Thursday, October 20, 2022

Walter Jack Savage, Artist, Author - Asks Just One Question! Whose America Is This?! Featuring Excerpts from The Big Truth!

https://wjacksavage.org/store.html
Two of Jack's paintings spoke to me today... So I'm spotlighting his fantastic art work, but also matching it with relevant words... By the way, the magazine cover of Jack is interesting...he submitted some work for publication, and all of a sudden makes the front cover! Cool, right! I have to add that, in my heart, I believe Jack's posting these two pieces today was at just the right time (God Incident) to allow me to share a little from The Big Truth:Upholding Democracy in the Age of The Big Lie  by Major Garrett and David Becker...


Whose America Is This?!




whose America is this?!

I don't think I've ever been more attuned to being a citizen in America than I have been during the last decade of my life... A little of that has been because I've had two major surgeries during the time period, and I have learned that I must spend time taking care of this temple that God has given me... Perhaps, more, though, I have lived sufficient years to see and respond to what Jack has asked all of us in his painting! 

Whose America is This?! 

For surely this is True... America has Never Before
Faced the loss of our
Basic Freedoms as has been seen and felt by ALL of Us
Yes, ALL of us have been ravaged by what has and is happening in America, even now...TODAY
WE CANNOT AFFORD TO LOSE SIGHT OF THAT KNOWLEDGE--THE AWARENESS, THAT AMERICA IS OURS!
AND WE MUST WORK TO KEEP IT SAFE FROM ALL WHO WILL TRY TO CHANGE IT IN DETRIMENTAL WAYS!
even from within the country


Men Without A Tree



I'd rather be a forest than a Tree...

When I think about the separation of man from nature, as surely displayed in Jack's painting, it is quite startling... I remember when the men from the power company who have a tower on my land, came in too far and cut down a beautiful pear tree that had been on this property for at least 100 years! I was devastated! The tree was gone and nothing could bring it back to bloom in the spring, or provide the pears for both animal and human consumption... 

Having it disappear by accident was bad enough, but consider those who destroy just because they want to make a profit... or they want the power that goes with being able to do anything they want to do, no matter the cost to the rest of us...

When we consider our freedom, shall we not also consider the basis upon which that freedom is guaranteed? When I look at Jack's beautiful painting, which I've made my screensaver, I realize that it is even more important to be a tree within a forest, as opposed to standing alone. The Declaration of Independence speaks clearly:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...

But during the last administration and culminating on January 6th, 2021, all of us were faced with a group of internal domestic terrorists--yes, terrorists, who were led by the past president... Many of you will see that this has not just incited the insurrection, but republicans are trying in any way possible, especially by lying, to continue this move toward authoritarian government! 

This IS NOT AMERICA AS WE KNOW IT! THE ONLY WAY TO PROTECT AMERICA IS TO VOTE OUT REPUBLICANS WHO DO NOTHING TO SUPPORT ALL AMERICANS... WE ALL KNOW THIS! LET US SPEAK OUT IN OUTRAGE AND GET OUT TO VOTE...!!!

The Big Truth is a book that stands as a counter-reference to all that is known about how The Big Lie is being used to scare Americans...

Election 2020 and the Truth 
The Big Truth: democracy is made up of millions of little truths, intimate and interlocking truths. Truths found in the votes cast by Americans in person or by mail. Truths found in the citizenry that voluntarily counts those votes and dutifully reports the results. Truths found in election officials who scrape together the means by which elections are held, public servants who create the voting precincts, buy the equipment to tally the votes, and manage the process of moving the votes along the line to be tallied and certified . . . so that they may be transparently confirmed and trusted. Truths found in this collaborative exercise of civic virtue are more obvious and verifiable than they have ever been in our history. The Big Truth is a variation of E Pluribus Unum—from many one. From millions of little truths we form a Big Truth, one we should celebrate, and almost always have before, but somehow now can’t, or that troubles us or feels less settled than it should. This book is about those little truths and The Big Truth. It is devoted to the people who make each little truth meaningful so that The Big Truth may flourish. 

Here is a truth that matters more than you might suspect. The 2020 election had more paper ballots than any national election in our history. Paper ballots are a hedge against hacking. You can’t hack paper. Paper ballots are the fingerprints, almost the DNA, of a verifiable election. All of the so-called disputed swing states used them. In fact, around 95 percent of the voters in our nation voted with them in 2020. And paper ballots are required for effective audits, confirming the results. Thanks to the pervasiveness of paper ballots in 2020, more states audited those ballots and confirmed the results than ever before, including all of the swing states. Another truth was vote counting had never been more visible or scrutinized. Despite what you may have read or heard, poll watchers and observers were present at all desired locations and in accordance with state or local laws. 

Anything different can only be attributed to one group! The republican party who continue to speak the Big Lie, even though it has been proven to be false!

Misdirection 
No one likes to be taken for a fool and no one likes to be told they’ve been taken for a fool. There are those who peddle The Big Lie who make money from it. There are those who use it to gain a momentary political advantage. Gaining wealth or power from subverting democracy and demeaning the Constitution is awful. Calling it patriotism bastardizes the word and insults those who truly love American democracy. 
These grifters occupy a narrow albeit influential range of the debate about the 2020 election. Many of them have written books on this subject. At various times, we will quote from them—not because we believe their varied arguments against Election 2020 are valid, but because none of the books actually agree on what happened. This strikes us as a kind of proof of concept of a con. Agreeing on what the con is makes it harder for many people to profit from it. By calling the con many things, lots of people can get in on the hustle. 
One book, by Patrick Byrne, contends “industrial scale vote flipping” stole the election from Trump. Another book, by Peter Navarro, says, flatly, that no vote flipping happened at all, but that the real culprit was “ballot box stuffing.” Another book, by Mollie Hemingway, dismisses both of those so-called explanations while contending the election wasn’t stolen so much as it was “rigged” by hostile media coverage, social media censorship, and Democrats who bent the rules. This tapestry of conflicting accounts conveniently keeps The Big Lie alive and tries to hide the fact that money has been made and appears certain to be made as long as that lie persists. We therefore have genuine concern and compassion for the millions of Americans over whom purveyors of these contradictory and self-canceling claims of a fraudulent election hold sway. Honestly, if the election had been stolen, don’t you think there would be a single explanation? There are not multiple ways a bank is robbed. There are not multiple ways someone is murdered or burglarized. There is one crime with one trail of evidence. That there is in the space of purported 2020 election fraud so many conflicting claims demonstrates that fiction is afoot, and for those beguiled by it we offer another explanation, one based on verifiable information, the truth. 
We believe most of the millions of Americans who express doubt about the 2020 election love America, cherish democracy, and believe in the rule of law. We don’t believe they have ill intent or seditious motives. They may feel alienated from cultural and demographic trends, they may have felt at some level left behind by the digital economy, and they may feel a kinship with Trump and fellow Trump supporters that, all other things being equal, makes them wonder what actually happened. It is to this wide and important swath of America we hope to speak. We especially seek to reach those who have donated money on behalf of “election integrity” or Stop the Steal appeals. 
First, we note that money has not been used for either purpose by Trump. Hundreds of millions of dollars were raised in November and December of 2020. Patrick Byrne, a Trump supporter and the former CEO of Overstock.com, claims in his book The Deep Rig that money raised to “Stop the Steal” was never used for that purpose. All available public financial records verify this fact. Let us quote Byrne: So I say to whatever Republican loyalists around the country coughed up those hundreds of millions, in donations of $10 and $20 . . . You were fleeced. It was a big joke: rank-and-file Republicans gave a pot of hundreds of millions of dollars to Republican Bigshots to unscramble what had happened on November 3, and from where I sat, nothing went to any activity related to doing so. It was all being stashedby people at the top, licking their chops...Trump spent little of what he raised. Other Republicans, seeing the same gold mine, began to mimic this tactic.

Let's look at two of the comments that were made by those who participated in the January 6th insurrection, planned for and incited by Donald Trump.

We didn’t see a coup in 2020. But we must be honest with ourselves about what we did see and, more importantly, what has been revealed since the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. 
When the history of this noxious era is written, federal judges who ruled on post-riot litigation will be credited with helping us all see through the haze—sharpening our view through the unflinching lens of the Constitution. 
“I sort of think about it as though we, all of us, on January 6th, we all looked into the abyss,” Liz Cheney told us. “And responsible public servants and responsible elected officials have a duty to pull the country back from that. And Donald Trump instead is trying to drive us into the abyss for his own gain and his own purposes.” 
Cheney said she spent months trying to put Trump’s actions in another historical context. “I’ve tried to think about how to provide people with an example of how dangerous his actions were. 
And one way to think about it, because we have become numb to Trump in so many ways, is to imagine if (President) Dwight Eisenhower had mobilized an angry mob and sent them to march on the Supreme Court during the Brown versus Board of Education argument and sat by and watched while they attacked and did nothing. That is inconceivable. It is inconceivable that he would have done that. But that’s essentially what Trump did to prevent the counting of electoral votes.”

There are so many victims of this grotesque grift. Some invaded the Capitol to save the country from what they now see as the phantom danger of a stolen election. The true theft, they came to understand, was perpetrated by Trump, a president who stole their faith in the law, incited them to violent trespass, and jabbered on while their lives crumbled.

Robert Scott Palmer pled guilty to assaulting, resisting, and impeding officers using a dangerous weapon. He was sentenced to sixty-three months in prison, which, as of this writing, was the longest of any rioter charged. Palmer’s legal team said the following in court papers: Mr. Palmer went to the Capitol at the behest of the former president. Like many others who participated in the Capitol riot, Mr. Palmer blindly followed the many figures who falsely but persistently claimed that the election had been stolen from the president. Those voices, including the voice of the then-president himself, had convinced persons such as Mr. Palmer that the election was fraudulent and that they must take action to stop the transition of the presidency. 
It is relevant to consider that the riot almost surely would not have occurred but for the financing and organization that was conducted by persons unconnected to Mr. Palmer who will likely never be held responsible for their relevant conduct. 
In his letter to the presiding judge, Palmer wrote, in small, sometimes pinched cursive, the following: A lot if not most of the defendants I have been incarcerated with would object to me saying that we were rioting. To be quite honest your honor if asked about it when it first happened in January I would have been counted in that group. I have over the course of close to a year come to a different conclusion. Since then I realize that well-meaning Trump supporters were lied to by those that at the time had great power meaning the sitting president, as well as those acting on his behalf. They kept spitting out the false narrative about a stolen election and how it was “our duty” to stand up to tyranny. Little did I realize that they were the tyrannical ones desperate to hold on to power at any cost even by creating the chaos they knew would happen with such rhetoric. 
For listening to them your honor let me offer please and I can only hope and pray it is accepted by the honorable court my most sincere apologies. Palmer apologizes first to all police officers attacked by “the angry mob.” 
“They are the real heroes of the day. The emotional as well as physical scars that some will carry for the remainder of their lives is a great tragedy and I wish with every fiber of my being that I could change it but I am powerless to.” 
He then apologizes to lawmakers inside the Capitol “who were carrying out their constitutionally bound duties to certify what now turns out to be the legitimate will of the American people. That is one of the greatest and proudest traditions of our country the peaceful transition of power and I am truly ashamed that I was part of a group that tried to circumvent that transition.” 
Palmer’s letter was by no means an outlier. It is, in its own way, pitiable and profound. It hurts Palmer that so much had to go wrong for him to reconnect himself to American traditions—ones Trump so carelessly debased...

I was going to share more from those who are now serving time for their part in the insurrection. But in rereading Mr. Palmer's words, together with those from Liz Cheney, who not only was removed from her duties in the House, as well as losing her re-election to an election denier, I think these two illustrate the range of, and the breadth of the devastation wrought by the Trump presidency. I may change my mind as I continue to finish reading this book...

In my mind, we have only one option. All republicans must be voted out by voting against those who lie and use lies to gain power. 

In the last day or so, we have seen the shenanigans being played by, for instance, Ron DeSantis, who sent police out to pick up Black voters for illegal voting... while they were doing just what they had earlier been told, that a change had been made to lift the ability of former prisoners from voting...What kind of man is this who would use lies and worse, humiliation for those who thought they were returned an earlier right to vote and then to jail them in the process! Honestly, folks, this is getting so dreadful that it is hard to stomach this type of abuse of our citizens!

At this point, I am worried for my own state since the republicans have thrown millions out there to get Dr. Oz elected, by lying about John Fetterman who has a proven record in law enforcement. And, the candidate for government openly states that, he will control the election machines to get whatever results he wants! 

I get lies through the mail, through my cell phone, and on my land line which I don't answer! Can we afford to NOT see that Biden has done more in two years than anything that republicans have accomplished in decades! And I do not credit republicans for taking away the rights of women in doing so! Women have fought long and hard to be able to be "recognized" as equal in law and in freedom... WHO IN THE WORLD WOULD FORCE US BACKWARDS TO ALLOW OLD WHITE MEN TO CONTINUE TO MILK US FROM OUR RIGHTS AND INTEGRITY! VOTE DEMOCRAT ALL THE WAY...PLEASE LISTEN TO THE TRUTH!








A final thought about the men without a tree. It is my belief that if we cannot see that the man who speaks on behalf of our country does NOT speak lies, then we are rudderless--men without the stalwart tree of justice and truth to represent all that America is...

And, all that God expects America to be... 



GOD And His Followers 
MARCHES FOR TRUTH - NOT LIES!

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