"Blow up the bags of sham" – Jean Arp
“Mercy sakes alive, looks like we got us a convoy.” – C.W. McCall Ah, the “People’s Convoy,” or, as it was originally called, “Freedom Convoy USA 2022,” the American right-wing stunt inspired by the mob of Canadian truckers and far-right yahoos that turned Ottawa into a giant parking lot and clogged cross-border transit and trade….
Monday’s Washington Post ran an article on city politics with the headline “In a setback for Black Lives Matter, mayoral campaigns shift to ‘law and order.’” The story cites mayoral races in Seattle, Miami Beach, and Buffalo where crime has suddenly become an issue (even though, aside from homicide and assault, most crime across the…
Sunday, Rolling Stone dropped a story about two organizers of the January 6 rally meeting with the January 6 House committee to spill on members of Congress and figures within the administration, including, Trump, for “using” them and being behind the unrest. Heather Cox Richardson did a good job summarizing the article: The story says…
There is a full-on citizen’s movement in Belarus against the dictatorship of Alexander Lukashenko, a despot who has ruled that country for over 30-years. The major news networks have been predictably silent about Belarus, while the PBS NewsHour and CNN only report when there is a flair up. Most mainstream reporting that we get on…
Jonathan Mitchell, former Texas solicitor general and architect of Texas’s anti-abortion law, just filed a brief defending the same law. In it he makes two very disturbing statements, one of which gives away the game. Here is the first statement: “Women can ‘control their reproductive lives’ without access to abortion; they can do so by…
First a caveat: It will be a few weeks before the final numbers come in, but between the Secretary of State (SOS) and Associated Press we have a pretty good idea of what happened and how the votes will fall. While my comments take into consideration that we don’t have an official tally, there’s enough…
Early this week, in Santa Barbara, Trump-Republican recall candidate Larry Elder asked his crowd, “How are we going to stop the Democrats’ cheating?”, followed by, “The number of people that are going to vote to recall this man is going to be so overwhelming so that even when they cheat, they’re still going to lose.”…
Recent events, particularly those in Texas, have brought the filibuster fight to the fore. So much so that a friend recently asked me, “What’s the downside to killing the filibuster?” I thought about it for a while and one thing I kept coming back to is that Americans might be familiar with the word filibuster…
Crime statistics can be very useful in creating policy if one really understands them and does the work to dig past the basic numbers. Really, it is the same with all statistics. However, a long trend in day-to-day reporting in journalism is to present statistics as if they were a static, stand alone set of…
Let’s talk about refugees. Right now, we have a refugee crisis. There are thousands of people who, through no fault of their own, are desperate to get to the United States. They are trying to escape violence and oppression, much of which impacts women. Men are also in danger, fearful of retaliation, of being snatched…