Apparently, if the polls are correct, a slim majority of Americans believe that life was better during the last administration, even in the depths of the pandemic, when we had a President who seriously considered injecting bleach into people’s veins as a treatment for COVID and who later tried to overturn an election.

For all the uproar over immigration, no one seems to remember or understand that the Biden Administration has deported more illegal immigrants than did the Trump Administration. And while the Trump Administration talked about bringing jobs back to the U.S., the only thing the Trump Administration did was grant a minuscule tax cut to the average American and a whopping tax cut to the wealthy and corporations, while the Biden Administration passed legislation resulting in the building of high-tech factories in the U.S. They also forget that Trump’s spending policies set off the inflation that they hate, and that inflation rates have come down under Biden.

And those fond “memories” seem to omit the fact that Trump paid hush money to a porn star, and drove small companies and contractors out of business because he wouldn’t pay his bills. Or the fact that he was convicted of tax fraud and sexual assault, or that there’s a recording of him illegally soliciting votes. Or that he did nothing for four hours while police were fighting for their lives in the Capitol. Or the fact that lawyers won’t work for him unless they’re paid in advance.

Nope. None of those memories seem to count… or even be remembered.

Apparently, inconvenient and proven facts don’t seem to have much weight against well-delivered bombastic rhetoric that paints an overly rosy picture of a past that never was.

Exactly what does whom the Fulton County (Georgia) Attorney General might be sleeping with have to do with whether Donald Trump tried to solicit some 11,000 votes illegally from the Georgia Secretary of State?

For that matter, why have both the Georgia State House and Senate passed measures that would create an appointed commission to discipline or remove district attorneys, measures that removed oversight by the state Supreme Court, and which would in fact allow the Republican Party to dictate which district attorneys should be investigated and disciplined.

Might it just be that all that effort is designed to halt a state court prosecution of the great Donald Trump because, even if Trump is elected in the fall, he can’t stop a state prosecution nor can he pardon himself if he’s convicted?

From what I can tell, whether the district attorney is sleeping with a prosecutor has very little bearing on whether Donald Trump tried to use the power of his office to illegally solicit votes. It appears that digging up dirt on Fani Willis is simply an effort to remove her from prosecuting Donald Trump…. or at the very least, to further delay his trial.

While I sincerely hope that someone accused of murder would not even be allowed to bring up unrelated personal matters and have them be considered as relevant to the guilt of an accused murderer, it appears that, in fact, if one has enough attorneys and money, he can try defense ploy after defense ploy to string out the case either for years or until one of those ploys succeeds.

Does that represent justice? For Donald Trump, it obviously does.

The other day, my wife was in the university parking lot, about to drive home. Then out of nowhere, a car pulled up two spaces away, and suddenly she could hear nothing except rap music that totally drowned out her classic easy rock music. Both her windows were closed, but those of the other car were open, and the volume of the “music” from the other car was enough literally to vibrate her solid but modest SUV.

I own a somewhat larger SUV, used primarily once for book tours and currently to carry opera props and sometimes sets, as well as for occasional trips around southwest Utah. Yet I’ve also experienced the unpleasant and definitely unwelcome sonic assault and/or or the involuntary full-body sonic massage.

We live on a fairly quiet street, but we still get the occasional sonic bombardment from so-called music, even with our well-insulated windows and walls – and our house isn’t even that close to the road, and there’s a five-foot tall, four-foot wide thick pfitzer hedge between the sidewalk and the grass.

What’s become even more prevalent is the sound of barely muffled large diesel pick-up trucks, except they’re more like monsters that tower over my standard-sized SUV, and the majority of these behemoths don’t appear to be working trucks, not with all that chrome and nary a splat of mud or so much as a dent in sight, and seldom even with any cargo.

Sound pollution is increasing everywhere in the world, and it’s not as though trucks and music have to be that loud. So why is it happening?

Studies show that human beings regard high levels of sound as a form of power, a way to dominate the space around them. Certainly, we can see this everywhere, even in politics, where demagogues from Hitler to Trump have ranted and raved at high volume and amplified that volume as much as possible.

But what it signifies to me is obnoxious boors who ought to be stuffed into a sound-proof chamber and subjected to their own noise at volumes high enough to burst their eardrums – except then they’d just increase the volume more.

For some reason I get bombarded with political emails, from both the left and the right, but the right sends almost ten times as many as the left. Here is a representative sample of the message subject lines of those from the right.

The Left is Coming for Us
Drunk Kamala Goes Viral
Riots Break Out- National Guard Deployed
Veterans Sacrificed for Migrants
Leftist Protesters Threaten My Home
President Trump to Win Nobel Prize
Say a Prayer for the January 6th Prisoners
US Days Away from Major Terror Attack
Stop Biden’s Deep State Apparatus
Jack Smith Hides Trial Facts
Joe Biden’s Cognitive Failure Even Worse!
White House’s Dereliction of Duty!
The Woke Mob Removed Founding Father’s Statue

And here are some of the message subject lines from the left.

Undecided Voters Not Breaking for Me
$7 Million in Negative Ads from SuperPac
Planet for Our Future
Our Numbers Need to Improve
Did you get the Invite?
We’re being Outspent by Dark PACs

Notice a certain difference?

Those from the right are pointed and eye-catching, and every one is somewhere between an exaggeration and a gross misrepresentation of the facts.

Those from the left tend to be more factual – and boring.

I can assure you that for months the tone and substance of the ads from the left and right haven’t varied, but it does strike me that the ceaseless eye-catching exaggerations are bound to have some effect.

Over the last decade, there’s been a fair amount of verbiage expended on income inequality, and how the rich are getting even richer. And that’s unfortunately true.

But all that verbiage has tended to obscure another growing inequality – and that’s an inequality that afflicts the U.S. system of justice. While there’s been lots of heat and light focused on law enforcers at all levels, there’s been little light and even less progress in dealing with the inequality in the courts created by lack of resources and exploited by wealth.

While the delay between the time a defendant is charged and when the case is tried varies considerably by state and locality, statistics show that, on average, that delay has been increasing steadily since 1990, to the point that in some of slowest areas, such as Chicago, someone charged with murder will wait four years before going to trial. Some cases have been delayed a decade.

Part of the problem is political, because Congress deadlocks over appointing federal judges as each party wants its judicial candidates, with the result that ten percent of federal judge positions are vacant. Also, the number of judges hasn’t kept pace with population growth.

These resource shortcomings play into the hands of unscrupulous litigants for whom every day of delay offers a benefit. The delays also punish innocents without financial resources, some of whom have been held in captivity awaiting trial for years. This creates pressure to plead guilty to a lesser offense… and the result that someone found innocent might spend more time in jail than someone found guilty.

In the higher profile cases, such as those involving Donald Trump, all the endless motions and extended litigation provide illustrated example after example of how those with wealth and accomplished (I wouldn’t use the term “good” here) attorneys can thwart and string out prosecution and trials for years.

And often even when they lose, at least in civil cases or cases involving fraud and white-collar crime, the cost to them is less than to what they’ve gained.

Large corporations can do the same in dealing with the government, as well as in civil matters against individuals or small companies creating legal proceedings that can bankrupt those without extensive legal resources.

Yet, even as the Trump legal spectacle fuels Trump’s re-election campaign funding and furthers his political ambition, few seem to grasp the impact such tactics have on those who can’t afford those kinds of attorneys.