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OPINIONOPINION

 Mountain Views NewsSaturday, January 4, 2025

RICH JOHNSON 

NOW THAT’S RICH

STUART TOLCHIN

MOUNTAIN 
VIEWS

NEWS

PUBLISHER/ EDITOR

Susan Henderson

PASADENA CITY 
EDITOR

Dean Lee 

SALES

Patricia Colonello

626-355-2737 

626-818-2698

WEBMASTER

John Aveny 

DISTRIBUTION

Peter Lamendola

CONTRIBUTORS

Michele Kidd

Stuart Tolchin 

Harvey Hyde

Audrey Swanson

Meghan Malooley

Mary Lou Caldwell

Kevin McGuire

Chris Leclerc

Dinah Chong Watkins

Howard Hays

Paul Carpenter

Kim Clymer-Kelley

Christopher Nyerges

Peter Dills 

Rich Johnson

Lori Ann Harris

Rev. James Snyder

Katie Hopkins

Deanne Davis

Despina Arouzman

Jeff Brown

Marc Garlett

Keely Toten

Dan Golden

Rebecca Wright

Hail Hamilton

Joan Schmidt

LaQuetta Shamblee

PUT THE LIGHTS ON


HOW DOES IT FEEL

WHY DIDN'T I THINK OF THAT OR DID I NOT 
THINK OF THAT? THAT IS THE QUESTION!

 Seriously, how does it feel? The first day of the year 
2025 has already brought tragic news of an attack in New 
Orleans. We probably all have at least one thing in common. 
We don’t know what is going to happen next and 
many of us are worried. My own year started strangely as 
I awoke from a dream containing a long story explaining 
how I had been programmed as a spy. In the morning, I at 
first wondered if my values and beliefs were truly my own. 
Perhaps the feeling began even before I went to bed. On Monday, December 
30th, I had an appointment to endure an endoscopy examination. This is a 
medical procedure wherein one is sedated, after which a camera is inserted 
down one’s throat for the purpose of inspecting the upper organs of one’s body. 
I am guessing that perhaps this recognition of my own ignorance as to my 
physical body carried over into the dream as I speculated about the contents of 
my own mind

 I am just guessing now, but I think this questioning is also connected to 
the movie my wife and I saw last week entitled “The Complete Unknown” a depiction 
of the life of Bobby Zimmerman, or Bob Dylan as he came to be known. 
Bob Dylan’s music, especially during the 1960’s seemed to express or formulate 
my feelings in that era. Sixty years later I proudly maintain these same values. 
It is what life has taught me. In 1966 I was fortunate to live in a dorm at 
UCLA as the coordinator of the Upward Bound Program. I was lucky to be 
allowed to live in the Dorm with selected High School Students from Watts and 
Boyle Heights and my values were forever affected by this experience. Some 
of these before under-achieving students have become mayors, legislators, and 
Professors.

 Can you remember the 60’s? It was time of momentous change or at 
least it appeared to be. My participation in the program amounted to allow students 
and myself to learn from one another. Students had different experiences 
and different abilities. Some of the students had been witness to the demonstrations 
downtown and in Compton recalled today as the Watts Riots. These 
“riots” lasted six days from August 11 -16, 1965. Rioters burned and overturned 
cars and looted and damaged stores. During this summer of 1965, just 
after graduating Berkeley, and prior to entering UCLA Law School, I served as 
the driver for my 55 year old father. He had lost his eyesight a few years earlier 
but continued to work as a salesman with my mother serving as his driver. Now 
in the summer of ‘65 I was his driver as we went with him from store to store, 
cigar stand to cigar stand, taking orders for cigarettes and candy. I remember 
one particular stop which made a lasting impression upon me. The cigar stand 
owner was there at his place of business with rifle almost in hand. He was an 
old Jewish man, a Concentration Camp survivor, who explained that life was 
unpredictable, but you must always keep your head about you and do what you 
have to do and what you feel is right. That is a lesson I learned, a lesson my 
father had learned as his family had escaped the pogroms in Ukrania and as he 
continued to work without eyesight.

 In my career as a defense criminal lawyer and as a single parent raising 
two children of very different abilities, I have learned that life gives each of 
us different circumstances and often different abilities. Nevertheless, no matter 
who we are and where we find ourselves, there are always choices to be made. 
I have learned to keep my eyes open (as my father taught me eyesight is not 
required} and to carry on always expecting the best and ready to deal with the 
worst 

 There will always be choices and "by keeping my eyes open” and staying 
in touch with the lessons I have learned I am my own person ready to cope with 
the future and to strive to be always the best person I can be. 

 Yes Bob, I feel pretty good.

Well, friends, truth be told I have not been feeling very good. When I don’t 
feel very good, an amazing world event of epic proportions takes place. I 
shut up. I know. Hard to imagine. I have a small group of friends and research 
scientists who live for those rare moments… most of them on speed 
dial. Even if I have nothing to say, these friends want to be there to hear what I don’t say 
especially if I don’t call. (That’s existential if you must know).

When this cosmic oddity strikes, yours truly runs wacky. People also want to be there 
because, as bad as I am when my mind is connected to my mouth, when not directly connected, 
what comes out of that major source of my anatomy may be memorable...maybe. I 
tend to pontificate. Go to that nether region where rationale thought is cosmic. With me so 
far? Me neither. Are you listening? Me neither.

Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre had me in mind when discussing existential 
thought years before I came into existence. It’s all in their work coincidentally on existentialism. 
My contributions preceded my existence further authenticating my contributions 
to the essence of nothingness.

Of course, you have questions. Here are some questions you might consider asking yourself 
and others.

If you try to fail and succeed, which one did you do?

Why, when I’m driving and looking for an address do I turn down the volume on the radio?

If a word is spelled incorrectly in the dictionary, how would we ever know? Can you cry 
underwater?

If you had something written on your face, what would it be?

Who actually calls the wind Mariah? Does Mariah answer?

Is it a pair of pants if there is only one?

What do you call a fly without wings? A walk?

What is the one thing movies never get right?

 If you could change the color of your eyes to an unnatural color, which color would you 
choose? Which color would you not choose?

What was the weirdest outfit you ever wore?

What’s the worst song ever written? What’s the best song never written?

What’s the worst pizza topping?

Which Disney Princess would make the best secret agent?

And thank you Susan Henderson for being exactly who are!

I just have one final question. And please answer truthfully….Do stairs go up or down?

I need to know. Thank you for putting up with me Oh, hello 2025.

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HOWARD Hays As I See It


“It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its polit-
ical system. Now it’s just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery . . 
. we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff 
to major contributors who want and expect and sometimes get favors for 
themselves once the election’s over.” 

– Jimmy Carter on the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision, 2015

 

Now there’s another battle between MAGA and Mar-a-Lago, yet again 
amongst those about to take charge. And we’re still weeks out from the 
Inauguration.

 

This one began with Donald Trump’s choice of Indian-American Sriram Krishnan, 
who’d helped Elon Musk revamp Twitter/X, as Senior White House Advisor on Artificial 
Intelligence. Krishnan, like Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, is a proponent of allowing 
programs like H-1B visas to bring in increasing numbers of immigrants to work high-
tech jobs.

 

MAGA activist Laura Loomer jumped in to argue those jobs “should be given to American 
STEM students . . . This is not America First Poli-cy.” She added, “It’s not racist 
against Indians to want the original MAGA policies I voted for.” (Over 70% of H-1B visa 
holders come from India.)

 

While Musk and Ramaswamy claimed a shortage of skilled tech workers here at home, 
former Trump adviser Steve Bannon charged, “This thing’s a scam by the oligarchs in 
Silicon Valley to basically take jobs from American citizens, give them to what become 
indentured servants from foreign countries, and then pay ‘em less.” There were reminders 
that major corporate employers of H-1B visa holders were also reporting waves of 
layoffs – with Tesla a prime example.

 

Musk (rather than the president-elect) had to engage: “I will go to war on this issue the 
likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend." He called those attacking the H-1B 
program “contemptible fools (who) must be removed from the Republican Party.” More 
than a dozen conserva-tive bloggers complained of having their accounts downgraded 
on X af-ter accusing Trump of abandoning his MAGA base and siding instead with 
those “oligarchs in Silicon Valley”.

 

Ramaswamy had his own peculiar take: Yes, there is a shortage of qual-ified American 
workers – and it’s all the fault of our “culture” having “ven-erated mediocrity over excellence”. 
While “immigrant parents” limit the amount of time their kids spend on TV, 
“most normal American parents” don’t. Those “normal American parents” simply aren’t 
instilling in their kids the values necessary to succeed as “immigrant parents” do.

 

Sports podcaster Pablo Torre, a classmate of Ramaswamy’s at Harvard, offered an analogy: 
“he’s going to talk to that (MAGA) base, a nativist base, the same way that . . . white 
people have been talking to Black people in America for a really long time – I don’t think 
they’re going to like it.”

 

Software engineer “Phil in Denver” posted his own take on H-1B work-ers: “At a time 
when even a first-year engineer's starting salary was in the $70-80k range in most of the 
country, these engineers were working for about $40k. THIS is the reason Musk et al 
really want more H1Bs. . . . they can't just hop to another job if things don't work out . . 
. (These workers) are not smarter, they are not more capable, and they certainly are not 
more experienced. What they are is cheap and pliant and that is ALL that the DOGE 
crowd and their fellow tech bros care about. And it is all they ever will.”

 

A self-described “long time Trump supporter” posted on Trump’s Truth Social about 
his own tech job: “They put everyone on worse insurance plans and stopped matching 
401k. Finally, they started bringing in H1Bs and let all the long-term employees go after 
we trained our replace-ments.”

 

MAGA diehards identify with the Trump of 2016, who called the H-1B program a 
means to import foreign workers “for the explicit purpose of substituting for American 
workers at lower pay . . . I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program, 
and institute an absolute re-quirement to hire American workers first”. But now it’s 
Trump under Elon Musk: “I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the 
visas. That’s why we have them”.

 

Democrats appear to be sitting this one out. They won’t side with sup-porters of importing 
cheap labor at the expense of American workers, nor with those who reflexively oppose 
any program that predominantly bene-fits the other-than-white. For Republican 
officeholders, it’s how to main-tain allegiance to Trump while not alienating the MAGA 
base they rely on for holding their office in the first place.

 

This latest MAGA vs. Mar-a-Lago battle comes just after the one over government funding 
and just before the next one over whether Mike Johnson (R-LA) keeps his job as 
House Speaker. And we’re still weeks out from the Inauguration.

 

After I’d started this column, news broke and I considered changing the topic. But I’ll 
leave it with the opening quote and the following: George W. Bush said of the man who 
ended his father’s bid for re-election, “Pres-ident Carter dignified the office.” A federal 
appeals court has upheld ver-dicts against Trump for sexual abuse and defamation. On 
the day Trump again becomes president, flags at our nation’s capital and throughout our 
country will be flying at half-staff.


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