Politics

2019 – a year so far in the future it doesn’t seem possible that it is here. 2020 sounds like healthy eyesight. 2019 sounds like a Star Date. To somebody who will turn 76 in a month, anyway. Read more about A Cup Half Full

We all know who “They” are. They are the ones in charge. They are the unspecified, who ruin everything we try to do. They have laws we didn’t know existed. They wrote the fine print. They know the detours and where to cut the corners. They have more money, more power, more of everything. And They are all in it together. Read more about The Great They

Uncivil, huh?

There are real people out there comparing mail bombs to citizens confronting their employees (elected officials) in public places. Like they are both equally impolite.

WTAF? No. Alphabet euphemisms won’t do here. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK? Read more about Uncivil

“I know a lot of liberal, college-educated, intelligent people who voted for Trump,” said a visiting friend last week. (paraphrase)

“They call him The Bomb.”

I knew just what she was talking about. I’ve been thinking something similar.

The question is, will it have been worth it? Read more about The Bomb

I’ve been reading Arnold J. Toynbee’s A Study of History, in an abridgement put together by one D.C. Somervell. I understand that his influence is not today what it was during the middle of the 20th Century. Read more about The Challenge

Trump goes to a NATO meeting and tells off the Secretary General of NATO, over breakfast. The next day he comes out and claims victory for things the Obama administration had already accomplished, giving a back handed “you’re welcome” to his European confederates for thank you’s he claims to have received. No European leader admits to having thanked him for anything. Read more about The Age of Thanos

I’m watching the second season of The Handmaid’s Tale, and I encourage everyone who can (it’s on Hulu) to join me.

Here’s the thing: this season spends some time chronicling the first intimations of change in what was, at the beginning, a world we recognize as our own. Suddenly there are more intrusive questions asked, women need a husband’s signature for birth control pills, identification as LGBTQ becomes, not illegal but … problematic. Read more about The Handmaid’s Tale - A Primer

Nobody on my side of the aisle is asking that question. The assumption is that he is guilty of collusion with Russia, among other things, and that he is more than impeachable. He is imprisonable.

There are a lot of reasons for believing in his guilt, beginning with the assumption that an innocent man does not behave the way that Donald Trump behaves. I agree with them, because Donald Trump is guilty of a great many things. There is never a reason to believe him innocent of anything. Read more about Is Donald Trump Innocent?

It’s fair to say I’ve been a lifelong Democrat, although that may actually have begun with Kennedy. My father was an Eisenhower Republican; my mother likely a closet Kennedy Democrat like me. But I had no qualms at all in voting for a Republican woman, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, in the Illinois Republican primary back in 1964 when she was running against Barry Goldwater. Was that the beginning of the end of the respectable Republicans? Lincoln, Grant, TR, Eisenhower. Were there more of which the country can be proud? I don’t remember. They are all gone now. Read more about The Loyal Opposition