain's name back to Denali.

Then, in January 2025, President Trump was sworn into office as our nation's 47th president and changed Denali's name back to Mount McKinley. 

That was a mistake.

Alaskans are not happy about President Trump's preemptive decision, and they've raised many arguments in protest. I believe, however, that Hudson Stuck, who, with three other men, was the first to reach Denali's summit, articulated the best reason for reclaiming the mountain's Athabaskan name.

In The Ascent of Denali, Stuck's account of his historic climb in 1913, Stuck wrote this:

[L]et at least the native names of these great mountains remain to show that there once dwelt in the land a simple, hardy race who braved successfully the rigors of its climate and the inhospitality of their environment and flourished . . . .

Indeed, for our nation to recognize North America's highest peak as Denali is to do no more than acknowledge what is right.  Alaska Natives lived and thrived in a harsh land for millennia before the Europeans showed up. The Native name of Denali is the mountain's proper name.

Note. I omitted an offensive Eurocentric phrase from my quotation of Hudson Stuck. 

Mount Denali: The Great One

Maine Governor Janet Mills defies Trump's ban on transgender high school sports: Is this the hill you choose to die on?

Earlier this month, President Trump signed an executive order making clear that schools and colleges that allow biological males to compete in women's and girls' varsity sports violate Title IX. Education institutions that continue this practice, Trump's order declared, would be denied federal funding.

Most Americans welcomed an end to a bizarre policy adopted by various varsity sports associations that allowed biological men to compete against women and girls in such varied sports as shot put competition, swimming, and pole vaulting. In essence, Trump's order announced that the emperor wore no clothes, and people who believe that only girls should be allowed to compete with other girls in school sports no longer need fear being branded as transphobic.

The NCAA immediately jumped on board, announcing  it would comply with Trump's executive order.  Henceforth, the NCAA announced, only athletes who were assigned female at birth could compete in collegiate women's sports. 

However, the reaction to Trump's order was mixed at the high school level. Some high school sports associations revised their policies about transgender sports competition to comply with the Trump directive. Others vowed to continue allowing biological males who identify as female to compete with real girls in varsity sports.

 

For example, the Maine Principals Association declined to comply with President Trump's executive order, and a biological male who identified as female was recently named the state champion in the girls' pole vaulting event. Laural Libby, a Maine State legislator, revealed that this transgender athlete had competed as a male in a previous year and had only tied for fifth place.

President Trump, aware of Maine's defiance, confronted Maine Governor Janet Mills at a governors' conference in Washington and warned her that Maine would lose federal funding if it refused to comply with his executive order. Ms. Mills did not back down. "See you in court," was her response.

Here are my thoughts. Banning biological males from competing against girls in varsity sports is a simple matter of fairness.  Congress adopted Title IX in 1972 to ensure fairness toward women and girls in school sports, and politicians and educators who interpret Title IX as permitting transgender participation in girls' sports are engaging in sophistry.

Moreover, states choosing to litigate the transgender sports issue in court are wasting their money on lawyers. Who believes biological males will be allowed to compete in women's sports when this litigation is concluded? Trump's executive order will ultimately prevail in the courts, and this controversy will die away.

So why is Governor Janet Mills defying President Trump's executive order? In my view, Mills is engaged in expensive virtue signaling-- willing to risk the loss of federal education funding for her state to publicize her opposition to Donald Trump. 

If so, Mills should pick another issue to fight about other than transgender sports competition. I strongly suspect that the majority of her constituents are opposed to biological boys competing against girls on Maine's athletic fields. In fact, I'm sure they think it's nuts.

Governor Mills has chosen the wrong hill to die on. She may not care about her political future since she is 77 years old, in her second term as governor, and prohibited by the Maine Constitution from running for a third consecutive term. 

However, her foolish stance on transgender participation in girls' sports will be remembered by the voters as a crackpot notion of the Democratic party, which could turn Maine into a swing state or even a red state in the coming years.

My feeble Catholic testament against the death penalty. Capital punishment coarsens us all.

Ten years ago, Pope Francis spoke out against the death penalty. Addressing a delegation from the International Association of Penal Law, the Pope said this: "All Christians and men of good faith are therefore called upon today to fight . . . for the abolition of the death penalty--whether it is legal or illegal, and in all its forms . . . ."

In speaking out against capital punishment, Pope  Francis followed the example of Pope John Paul II, who condemned the death penalty as "both cruel and unnecessary." 

In 2018, Pope Francis revised the Catholic Catechism to make clear that the death penalty is "inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person." Therefore, the Catechism instructed, the Catholic Church would work "with determination to its abolition worldwide."

Catholics confront the reality of capital punishment every time they attend a Mass or contemplate the crucifixes that many Catholics display in their homes. Christ died a horrible, gruesome death--hung naked on a tree and forced to lift his nail-implanted feet just to breathe until he finally died of blood loss and asphyxiation. 

Surely, as Catholics, we are called upon to oppose any kind of execution by the instruments of government, whether by hanging, firing squad, electrocution, or lethal injection. In the way that he died, our Savior calls on us to respect the dignity of life--every life, even the life of the most hardened criminal. After all, Christ reassured St. Dismas on the cross that he would join Christ in paradise on the day of his death.

Catholic opposition to capital punishment is also a way of honoring all our saints and martyrs who died horrible deaths for their faith. Indeed, some of them died deaths by methods even more cruel than the cross.  During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, Catholics were publicly hanged, drawn, and quartered, which meant that they were first hanged by the neck, taken down while still conscious, and then eviscerated and sometimes even castrated while still alive.  Their bodies were then pulled apart (quartered) to the delight of watching crowds. St. Edward Campion was executed in just this way.

Capital punishment, whether in its most benign or most malevolent form, degrades the societies that practice it, including the United States.  Our detractors point out that Catholics are far more vociferous when opposing abortion than we are when speaking out against capital punishment. Unfortunately, they are right.

Those of us who are Catholic should follow the examples of Pope Francis and Pope John Paul II and speak out publicly against the death penalty. Let us be guided by  Catechism, which clarifies that capital punishment is contrary to our Catholic faith.

Pope Francis opposes the death penalty.