Maybe it’s time for us to take a page from the Trump script for ‘making America great again.’ After all, he took our descriptor, Fake News, and made it his own, turning it back on us. Drive around New York State. Interior Maine. West Virginia. You won’t see happy people gainfully employed in sparkling towns…
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The fires in and around Los Angeles are absolutely terrifying. Utterly heartbreaking. There is no responsible way to discuss these fires without acknowledging the almost unendurable pain that individuals feel when losing a home — not merely a house, but a home — and everything in it. Every keepsake. Every book. Every favorite article of…
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The growth of a bureaucracy in America (and in all Western democracies) is a direct result of the people’s will. If my town’s river is being polluted by a careless business in the town upstream, I would expect there to be some mechanism whereby my town could stop it. Ever since the Clean Water Act,…
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So now America is to become what Putin has made of Russia: a resurgent empire having learned absolutely nothing from history.
I just had a thought, which, after reflecting, is not at all far-fetched.It is 2026. The GOP has the trifecta. Trump is unstable and has had a few nights in a hospital. Sen. Rand Paul introduces a bill in the Senate, with Rep. Greene concurring in a House bill, to strike from the Constitution the…
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A billionaire is interfering now with German elections. It apparently wasn’t enough to spend $250,000,000 to help elect Trump. There’s a ray of hope here. If we accept the premise that the Western democracies are caught in a vortex of anti-incumbancy, then Trump and everything he stands for will become like kryptonite to Superman in about two…
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If you were born after 1980, you probably don’t know what freedom we had without cell phones, nor do you know a world in which your mother and father, brother, best friends, and cousins would call — without warning! — at all times of the day, requiring you to sit down for a while as…
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My miserable excuse for an esophagus hosted a tumor the size of a good cigar, terminating in the upper part. The metastasis was in the lymph nodes. I had this big one on my neck that stood out like a misplaced voicebox. Originally I was told surgery was out of the question (although one highly-regarded…
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Heather Cox Richardson makes observations on Obama’s recent speech at his foundation’s Democracy Forum. You can read it here. And you can read my reaction below. There is the pluralism and there’s chaos. We are closer to chaos than to pluralism. James Madison lived in a time when the issues of the day revolved around trade and agriculture. Some…
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We like to think we can get some other person to pay our bills, but that’s what our parents thought, too. Eventually, we have to pay our bills. The longer we wait, the more catastrophic the cost.