January 14, 2026

Americans are under siege by our own military forces

...in October of last year, NPT asked the qestion, 'Could President Trump really use the U.S. military against Americans?'

Today, the nation is under siege by the militarized federal agents who are no longer pretending they're operating out of concern for public safety, but are basically terrorizing communities in an effort to bend Americans to their open-ended, prevaricating mission that perversely is claiming to be 'defending our culture' as it eviscerates expectations of freedom and liberty in America with their state-sponsored, presidential-directed repression and tyranny.

Just months ago the fear was that Trump would invoke 'martial law' to strip Americans of their right of free movement and other legal expectations and rights of citizenship. Now we have seen that the devastating budget republicans just passed on their own votes which inflated our immigration control agency budget beyond any other law enforcement division in the country wasn't actually meant to effect the removal of the 'worst of the worst' of undocumented immigrants from the country.

What this republican administration plotted and engineered was the creation of a mostly secret militarized force basically answerable only to the president which Trump immediately directed into American communities to raid homes, churches, workplaces, schools, hospitals, even courts of law to arbitrarily snatch and grab people into unmarked vehicles and abduct them away to place where it's almost impossible to find them, much less contact them; either making up justifications afterward, or just releasing people after days, even months in captivity with no explanation for their detention.

ACLU:

One of the most chilling developments after the killing of Renee Good by that ICE agent has been the administration's refusal to even investigate the killing, summarily deciding the summary execution in our streets was justified, while simultaneously declaring their victim a 'domestic terrorist;' Good armed with words, and her killer armed with a federal government-sponsored gun.

Trump killed Renee Good; his agent dutifully carrying out the very mandate Trump gave him to 'defend the culture;' a directive to his militarized forces which have been cast in the mold of this anti-American regime which regards everyone except their cabal and those who give fealty to it as an enemy to their state of power and authority over us all.

That power and authority Trump's militarized forces are wielding against us isn't some defense against actual threats to the nation; to federal agents; or even to their perverse and arbitrary exercise of state power against people in this country. It's all about Trump's desire to control Americans and intimidate us into submission to whatever he chooses to do with our taxpayer-funded government and resources.

Trump believes Americans aren't anymore entitled to their freedom than the Venezuelans he's just declared himself ruler over; all through his autocratic exercise of our military forces as he bombs and kills scores of people we don't even know, and threatens to kill even more if their government doesn't bow down in submission to him and surrenders their country's resources to him.

Yesterday Trump gave an even more chilling assessment than the blame cast on Renee Good for having the temerity to try to move out of the way of the tyranny of Trump's mercenary thugs, declaring that the woman who told her killer with open arms just seconds before he shot her point blank in the face that, "she wasn't mad at him," claimed that she was "disrespectful to law enforcement."



We can either pretend that his remarks were just more of the ranting he does to hear himself talk, or we can recognize that the president of the United States excusing a federal agent accountable primarily to the chief executive for the killing of a U.S. citizen by declaring the victim 'disrespected law enforcement,' is a deliberate intimidation to all Americans who would dare to question his or his agent's authority.

Of course, the most chilling development in the wake of Good's execution is the federal government's refusal to either investigate the killing, or even cooperate with state authorities in their efforts to investigate the fatal incident. That's is a direct signal to law enforcement EVERYWHERE in the country that the federal government under Donald Trump will excuse and justify any and all extrajudicial killings of American citizens by agents or officers, even in the most egregious of circumstances where reasonable doubt exists.

It's worse than that, but just on the face of this autocratic regime, and looking at the violent and increasingly deadly operation and actions of the president's personal militarized forces who are assaulting, shooting, and killing people in the country with the relative impunity he's affording them ("absolute immunity" as the vice-president characterized it), no American can regard themselves as safe or immune from some immediate and arbitrary militarized force being used against them.

You can get yourself, abducted, roughed up, interrogated, shot, or indefinitely jailed out here just going to work, school, shopping, to church, to court, to the doctor's; anywhere Americans long had the expectation of free movement before Trump's regime outlawed that right to travel freely without fear of harassment from police or federal agents.

You may believe you're in some protected group, but the self-interest of the Trump regime now outweighs any expectation of free will in America without first considering the fraught consequences of exercising that liberty in a nation under military occupation and siege by the federal government.

What did America do wrong to deserve this tyranny? For one thing, they voted for a convicted felon for president who had already demonstrated disregard for the nation's laws, and even an utter contempt for the laws and regulations that the rest of us are subject to.

It will be just a short minute before one of these enablers is caught up in their own noose. I'll be here for the Trump regime's lecture to that complicit victim about their own 'disrespect' that led a federal agent to violate their rights as Americans, and the 'absolute immunity' Trump's goons had in blowing them all away, because their silence and even cheering for Good's execution makes all of their 'Don't Tread In Me" bleating for decades and decades just a prelude to their present cowardice and supplication to the very same jackbooted thugs they supposed were just denizens of the pols they politically opposed.

Wait until they realize that the dandy from Mar-a-lago they thought was some kind of patriot, is just a self-absorbed traitor who regards them as collateral to his consolidation of power.

January 12, 2026

Venezuela's Dictators Nationalized Their Oil for Venezuela, New Dictator Trump's 'Nationalizing' Their Oil For Himself

Donald Trump States He Is Inclined to Keep ExxonMobil Out of Venezuela After CEO Darren Woods Calls Country Uninvestable

During a White House meeting with oil industry leaders, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods described Venezuela as 'uninvestable' under current conditions. Trump, criticized ExxonMobil for being 'too cute' in their response to his quasi-control if Venezuela's energy sector following his military attacks and kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro.

Trump:

“I’d probably be inclined to keep Exxon out. I didn’t like their response. They’re playing too cute.”


...some history:

In 1976, Venezuela took control of the assets of ExxonMobil, Shell and Chevron, using them to create the state oil company Petróleos de Venezuela. Unlike sudden nationalizations elsewhere at the time, this process was a negotiated transition after decades of incremental policy shifts.

Mr. Chávez embarked on another nationalization phase in 2007, with the aim of dismantling the opening of the oil industry in the 1990s, which had allowed international oil companies to again put down stakes in Venezuela.

Even though Mr. Chávez allowed the foreign companies to remain in Venezuela on less favorable terms, this nationalization was more contentious, setting off protracted legal battles with U.S. oil giants like ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, which claimed they were owed billion of dollars in compensation.

Some of the ill will from this process involved Mr. Chávez’s push to situate oil at the heart of his revolution. He purged political opponents from Petróleos de Venezuela and transformed the company into a cash cow for antipoverty programs at home and political alliances with other countries, like Cuba, that chafed at the power of the United States.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/17/world/americas/trump-venezuela-oil-fields-stolen-claims.html

...that's the irony in an American president today posturing as if he can just dole out Venezuela's oil resources like he personally owns them - essentially declaring he's nationalizing Venezuelan's oil for the United States - but being rebuffed by the very U.S. based oil giant he's pretending to avenge; mainly because Trump's thuggery and imperialism has caused the very unrest that made operating in that country a dicey, dangerous enterprise that wasn't worth their investment.

What Trump wants is some grand scheme to cover for his blundering imperialism. It shouldn't surprise anyone that a man who is not only ignorant of history, but actually antagonistic to history that doesn't give fealty to him personally, doesn't have a clue about what anyone else actually expects or wants to happen in that country.

Every day that passes, Trump endeavors to make more clear that he intends to be the new dictator of Venezuela, by hook or crook. This isn't about drug trafficking, or drug gangs, or any of the lurid charges Trump has repeatedly projected against the Venezuelans in this country and in their own.

It's not even about oil, with it becoming increasingly clear that Trump's military interference has deepened and exacerbated the reasons U.S. and other oil giants find it so difficult to make a profit there.

This invasion of Venezuela may well be the culmination of manipulation and graft by interests looking to profit from the militarization, but from this American president's view, it's about his self-aggrandizement ensconced in one unsupportable justification after the other.

It should be obvious to everyone looking on how craven he is to be crowned king of the Americas by his latest threat to again attack Venezuela, bomb the government that remains in place who he's expecting and demanding do his bidding, if they don't comply.

Despite the people of Venezuela celebrating the removal of one autocratic, brutal leader, they are actually under the thumb of a more dangerous and self-interested tyrant who doesn't even reside there, auguring to not only steal their resources, but subjugate them to his imperialistic thievery.

Americans who even remotely support this need to ask themselves what it is that they regard about Venezuelans that they believe their president is justified in subjugating them to our own will and whim, all indifferent and even hostile to the interests of the people there.

But more importantly, where is the morality in this assault upon and rape of Venezuela in which the most prominent component is American avarice, and the most glaring consequence and result is murder and thievery; all to the detriment of everyone except the man in the WH aggrandizing himself behind everyone else's sacrifices?

January 12, 2026

You overthrow a foreign government, you're terrorizing U.S. communities with militarized forces

...attacking the Federal Reserve Chairman with your DOJ thugs like a mobster should seem well within your sphere of relative impunity.

What's next, America?

Fed's Powell says Trump administration has threatened him with a criminal indictment

WASHINGTON, Jan 11 (Reuters) - The Trump administration has threatened to indict Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell over Congressional testimony he gave last summer about a Fed building project, an action Powell called a "pretext" to gain more influence over the central bank and monetary policy.

The development in the long-simmering effort by President Donald Trump for greater control over the Fed had immediate fallout, with Republican Senator Thom Tillis, a member of the Senate Banking Committee that vets Presidential nominees for the Fed, saying in a statement on X that the threatened indictment puts the Department of Justice's "independence and credibility" in question. Tillis said he would oppose any Trump nominees to the Fed, including the president's coming choice of a new chair, "until this legal matter is fully resolved."

Powell revealed the subpoenas and threats in a Sunday night statement.

"On Friday, the Department of Justice served the Federal Reserve with grand jury subpoenas, threatening a criminal indictment related to my testimony before the Senate Banking Committee last June," Powell said. "I have deep respect for the rule of law and for accountability in our democracy. No one—certainly not the chair of the Federal Reserve—is above the law."

"But this unprecedented action should be seen in the broader context of the administration’s threats and ongoing pressure" for lower interest rates and more broadly for greater say over the Fed, he said.

"This new threat is not about my testimony last June or about the renovation of the Federal Reserve buildings. It is not about Congress’s oversight role...Those are pretexts. The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the President."

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/feds-powell-says-administration-has-threatened-criminal-indictment-over-his-2026-01-12/

...like a cartoon mobster, Trump claimed to know nothing about the investigation he's been repeatedly calling for; despite everyone already having witnessed his ignorant attempt to embarass Chairman Powell during a joint appearance that the president set up to put the chairman on the spot for some real estate cost overrun that had nothing to do with Powell, something undoubtedly related to these certainly trumped-up allegations.


Independent, 24 July 2025:

'You just added a third building': Powell fact checks Trump's Fed renovation as awkward hard-hat visit turns tense
Federal Reserve chair wasn’t fazed by Trump’s attempt to bully him in front of press

President Donald Trump’s attempt to shame Federal Reserve Board of Governors chair Jerome Powell over the cost of a long-running renovation to the central bank’s Washington headquarters went horribly wrong on Thursday when Powell had a ready response for the president’s accusations during a tour of the construction site.

Trump said the cost of the years-long project was now “about $3.1 billion” rather than the $2.7 billion previously stated by Powell.

The chairman replied: “I haven’t heard that from anybody” and asked if the paper Trump was reading from came from the central bank.

At that point, Trump handed him the paper and continued talking while Powell pulled out his reading glasses to look. He then told the president that the higher number he was claiming included a separate project that wasn’t part of the renovation at issue.

“You just added in a third building,” he said.

read more: https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-powell-fed-renovation-meeting-b2795600.html


WaPo, December 29, 2025:

Jason Furman @jasonfurman
Some countries that have prosecuted or threatened to prosecute central bankers for the purpose of political intimidation or punishment for monetary policy decisions: Argentina, Russia, Turkey, Venezuela and Zimbabwe.

January 10, 2026

We told y'all

...we told you that letting your government criminalize and target immigrants would lead to EVERYONE'S rights and safety being at risk from the very same regime.

Anyone paying attention has to be running a scenario through their own minds today, no matter their race or ethnicity, where they can envision themselves suddenly, without a moment's notice' at risk of losing their lives because of some hothead federal agent with a grudge and a personality flaw thinking they have a right to shoot and kill them for disobeying their traffic instructions.

This isn't an exaggeration, it's a fear that's become all too real today. How many U.S. citizens with every right to travel where they want just made the decision to remain in their home, fearful of their own government?

I haven't left my own property since I had a panic attack months ago. Even now, I just questioned my dark-skinned self and wondered if I should just venture out to feel my own freedom, but I talked myself out of that foolishness of trusting my life to roving armed federal agents looking to pull over people who look 'Somali' or Mexican, or Latin American, or Muslim; whatever opportunistic reason they've been using to pull over and drag from their vehicles, assault and detain (possibly kill) people in this country who have browner skin than, I'd guess, their own.

But I'm going to guess that any illusion that, say, white Americans might have held that they are immune from the abuses and violence the federal government has directed at 'others' has now evaporated for the majority of people in the country - wherever they are, knowing that ICE has infected all of our states with armed men encouraged to play out their personal take on the recruiting lure of 'protecting their culture' on those who don't genuflect to their false and often illegal displays of authority.

You may not be personally afraid, but you should be asking yourself what the basis is for believing your protected and can defend your own safety or that of your loved ones against these thugs and their Trump-sanctioned thuggery and murder.

Do you realize that Renee Good is ALL of us, watching the Trump regime run roughshod over our rights and democracy. Can any of us who might disagree with this regime imagine we have the ultimate freedom under this government to hold those views and exercise those rights to dissent without fear of the government challenging us with the full force of the power we invested in them?

Did it take the wind right out of you to hear the president of the United States and his DHS minion describing the mother who told her killer she 'wasn't mad at him' seconds before he shot her dead as a domestic terrorist for having the temerity to merely observe the federal agent's actions from her vehicle?

Or, the vice president of the United States blame the victim of the federal execution in the street with a completely invented, and dumbfoundedly inconsequential rationale to her killing that she was a "victim of a "left wing' ideology?"

Of course, this hasn't just been a police exercise against the 'worst of the worst' or any of the other feints from the Trump regime about their intentions with the most funded law enforcement agency in the nation. It's not about making communities safer.

For Trump and his hired, taxpayer-funded goons, this is about bullying, conquering, and coercing Americans to the will of one party's president; this one intent on 'owning' Americans like one of his real estate acquisitions; like the way he just claimed to own the ostensibly independent country of Venezuela which he just abducted a political figurehead from that the U.S., in the past, once lorded over the people there as head of state.

Not only are you to be the subject of Trump, you're a hostage to his armed reign of terror in countless communities around the nation. If this isn't outright war, it's at the very least an armed government occupation of America; fomented by first politically advantaging the antipathy and antagonism of the Americans toward our own foreign-born or ethnically rooted neighbors; then by taking that power given to them to recklessly and violently direct those resources against us all.

We fucking told you.

January 10, 2026

Child care providers: "We're used to Minnesota snow days, now we have ICE days." (Watch)

Minnesota childcare providers and parents speak out with emotion and conviction on ICE targeting childcare centers and the impact on children and their community.

watch press conference:




Minnesota educators and families call on ICE agents to stay away from schools
https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/minnesota-educators-families-ice-agents-stay-away-schools/

January 8, 2026

I'm effectively terrorized by my own country's government, compromised by the color of my skin

...I don't go anywhere anymore. I just stay home. I'm effectively terrorized by my own country's government.

I hate to admit this, but it's true. I'm too decrepit to risk an encounter gone wrong. Had to even sadly face up to an untenable risk to my health in any protest gone wrong.

I know I'm not alone in this, but I wonder about the rest of the nation; a good number of whom have always been privileged by their majority with the ability to play whatever advantage or animus they choose off of their relative under-abundance of eumelanin.

To me, the abstractness with which our majority white society regards their brown-skinned counterparts, despite the tenuous laws which have undergirded my own citizenship and rights in this country, faltering and actually recanting promises and admonitions of my very humanity that had been so long denied by our government and people, all reminds me of the videos I've seen from Somalia where children and elderly and others dying from hunger can be seen crawling on the streets and sidewalks as others more fit rushed past, and roving armored vehicles roamed by and shot them at random.

The funny thing is that I've had a lifetime, born in 1960, that tracked the promise of the civil rights era; my on father Director of Civil Rights at the Equal Opportunity Commission. I had come to be convinced of the irrefutability of my citizenship. The joke was believing (whenever that happened) that a new generational majority of white people would reject the impulses of the past to advantage themselves by disadvantaging people who didn't share their lack of abundance of eumelanin.

Think about what it took for Donald Trump or anyone else to lurch the nation back into Jim Crow, and reflect on how easily it seems we're slipping into a Nazi Germany-type upheaval of the lives of people with brown skin in this country. Not very much, right?

How easily the nation is allowing this theft of our democracy which insidiously relies on an assault on brown-skinned people at each and every turn of Donald Trump's autocratic screw, in presidential declarations and legal arguments that insist 'diversity' is some sort of crime perpetrated on America; instead of the opportunity that I was made to believe existed for me; a tale of equality told by countless leaders, pols, and writers from my very birth and childhood through my advanced age?

This new Jim Crow is sticking in this black man's craw. I'm an island in this country with no sovereignty.

ICE is a modern day Klu Klutz Klan comprised of good old boys who think terrorizing brown people in this country is sport - now fully sanctioned and armed by the federal government for these raids on minority communities in a nightmare that rivals the vigilante violence of the past, indistinguishable only by the official embrace and encouragement by a modern president of the United States.

I'll say this. I'll ultimately be here for y'all, so far as you show up for me.

If you have the privilege and the means, now's the time to step forward and defend your neighbors like that neighborhood in Minneapolis which broke out their whistles to warn the vulnerable among them when they saw ICE forces enter their community.

Like James Brown said...

I don't want nobody
To give me nothing
Open up the door
I'll get it myself
Do you hear me
Don't give me denegration
Give me true communication
Don't give me sorrow
I want equal opportunity
To live tomorrow
Give me schools
And give me better books
So I can read about myself
And gain my truly looks
Do you hear me now, now
Some of us try
As hard as we can
We don't want no sympathy
We just wanna be a man.

January 7, 2026

People who balked at calling Trump Hitler need to come correct

......nothing has yet restrained the man who just openly mused about his ability to unilaterally attack and invade other nations with the intention of controlling their government or national resources, some of them democratic allies, from using our military forces to abduct and rendition the Venezuelan leader to the U.S. while demanding their government kowtow to his political demands as he vows to enable corporations to rape their land and rob them of their resources behind his use of military force.

Independent:

This idiocracy has striking similarities to the Nazi movement that Hitler advantaged to lauch his own military ambitions to seize other countries' territory, just because he could.

When Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, he was determined to overturn the military and territorial provisions of the Treaty of Versailles. By overturning the treaty, the German government sought to incorporate ethnically German territories into the Reich. Hitler moved to extend German power in central Europe, annexing Austria and destroying Czechoslovakia in 1938-1939._

Like Hitler wanted to militarily dominate Europe, Trump wants to be king of the Americas, and he's not wrong in thinking that there's no actual barrier right now to his use of our nation's military force to kill, maim, and threaten vulnerable nations into submission.

The rub is that ambition isn't limited to the U.S.. Indeed, it's been successive governments since WWII which have adhered to principles outlined in international agreements, like the The North Atlantic Treaty, signed on April 4, 1949, established the framework for collective defense and security in the North Atlantic area.

It was signed by the United States and several Western European nations, including Denmark, who Trump is now threatening by intimating he'll take their Greenland by military force if it's not surrendered to him; a treaty ironically intended to promote stability and prevent aggression in the region.

Trump is complaining that Russia and China are milling around Greenland, but the U.S., now under Trump, isn't even advantaging the land that's been made available to us by the country to police with our military forces.



Emboldened by his snatch-and-grab n Venezuela, Trump and his toadies are forcing independent nations in the region into defensive positions which are completely unnecessary, except in the face of what is, effectively, a potential military threat from the United States to their safety and independence.



While there may well be no effective counter right now to these intentions and actions, the political landscape that enables Trump in these Hitler-esque military assaults on other nations isn't a static one. We have an opportunity, along with a deep institutional memory, to roll back this autocratic imperialism.

It's a matter of national will that needs to be infused with already established understandings about the folly and danger of 'might is right' attitudes and actions used by the US to coerce other countries to bend to our self-interested will.



There are similar understandings between other nations which Trump aims to smash through and undo with his 'doctrine' and practice of Nazi-esque military expansionism abroad, precipitated by a Hitler-esque attack on minorities and immigrants in this country.

We're at an inflection point, and we're an election away from a tenuous hope that we can pull the nation back from Trump's autocratic lurch of our nation's military into the madness of coups and destabilization of governments abroad like we're Germany in 1938.

January 7, 2026

Trump immediately sets about projecting his 2020 election lies onto his Venezuelan captive

...successive presidents (Obama and Trump) made a lot of noise and effort claiming Maduro threatened the U.S., despite the fact that BOTH of those administrations once recognized Maduro as Venezuela's legitimate leader.

Over 80% of Americans disagree that something in Venezuela threatens them, but that hasn't stopped Trump from exploiting those State Dept. derived findings about Maduro in his effort to portray Venezuela and Venezuelans as evil incarnate.

But, why? Could it have something to do with the Sydney Powell's looney, disproved claims that Venezuela was deleting Trump votes in Dominion voting machines?

Or, is it just about Trump's megalomania, or some fealty or benefit he thinks he's going to get by allowing oil companies to run rampant in Venezuela behind his military coup plan?

Whatever it is it isn't about an indictment from his corrupt and compromised DOJ which abducted more than 200 immigrants en masse from the U.S. shackled, their hair shaved off, to one of El Salvador's most infamous mega prisons.

Surprise all around today, I'm sure, when Trump revived debunked claims about Venezuela helping steal the 2020 election for Joe Biden, trying as he might to sell his attempted theft of Venezuelan oil as something more than the drug charges against Maduro which his DOJ invented to embellish what had been primarily political concerns, not withstanding the legal arguments in that regard about Venezuela's contested election.

...WHATEVER people may believe about the drug charges in the indictment the Trump DOJ brought against Maduro, whatever they may feel about past administration support for 'bounties' or anything related to Maduro and the Venezuelan election, this abduction and further destabilizing coup attempt by the Trump regime is an insidiously banal and mindnumbingly arrogant extension of the 2020 election fraud the maga majority on the Supreme Court (having openly expressed skepticism about the election fraud charges) allowed Trump to dodge.

I mean, even if you want to make an obtuse point about Maduro being some bad guy who allegedly sells drugs to Americans, rather than debate the arcane details of Venezuelan election law, you'd still be forced to ride along with Trump as he takes you on a magical conspiracy tour that still insists he won the 2020 election.

Aside from his avarice and greed for Venezuelan oil, and his megalomanic desire to be king of the Americas, there's still the pesky treason he engaged in that needs muddling in the minds of Americans.

In for a penny supporting this political prosecution because you think Maduro is a bad man who sells drugs to Americans; in for a pound of Trump conspiracy-mongering in pursuit of exoneration for his election crimes.

January 1, 2026

Haiku for the New Year

We got through a year
With Trump's lies proving to be
Worth less than our truths.

There's no time this year
In any of our own lives
For any of that.

Let's resolve this year
To not let Trump waste our time
On the things he says.

But instead we will
Be more of an obstacle
To the shit he does.


-Ron

December 17, 2025

All In Our Family

...my sister and I watched EVERY episode of 'All in the Family' together with my dad, he on the couch and us stretched out on the floor in front of the only color television.

The show wasn't actually the basis for a generational or societal discussion like the critics have done for decades now. It gifted us with its own narrative and soundtrack for the edification of parents or youth watching.

At least that's the way it was in our suburban family, with my sister and I fully absorbed in the post-hippie culture of the seventies, and my parents relics of the valedictorian order of their salad days in the 40's and 50's which forced them to quickly shed the uniform and buttoned-down precepts which they had only just accepted and adopted as their own.

Dad would come home from work and take off his suit and tie and put on another suit and tie to go shopping, sans the hat that never left the hatbox after we moved to the relative informality of the suburbs to the city life that defined his coming of age into the world of business and government.

We weren't a particularly politically oriented family, outside of the necessary attention that upwardly-mobile black professionals gave to the politics that determined rights and opportunity; federal government action and protections indeed a major influence in my parent's professional success.

On vacation, and almost out the door to the beach one summer, Richard Nixon was on the motel television resigning the presidency and I had to practically beg them to stop and watch.

But while those political events weren't the actual flashpoints of our family's generational divides, there was an over-current of resistance to permissiveness against our natural drive for free expression and anti-authoritarianism which took advantage of those events as markers of our individual identities.

Conservative and liberal ideals were certainly attached to important political initiatives and events, but in our family they were mostly just abstractions; undercurrents to the everyday clashes between young and old.

We didn't actually talk about the episodes of AITF we watched; didn't really comment on what was said. It wasn't that kind of relationship. What we got from the constant debates between 'Meathead' and Archie was a subversive means of introducing subjects and ideas into each others minds and psyches without saying a word.

It was like when we'd be in the car and 'Signs' would come on the radio, or Jonathan Edwards singing 'Sunshine; as we turned the sound up loud for Dad to take it all in:

"Some man's gone, he's tried to run my life
He don't know what he's asking
When he tells me I better get in line
I can't hear what he's saying
When I grow up, I'm gonna make it mine
These ain't dues I been paying..."

Watching those staged debates didn't elicit any open confessions of support or belief from any of us watching other than a revealing laugh or groan, or maybe a frown acknowledging that the message had been received and processed, all for better or for worse.

The brilliant writing by Lear and others exposed flaws in the zealous politics expressed on both sides of the Bunker living room; generating grudged understanding of each other, and informing us of contradictions in some of our own reasoning that we used to deliberately divide ourselves, as well.

I think we all lost some of the edge of our own projections against each other when actually faced with their others' probable beliefs. It possibly defined for us what we believed in ways that didn't just cast our opponents as enemies, but as family members who may disagree.

So, it wasn't at all surprising that Rob Reiner grew into a man so resembling of the character he played, with all of the principle and values that we used as a representation of our own social awakening, against the stubbornness of our parents' generation in accepting change; a stoic alternative to blind patriotism, warmongering, and vulture capitalism.

When we couldn't, or wouldn't express those truths to each other, Rob said them for us for our own edification; and boy, he would get right under their skin.