Politics

Pecos Bill and Buffalo Bill. Billy the Kid and Wild Bill Hickok. Read more about The Power of Bill

Met my next door neighbor last night at the mail boxes. (We're in the city, but our neighborhood still has remnants of the time when it was a rural outskirt - our mailboxes are clustered together at the curb.)

"Watching the Republican Convention?" he asked.

And I had to confess. I just don't have the stomach for it.

I used to watch everything. I don't remember having to leave the room when Richard Nixon came on the air. I wasn't much interested in what he had to say and disagreed with most if not all of it, but he didn't actually make me feel a little queasy. Read more about Cowering in the Kitchen

I remember a commercial for an evangelical christian college that ran sometime in the 70's claiming to "send your children back to you exactly as they were when you entrusted them to us."

I read that as a promise from the college to refrain from educating your children at all. My mother-in-law du temps, visiting at the time, sighed audibly and said, "Oh, I wish I had sent Barry there." Read more about We Don't Need No Education

If there is one thing we know about Paul Ryan, aspiring VP, it's that he is a Rand fan. He's so enthusiastic about her that he gave his entire staff a copy of Atlas Shrugged. What I didn't know until recently was that his father died when Paul was 16, and I'm wondering if, by some awful trick of fate, that is when he found Rand. It was a vulnerable time at an impressionable age.

I have a confession to make. Well, it would be a confession if I hadn't already confessed to it numerous times, but let's pretend you don't know this.

From the ages of 16 to 18, I was an Ayn Rand fan. Read more about Ryan Shrugged

I'm short on time and topic today and don't think I can do any better at the moment than channel Time Magazine's James Poniewozik's Tuned In post today, schooling us on the difference between a lie and an un Read more about Channeling James

Is there anything less colorful in our political narrative than a primary campaign season without a shootout between inter-party gangs? Actually, here in SEAWA, that shootout would have taken place during an earlier caucus anyway. So no matter the national, by the time our August primary rolls around - and why we're having both escapes me at the moment - there's naught left to get excited about except the state legislature. And maybe a judgeship, Commissioner of Public Lands (huh?!) or a referendum or two.

Yawn. Read more about Primary Colors

Over the past few weeks, I've had more than one bone to pick with Jonathan Haidt and the results he has drawn from his Moral Foundations Questionnaire. This questionnaire covers six general areas which Haidt defines as providing a moral core: Care, Fairness, Liberty, Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity. Read more about The Sacred

Question Authority. If there is an eponymous bumper sticker for my chosen culture, that's the one. Although over the years, I've come to question the dictum itself, wondering if it isn't taken to mean, more often than not, Reject Authority. Read more about Authority: An Iffy Subject

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Read more about I Pledge Allegiance

The Grateful Dead song, Liberty was a great favorite in the last years before Jerry's death. The chorus of

Ooo, freedom, ooo, liberty
Ooo, leave me alone
To find my own way home!

is an anthem for those of us who identified with Bobby Weir's idea of misfit power.

It always reminded me of Thoreau's little dictum, Read more about Ooh, Freedom! Ooh, Liberty!