My wish for us all as 2020 arrives

We stand, together, on the threshold of a new year.

And my wish for you is that 2020 will be a very good year.

I have to say that 2019 was an awful year in many ways.

I have been–and continue to be–greatly alarmed to see our National nightmare unfolding.

And, yes, I most certainly hope to see a lot of that turmoil and tragedy be resolved in this year which is just around the corner as I'm writing this.

For me personally, 2019 was a mixed bag, you might say.

The first half had some challenges and plenty of ups-and-downs.

The second half could be described as 99% bliss.

And I’m grateful.

I’m thinking that for many of you, 2019 may have been something like that. After all, life’s experiences are often a strange mixture of good stuff and the stuff you hope you’ll never have to go through again.

So I wish for you and all of us a 2020 with more–way more–of the good stuff.

May it be so!

“Bulldog Ben” Basile

© 2019 Ben Lawrence Basile

Grand Funk and the Doobies? Oh, my!

It was late August in that eventful year of 1972 when I arrived at a little-known University in Oklahoma for my Freshman college orientation.

Because of my background as a good little church boy and my pretty tightly-controlled upbringing, I hadn't seen many rock concerts.

The Association, at the Bob Carr Auditorium in Orlando, was about as wild as it got for me.

And that's not a knock on that fine band, not at all.

It's just a way of saying that, although I spent a very considerable chunk of my time listening to Rock and Top 40--especially over WLOF, Central Florida's fondly-remembered Channel 95--I had experienced few Rock concerts.

Especially compared to most of my boomer buds in those heady days of the '70s, when Rock 'n Roll was in its heyday.

So when my college bestie and I heard on the radio that Grand Funk Railroad was coming to Skelly Stadium on Tulsa's north side, we put it on our calendar.

Grand Funk and Sugarloaf. Yeah, the "Green Eyed Lady" group.

The opening act was some other band we didn't know so well, The Doobie Brothers.

There was not a shadow of a doubt that we'd make the show come hell or high water, but there was one little problem: we knew that Public transit would get us there--it was eight miles to the site--we had no idea how we'd get back to campus.

As you might imagine, the show was awesome! I'm still a Grand Funk fan and think that Mark, Don and Mel made up one of the very best bands from the late '60s and '70s.

Jerry Corbetta and Sugarloaf impressed.

And the Doobies absolutely tore my 17 year-old head off! I damn sure knew who they were after that show!

We didn't mind the really, really long walk back all the way to 71st Street and Lewis.

Even though Tulsa received its first snow fall for the year on that October night and we were only wearing light jackets.

We two hard-core Rock lovers trudged all the way back, knowing that that sojourn southward was but a small price to be paid to see a show like that.

The memory of that night is still fresh in my mind.

Like so many of us, I'm now a total Rock 'n Roll wimp and am not willing to go to any more effort to hear the good stuff than to start one of the playlists on my trusty laptop.

But in the Fall of '72, I was more-than-willing to go to great lengths to be there in the middle of it.

Hell, yeah! Those were the days!




Still a Rock child at heart, I am,


"Bulldog Ben" Basile


© 2019 Ben Lawrence Basile

The Poser Prez is Impeached

As pretty much the whole world knows, donald trump was impeached yesterday in the House of Representatives.

Two Articles of Impeachment passed--pretty much along party lines--and the Senate will be tasked with conducting the trial and acting on whether or not to remove him from the Presidency at some date to be determined.

The first Article charged Dolt 45 with abuse of power.

The second charged him with obstruction of Congress.

No one who has even the slightest grasp of what happens in Washington these days believes that the Republican-dominated Senate will actually remove him.

But it was very important that the House did its job.

Needless to say, this is big story. A very big story.

It will, in all likelihood, grind on for quite a while.

But regardless how this turns out, it's a very big deal that trump became the third President in our history to be impeached.

Removal by the Senate?

Not in this lifetime.

But he faces, at long last, some measure of accountability for his many high crimes and abuses of power.



"Bulldog Ben" Basile

© 2019 Ben Lawrence Basile

Articles of Impeachment Unveiled

Today the House Judiciary committee approved two articles of impeachment in the bizarre matter of our bully-in-Chief focusing his tried-and-true strong arm tactics on Volodymyr Zelensky.

The whole thing is, truly, quite bizarre and illegal on its face to boot.

Hard to say where we will go from here but the spinning has begun!

Dolt 45 may jump the shark here, as he has on so many occasions. One day his luck will run out.

Until then we continue to marvel at the depths of his stunning venality, ignorance and incompetence.

It's possible that we'll only be rid of him after November 3rd. Perhaps the day will come before then.

In the meantime, our beloved country continues to suffer at the hand of this hateful Polit-i-thug and grifter.

The fact that his Kool Aid-slurping followers are still sticking with him through all of this is truly baffling. And it bodes ill for our country.

"Bulldog Ben" Basile

© 2019 Ben Lawrence Basile

More troubling signs

Those of you who know me know that I’m very much focused on environmental issues.

If I say something about the degradation of the Earth and that we’re all in deep trouble as these trends proceed, no one will be surprised.

But as more and more signs and facts come in, I’ll surely be passing them along.

Don’t turn away. Get involved.

The signs are everywhere. I wish it were not so.

“Bulldog Ben” Basile

© 2019 Ben Lawrence Basile

The first two to support trump are...

There are times when a simple story--or even its headline--is so straightforward and telling that you really don't have to throw in any thoughts or commentary of your own.

This is one such story.

So Representatives Hunter and Collins were the first to publicly support Adolph Twitler? And they're both convicted criminals now?

Yeah, I've got nothing to add.



"Bulldog Ben" Basile

© 2019 Ben Lawrence Basile