Raoul’s Two Cents: March 7, 2025
Looking Forward to a Better World
Did you notice people walking around with black smudges on their foreheads last Wednesday? Actually, it wasn’t dirt. It was ash/charcoal. This strange beauty mark was supposed to come from the burned palm leaves that was used in Palm Sunday of last year. Last Wednesday was Ash Wednesday, a celebration of the start of Lent in the Catholic tradition to remind us about our mortality and our need for humility.
I grew up Catholic. When I was a kid growing up in a Catholic school, the priest would mark our foreheads with a sign of the cross saying “from dust you come and from dust you shall return.”
I know this is silly but I used to think the ashes came from dead people. I was curious why someone would even volunteer to share their ashes with strangers. I wondered why it was black ash. Were they from Africans? I had such strange imaginations as a kid.
The Hindus have their tilak (or bindi or sindoor) — the red dot right between their eyes believed to be the seat of wisdom, intuition and spiritual energy. That spot is where they believe their Third Eye is located.
People adorn a variety of symbolism and signs to declare their allegiance. You see it in sports uniforms, in bumper stickers, in flags, hats, tattoos … even in bodily mutilations. Some marks spark good and healthy competition while others demand unquestioned loyalty.
I have a problem with that last one. I believe we should remain curious and always question what we don’t understand … that’s why I encourage open and honest dialogues. And if the group moves in reprehensible contradictory directions we should be brave enough to correct the wrong or to leave the group.
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN OPPRESSIVE AND BENEVOLENT COLONIZATION
A good leader is confident and generous. A bad leader is insecure and withholds information to keep his underlings ignorant. When Spain colonized the Filipinos they suppressed education from the natives. They did the same to the Mexicans. Both countries remained under Spanish rule for 300 years. Kudos to the Americans. It was different when they colonized the Filipinos. Americans started public schools and gave the Filipinos a chance to succeed. The Americans did the same for Japan and South Korea. The Americans elevated their colonies to a better world.
There has always been tension between individuality and solidarity: good versus evil — right from wrong … the left and the right … so clean and bright. Clap them softly, one, two, three. Clean little hands are good to see.
But I degrees.
I think the media has been manipulating us — pushing an agenda of hate and dividing us for years. Conflict keeps them relevant and fills their pockets. Maybe we should be more like the compassionate Good Samaritan who wasn’t supposed to help but did … unlike those who were supposed to help but didn’t.
Instead of championing our differences and choosing sides, maybe we should understand more and put our diversity to good use and elevate each other to a better world.
Of course this is just me. TGIF people!
“We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.
“When spiders unite, they can tie down a lion.” — Anonymous
“And above all these, put on love — which binds everything together in perfect harmony.” — Colossians 3:14
“Finally, all of you, have unity of mind, sympathy, brotherly love, a tender heart, and a humble mind.” — 1 Peter 3:8
JOKE OF THE WEEK
Thanks to Colleen of Washington State
Original art by Raoul Pascual.
Parting Shots
Thanks to Richard of New Manila, Philippines
Thanks to Colleen of Washington State
Thanks to Tom of Pasadena, CA
Thanks to Art of Sierra Madre, CA
Thanks to Norm of Encino, CA
Thanks to Jose of San Diego, CA
Thanks to Joanne of Hacienda Heights, CA
Thanks to Drew of Anaheim, CA
Thanks to Maling of New Manila, Philippines
I found these:
My good friend (and jokester) Terry and I came up with these.
Larry
March 11, 2025 at 6:31 pm
Koreans have an appreciation for America, but their independent spirit, plays a role in their distrust too.
For Korean Christians, the Billy Graham Crusade is their biggest influence. Korean Christians, generally have a more charismatic approach and emotional worship.
Last night at church, during prayer time, a woman laid down on the floor and was wailing and crying uncontrollably. No one disturbed her.
The Philippines has such a strong Catholic tradition. From Spain, of course.
Were you an altar boy?
One of the worst things Americans gave to Asia was Spam. Koreans and Japanese use it all kinds of cooking. Ick.
TGIF
Heather
March 11, 2025 at 6:31 pm
I am grateful that I was raised in a family where the parents were two different religions. They thought it was arrogant to choose for us kids so they said they wanted us to check things out for ourselves and make our own decision. I attended every church around talk to the ministers, pastors, and priests. Everything I did for recreation was with church, school or the Y.W.C.A.
I relate to anyone I like or adore and all of those ideals have served me well.
Tom
March 11, 2025 at 6:32 pm
Loved the two cents worth and Art. Today was St Felicitas and Perpetual Saints Day. Like you I had Nuns teach Me in Grammar School and I loved the experience! My Mom was an organist in the parish in San Marino and that’s where I sang in the choir
Lent is special for me as we sing Latin Responses. Brings back fond memories of Fr. Fox born in Ireland with a wonderful brogue
His favorite phrase was “ lord when life is over, do with me what thou wilt.
Ed
March 11, 2025 at 6:33 pm
Maybe it’s just me….hut i felt a little confliction on the intro….. but a thoughtful read.
Jeff
March 11, 2025 at 6:36 pm
Raoul–I’ve seen several very funny jokes lately. I thought about sending you my favorites…but then I realized they were all from your blog. Well, Whatever.
Noel
March 11, 2025 at 6:38 pm
Cremation was not yet a fad when we were growing up. LOL!
(Hindi pa uso cremation nung bata tayo..kaya wala pang abo ng patay nun LOL!!)
David in Boston
March 11, 2025 at 6:42 pm
Just sharing. Hope you are well and busy.
Best regards,
David
From March 6, 2025
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON:
Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more
March 6, 2025
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
MAR 7
This morning, Ted Hesson and Kristina Cooke of Reuters reported that the Trump administration is preparing to deport the 240,000 Ukrainians who fled Russia’s attacks on Ukraine and have temporary legal status in the United States. Foreign affairs journalist Olga Nesterova reminded Americans that “these people had to be completely financially independent, pay tax, pay all fees (around $2K) and have an affidavit from an American person to even come here.”
“This has nothing to do with strategic necessity or geopolitics,” Russia specialist Tom Nichols posted. “This is just cruelty to show [Russian president Vladimir] Putin he has a new American ally.”
The Trump administration’s turn away from traditional European alliances and toward Russia will have profound effects on U.S. standing in the world. Edward Wong and Mark Mazzetti reported in the New York Times today that senior officials in the State Department are making plans to close a dozen consulates, mostly in Western Europe, including consulates in Florence, Italy; Strasbourg, France; Hamburg, Germany; and Ponta Delgada, Portugal, as well as a consulate in Brazil and another in Turkey.
In late February, Nahal Toosi reported in Politico that President Donald Trump wants to “radically shrink” the State Department and to change its mission from diplomacy and soft power initiatives that advance democracy and human rights to focusing on transactional agreements with other governments and promoting foreign investment in the U.S.
Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency” have taken on the process of cutting the State Department budget by as much as 20%, and cutting at least some of the department’s 80,000 employees. As part of that project, DOGE’s Edward Coristine, known publicly as “Big Balls,” is embedded at the State Department.
As the U.S. retreats from its engagement with the world, China has been working to forge greater ties. China now has more global diplomatic posts than the U.S. and plays a stronger role in international organizations. Already in 2025, about 700 employees, including 450 career diplomats, have resigned from the State Department, a number that normally would reflect a year’s resignations.
Shutting embassies will hamper not just the process of fostering goodwill, but also U.S. intelligence, as embassies house officers who monitor terrorism, infectious disease, trade, commerce, militaries, and government, including those from the intelligence community. U.S. intelligence has always been formidable, but the administration appears to be weakening it.
As predicted, Trump’s turn of the U.S. toward Russia also means that allies are concerned he or members of his administration will share classified intelligence with Russia, thus exposing the identities of their operatives. They are considering new protocols for sharing information with the United States. The Five Eyes alliance between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the U.S. has been formidable since World War II and has been key to countering first the Soviet Union and then Russia. Allied governments are now considering withholding information about sources or analyses from the U.S.
Their concern is likely heightened by the return to Trump’s personal possession of the boxes of documents containing classified information the FBI recovered in August 2022 from Mar-a-Lago. Trump took those boxes back from the Department of Justice and flew them back to Mar-a-Lago on February 28.
A CBS News/YouGov poll from February 26–28 showed that only 4% of the American people sided with Russia in its ongoing war with Ukraine.
The unpopularity of the new administration’s policies is starting to show. National Republican Congressional Committee chair Richard Hudson (R-NC) told House Republicans on Tuesday to stop holding town halls after several such events have turned raucous as attendees complained about the course of the Trump administration. Trump has blamed paid “troublemakers” for the agitation, and claimed the disruptions are part of the Democrats’ “game.” “[B]ut just like our big LANDSLIDE ELECTION,” he posted on social media, “it’s not going to work for them!”
More Americans voted for someone other than Trump than voted for him.
Even aside from the angry protests, DOGE is running into trouble. In his speech before a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, Trump referred to DOGE and said it “is headed by Elon Musk, who is in the gallery tonight.” In a filing in a lawsuit against DOGE and Musk, the White House declared that Musk is neither in charge of DOGE nor an employee of it. When pressed, the White House claimed on February 26 that the acting administrator of DOGE is staffer Amy Gleason. Immediately after Trump’s statement, the plaintiffs in that case asked permission to add Trump’s statement to their lawsuit.
Musk has claimed to have found billions of dollars of waste or fraud in the government, and Trump and the White House have touted those statements. But their claims to have found massive savings have been full of errors, and most of their claims have been disproved. DOGE has already had to retract five of its seven biggest claims. As for “savings,” the government spent about $710 billion in the first month of Trump’s term, compared with about $630 billion during the same timeframe last year.
Instead of showing great savings, DOGE’s claims reveal just how poorly Musk and his team understand the work of the federal government. After forcing employees out of their positions, they have had to hire back individuals who are, in fact, crucial to the nation, including the people guarding the U.S. nuclear stockpile. In his Tuesday speech, Trump claimed that the DOGE team had found “$8 million for making mice transgender,” and added: “This is real.”
Except it’s not. The mice in question were not “transgender”; they were “transgenic,” which means they are genetically altered for use in scientific experiments to learn more about human health. For comparison, S.V. Date noted in HuffPost that in just his first month in office, Trump spent about $10.7 million in taxpayer money playing golf.
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo pointed out today that people reporting on the individual cuts to U.S. scientific and health-related grants are missing the larger picture: “DOGE and Donald Trump are trying to shut down advanced medical research, especially cancer research, in the United States…. They’re shutting down medicine/disease research in the federal government and the government-run and funded ecosystem of funding for most research throughout the United States. It’s not hyperbole. That’s happening.”
Republicans are starting to express some concern about Musk and DOGE. As soon as Trump took office, Musk and his DOGE team took over the Office of Personnel Management, and by February 14 they had begun a massive purge of federal workers. As protests of the cuts began, Trump urged Musk on February 22 to be “more aggressive” in cutting the government, prompting Musk to demand that all federal employees explain what they had accomplished in the past week under threat of firing. That request sparked a struggle in the executive branch as cabinet officers told the employees in their departments to ignore Musk. Then, on February 27, U.S. District Judge William Alsup found that the firings were likely illegal and temporarily halted them.
On Tuesday, Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) weighed in on the conflict when he told CNN that the power to hire and fire employees properly belongs to Cabinet secretaries.
Yesterday, Musk met with Republican— but no Democratic— members of Congress. Senators reportedly asked Musk—an unelected bureaucrat whose actions are likely illegal—to tell them more about what’s going on. According to Liz Goodwin, Marianna Sotomayor, and Theodoric Meyer of the Washington Post, Musk gave some of the senators his phone number and said he wanted to set up a direct line for them when they have questions, allowing them to get a near-instant response to their concerns.” Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told reporters that Musk told the senators he would “create a system where members of Congress can call some central group” to get cuts they dislike reversed.
This whole exchange is bonkers. The Constitution gives Congress alone the power to make appropriations and pass the laws that decide how money is spent. Josh Marshall asks: “How on earth are we in this position where members of Congress, the ones who write the budget, appropriate and assign the money, now have to go hat in hand to beg for changes or even information from the guy who actually seems to be running the government?”
Later, Musk met with House Republicans and offered to set up a similar way for the members of the House Oversight DOGE Subcommittee to reach him. When representatives complained about the random cuts that were so upsetting constituents. Musk defended DOGE’s mistakes by saying that he “can’t bat a thousand all the time.”
This morning, U.S. District Judge John McConnell Jr. ruled in favor of a group of state attorneys general from 22 Democratic states and the District of Columbia, saying that Trump does not have the authority to freeze funding appropriated by Congress. McConnell wrote that the spending freeze “fundamentally undermines the distinct constitutional roles of each branch of our government.” As Joyce White Vance explained in Civil Discourse, McConnell issued a preliminary injunction that will stay in place until the case, called New York v. Trump, works its way through the courts. The injunction applies only in the states that sued, though, leaving Republican-dominated states out in the cold.
Today, Trump convened his cabinet and, with Musk present, told the secretaries that they, and not Musk, are in charge of their departments. Dasha Burns and Kyle Cheney of Politico reported that Trump told the secretaries that Musk only has the power to make recommendations, not to make staffing or policy decisions.
Trump is also apparently feeling pressure over his tariffs of 25% on goods from Canada and Mexico and an additional 10% on imports from China that went into effect on Tuesday, which economists warned would create inflation and cut economic growth. Today, Trump first said he would exempt car and truck parts from the tariffs, then expanded exemptions to include goods covered by the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement (USMCA) Trump signed in his first term. Administration officials say other tariffs will go into effect at different times in the future.
The stock market has dropped dramatically over the past three days owing to both the tariffs and the uncertainty over their implementation. But Trump denied his abrupt change had anything to do with the stock market.
“I’m not even looking at the market,” Trump said, “because long term, the United States will be very strong with what’s happening.”
Jonathan
March 12, 2025 at 5:10 pm
Some of the data is wrong. And citing POLITICO as a credible source is omitting the fact that POLITICO has been getting millions from USAID. And the author defends corrupt institutions as if they should not be cleaned up first. And Trump’s tarrifs are actually working. Canada surrendered to Trump’s tariff and removed theirs. And Trump just got a ceasefire from Russia and Ukraine.
The author is so blind with hate he does not see the good things that are happening.
All of these should be expected. The Biden administration did so much damage. Like a cancer the doctors need to do open surgery which will seem crazy at first but is necessary for the long run.