Trump is not sleeping well. He has judges on his mind. He’s fighting a desperate battle to keep his financial affairs hidden. He was in Tokyo a day or two ago but he was up early.

Here’s are Trump’s latest thoughts on judges:

Earlier last week Judge Amit Mehta found that Congress was in its right to subpoena financial records of Trump. In one of his impromptu talks to the media on his way to some event or another Trump said:‘We disagree with that ruling. It’s crazy.” . . . “We will appeal it. “It’s totally the wrong decision by, obviously, an Obama-appointed judge.”  (my emphasis)  

On the 24th Trump tweeted: “Mitch McConnell and our Republican Senators have been very solid and strong. We have accomplished a great deal together, in particular with our Courts, 107 Federal Judges….(with many more to come) and 2 Supreme Court Justices – we are getting into record territory! Thank you all and have a great Memorial Day Weekend.”  

Memorial Day is a time to wonder what makes us Americans.  The memorial to the left brings the question to mind. The figure of the woman at the top of it faces to the south.

Memorial Day is supposed to be a solemn day for us to remember everyone who died serving in the American armed forces. It started after the Civil War to honor the dead in that war. It continued through our many wars after that. It wasn’t officially named Memorial Day until 1967 and the holiday established a year later.

When was the first Memorial Day? Many places claimed it originated in their towns. In 1966, “President Lyndon B. Johnson, declared Waterloo, New York, the official birthplace of Memorial Day. They chose Waterloo–which had first celebrated the day on May 5, 1866–because the town had made Memorial Day an annual, community-wide event, during which businesses closed and residents decorated the graves of soldiers with flowers and flags.”

A Brief History of Memorial Day suggests the following event may have been the earliest occurrence. “The event in Charleston that may have precipitated Memorial Day offers poignant evidence of a country struggling to rebuild itself after a bloody war: 257 Union soldiers died in prison in Charleston during the Civil War and were buried in unmarked graves, and the town’s black residents organized a May Day ceremony in which they landscaped a burial ground to properly honor the soldiers.”

When Lenin took power he said: “all leaders of the Constitutional Democratic Party, a party filled with enemies of the people, are hereby to be considered outlaws, and are to be arrested immediately and brought before the revolutionary court.” That party had a large representation in the Russian Duma which Lenin dissolved.

The Soviet Union made extensive use of the term. It was applied at one time or another, according to Wikipedia, to “to Tsar Nicholas II and the Imperial family, aristocrats, the bourgeoisie, clerics, business entrepreneurs, anarchists, kulaks, monarchists, Mensheviks, Esers, Bundists, Trotskyists, Bukharinists, the “old Bolsheviks“, the army and police, emigrants, saboteurs, wreckers (вредители, “vrediteli”), “social parasites” (тунеядцы, “tuneyadtsy”), Kavezhedists (people who administered and serviced the KVZhD (China Far East Railway), particularly the Russian population of Harbin, China), those considered bourgeois nationalists(notably Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Armenian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian nationalists, Zionists, Basmachi)”

Enemies of the people could be: “lmprisoned, expelled or executed, and lose their property to confiscation. Close relatives of enemies of the people were labeled as “traitor of Motherland family members” and prosecuted. They could be sent to Gulag, punished by the involuntary settlement in unpopulated areas, or stripped of citizen’s rights. Being a friend of an enemy of the people automatically placed the person under suspicion.”

I was cut up short reading a tweet that Trump wrote the other day. (I assume he wrote it but I note that he has said other people have access to his Twitter account and they can tweet for him. This, of course, is another lie but it is an attempt to protect himself from his own words and give him some deniability.”

The tweet that caught me up was: “If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran. Never threaten the United States again! 1:25 PM – 19 May 2019”

Whatever could that mean “the official end of Iran?” How do you end the existence of a country? How would a person even think that could be accomplished? Never mind that, why is a person who is the U.S. president tweeting out such absurdities?

I pondered that thought. Then I remembered Trump’s statement about nuclear weapons. I also remembered Sheldon Adelson’s statement about them in relation to Iran. Knowing of the close connection between Trump and Adelson I dreaded thinking that Trump was actually planning to nuke Iran. I suppose that would in a sense be the official end of Iran since much of the area nuked would not be habitable for many years; along with that, there would be a drastic decrease in the number of Iranians living there.

I knew something was up when my wife, Maria, told me that I had to go up to the Boston area on my birthday, Wednesday, May 1, because the two grandchildren of my son Ted, Theo and Cora, had wanted to see me because they had something special to give me. My other grandchild of my daughter Tatiana, Matty, had been at my house over the weekend before. They left Tuesday afternoon, the day before the birthday for their home in Connecticut, so I was told.

My birthday dawned and my wife gave me the traditional birthday gift which was “oh, it’s your birthday, Happy Birthday.” Many years before she said she didn’t like to give gifts on birthdays.  She added, “by the way, we have to leave earlier than planned” telling me my son Matt had cleaners coming to his condo. We had to let them in at noon time because he would be tied up at work.

Kevin Cullen of the Boston Glove wrote something a few weeks ago about another scandal in the Catholic Church which he called the annulment scam or something to that effect. He mentioned in passing Sheila Rauch Kennedy’s book called Shattered Faith.

That struck a note for me because I wondered how it was that Ted Kennedy and Joe Kennedy were able to get their marriages annulled by the Catholic Church after being married for so many years: Ted to Joan for about 20 years and Joe, the son of Ted’s brother Bobby, to Sheila for 16 years.

That was what Sheila wondered also. She had no problem with them being divorced which was an event she brought about because Joe had found some other arms that a country music song would suggest apparently had not gone cold. They went their separate ways on a somewhat friendly manner; Joe kept the house they lived in; Sheila with their two kids, twins, had to move to Cambridge. I’d guess Sheila was indoctrinated in the belief she should not complain for after all it was in the best interests of the men in the family that she go along with their desires.

Do you know where the expression “praise the Lord and pass the ammunition comes from?” I knew it was a WWII patriotic song but did not know that it existed prior to the song. The first time it was spoken was during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Chaplain, Lt. j.g. Howell M. Forgy, was stationed aboard the USS New Orleans during the attack.

According to Lieutenant Edwin F. Woodhead, who was the officer in charge of an ammunition line on that ship, “I heard a voice behind me saying, ‘Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.’ I turned and saw Chaplain Forgy walking toward me, along the line of men. He was patting them on the back and making that remark to cheer and keep them going. I know it helped me a lot, too.”

Chaplain Forgy later recounted, “our electrical power wasn’t on, and so when we went to lift the ammunition by the hoist, we had to form lines of men — form a bucket brigade — and we began to carry the ammunition up through the quarterdeck into the gurneys, and I stood there and directed some of the boys down the port side and some down the starboard side, and as they were getting a little tired, I just happened to say, “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.” That’s all there was to it.”

Local boy Jack Kerouac son of a potato farmer said: “Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?”  It is appropriate I think to ask Judge Joseph where does she think she will be going  in the near future after the Boston U.S. attorney Andrew Lelling finishes up with her. But I also to wonder where America is also going when situations like this arise.

Judge Joseph is allege to have kicked an immigration (ICE) officer out of her courtroom. This ICE officer held a warrant to arrest a person who was appearing before her in court on a criminal charges . Then she is said to have provided that person a secret escape route out of the court so that the ICE officer was thwarted in the performance of his job. Lelling indicted her for obstruction of justice.

Her attorney Thomas Hoopes said: “This prosecution is totally political and Shelley Joseph is absolutely innocent.” That remains to be seen although I suggest it is far from political. Others though suggested it was political and that the judge should not have been indicted.