Yesterday, on C-span, I listened to part of a panel discussion which included Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, who was incarcerated in Tehran from July 2014 to January 2016, a total of 544 days. Also on the panel was his American attorney, whose name I did not catch (and did not bother to look up). He was charged with and convicted of spying and spreading anti-government propaganda.

A portion of yesterday’s program dealt with Rezaian’s trial. Without going into great detail, it is best simply to say that it was not a fair trial and there was no possibility of any result other than ‘guilty’. He met with his court-appointed lawyer only two times before the trial itself began, and those two times only with someone from the prosecution present. There was a meeting with the judge prior to the trial at which the judge questioned why any of these pretrial procedures were necessary, as it was clear that the prisoner would be found guilty and sentenced. The judge himself was apparently someone with a strong reputation for finding everyone guilty, and for his free use of the death penalty. Rezaian’s lawyer said, after Rezaian went through his experience with the Iranian judicial system something like: “This sure is not the way it would have worked in America”.

Cut forward to this morning. My occasional Friday morning breakfast group had as its guest a young woman who is a documentary film maker, and who has been working for 7 years on a film about a woman from Guatemala who entered the country more than ten years ago with her daughter, and who applied for asylum. She has not been involved in any criminal activity since she came to this country, and has fulfilled all requirements for asylum seekers. Nevertheless, since ICE does not seem to care that she is following a recognized governmental process, she is presumably fair game for capture, detention and deportation at any time. This of course makes the making of this film itself risky, and the makes the question of what to put in the film, and what to leave out, even more risky.

For a while, when she first crossed the border, she was held in detention, but then released. Because of the backlog of such proceedings, her detention hearing is set in 2028, and may be postponed beyond that date.

The film maker this morning discussed how hearings are now working in our broken administration system. As we know, people are being kept in detention, being whisked off the street (sometimes whisked out of scheduled hearing rooms) and sent to far away detention centers or far away countries. There are hearings being held, but they are extremely cursory and some judges have ruled in favor of the government and against the asylum seekers 95% of the time. Other judges, who have been more favorable to seekers, have been summarily fired.

As to these proceedings, Rezaian’s lawyer could not say that the fairness of our procedures are much better, if at all, than the procedures used in the Islamic Republic of Iran. We should be ashamed of ourselves.

But this is the Trump administration in action, and it is not clear if things will be any different now that Kristi Noem is out of HHS. That, we will see.

The administration, whose leader wants to be able to choose (or at least to hold a veto over) the next leader of Iran, is in deep trouble. The dismissal of Noem is just one matter. I saw this morning that, across the country, the average price of a gallon of gas is $3.44, and presumably the idea of $1.95 gas is now only a dream. I saw that the country lost 92,000 jobs last month, that unemployment has risen. Trump’s 50,000 DOW that Pam Bondi loves to boast about, may fall below 47,000 by close of the markets today. Everything is a mess, and we will see how Mr. Trump responds. It will not be pretty.

In the meantime, we still have not had a replacement toilet for the one we are told has been clogged over time. After dealing with one plumber for over a month looking for the right replacement, we have a new plumber coming Monday morning with a promise of fast and good service. The problem is that the toilet sits under a window, and normal toilet tanks are too high. The related problem is that we don’t want to overpay for a replacement toilet. We don’t need anything fancy.

Yesterday, I saw the first segment of a Netflix show called Love & Death, apparently the story of a true incident in Texas in 1980. In that first episode, there is a poetry group that meets in a church, and the members of the group are asked by the facilitator to read their poems. The first member says that he wrote a short poem which is meant to attack materialism. It went like this:

“On my new toilet,

I do the same things.”

That was it. I identified.