"Blow up the bags of sham" – Jean Arp
Sunday, the Washington Post reported that the Equality Act has hit a wall in the Senate. The bill – which would add LGBT folks to the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s list of people legally protected from discrimination – is supported by a strong majority of the population and is fairly uncontroversial; however, according to the…
Time for some math! In a democracy, numbers are very, very important, especially in decision making. When a piece of legislation is introduced to the Senate, the House of Representatives, a state legislature, or a city or county council, it gets voted on. In some cases, the voting starts in a committee. If a majority…
Monday morning and it is a fairly bleak news day, the kind that makes it easy to doubt our power and the possibility of change. I am not going to dive into the bleakness or take on each of today’s headlines. Instead, I am going a little deeper by giving you a slight preview of…
Joe Biden gave his “First 100 Days” speech to Congress last night and it was a first for me. I’ve heard presidential candidates give speeches that had a bold vision for government, but candidates are running for office, they are not in power. I’ve heard contemporary presidents present a bold vision with many qualifiers –…
The trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd is over. The jury convicted Chauvin of two counts of murder and one count of manslaughter. Trial aside, anyone who saw the video(s) or witnessed the murder knew that Chauvin was guilty, and that includes Chauvin and his lawyers, who, because…
The stranding of the Ever Given super-freighter in the Suez Canal is far more than a tale of a boat run aground. If you’ve followed the story, you know that there was a backup of freight – 10% of the world’s shipping – and that some freighters doubled-back through the Mediterranean to make the trip…
Hello, I am back. My absence is not due to lack of words – trust me, I am full of them, or something! I’ve written several essays that I intended to send out but never got to the point where I was happy with them. The shift in Washington is so drastic, that my mind…
A week or so after Biden took office, many of us discovered a calm inside us. The calm came not just from the knowledge that the country was being run by intelligent, competent, empathetic people. We suddenly had all this space in our heads for something other than Trump. Trump as no longer top of…
Something about our psychology makes us believe that what we experience today is wholly unique to ourselves and this day. Technically that is correct. Go back fifty years and half the players involved in the current drama over “extremists in Congress” weren’t even alive. But, like a thousand punk songs that sound like “Wild Thing”…
So, here we go, the Joseph R. Biden Administration. Though the people occupying the White House have changed, I will be writing about the Biden administration with the same directness I did with the previous occupant. I will criticize and condemn when need be. I will give props when it is warranted and rare praise…