Politics

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Send in the clowns

SEND IN THE CLOWNS

What an administration this will be!  In the past, most Democrat and Republican President-elects have chosen department heads on the basis of competency and experience.  Occasionally, department heads are chosen based primarily on ideology.  This President-elect is choosing them on the basis of idiocy in some instances. What a circus. Time to send in the clowns. Let’s see who we have.  We have Matthew Gaetz who, until yesterday when he resigned his seat in the House of Representatives, was facing Congressional ethic charges from...

I'm Not Voting

I’M NOT VOTING TUESDAY!

I am not voting on Tuesday. I had thought of voting for that Harris lady, but my husband told me that if I wanted to really be patriotic, then I should listen to what he says and bake him some cookies instead of wasting time going to vote.  He says that if 500,000 other women stayed home and did not vote on Tuesday—if they baked cookies for their husbands instead—then the country would be better off.  After all, the way to a patriot’s...

A Pox on Both Your Houses

A POX ON BOTH YOUR HOUSES

Many, many years ago when I was the editorial advisor for my college’s student newspaper, I had the opportunity to interview Mark Perrineau.  He had just played Mercutio in Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Dane’s movie Romeo and Juliet.  Along with another actor from the movie whose name escapes me and with one of my students, we four gentlemen from Verona spent an hour talking.  We spoke in a spacious enclosed porch at a villa about the movie, acting in general, the imminent Hollywood strike...

My take on the CNN interview

MY TAKE ON THE CNN INTERVIEW

So, Deena and I watched the CNN interview last evening with Dana Bash. I decided to add my two cents to the post-game critique as Coach Walz might call it. This is my take on the CNN interview. I consider myself a student of politics. Sixty years ago, I first got interested in politics when Senator Barry Goldwater ran for President. At the time, I was a confused teenager who got mixed up in the John Birch Society (JBS), which...

Conair

CONAIR

The U.S. Marshall’s Service has a fleet of several Boeing 737 aircraft to fly people in legal custody to prison, to another state, or to court or detention centers, wherever official business requires them to fly.  Illegal aliens in custody are also passengers on these aircraft.  The term for this operation is the Justice Prisoner and Alien Transportation System (JPATS), though informally it is known as Conair (for Convict Air.) More than a quarter of a million transfers take place each year.  Conair was also the...

Why I'm voting for Kamala Harris

WHY I’M VOTING FOR KAMALA HARRIS

Given the choice this year between voting for Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, I have decided to vote for Vice-President Harris, rather than not vote at all or spoil my ballot.  No doubt, some of my evangelical brethren will cast me as an apostate or consign me to the outer darkness.  As it is, they are siding with a narcissist who is a convicted sex offender, whose only association with Scripture seems to be selling Bibles at exorbitant prices to pay for...

Scary stories, pizza parlors and critical thinking.

SCARY STORIES, PIZZA PARLORS AND CRITICAL THINKING

If you look up the word “lunacy,” you’ll see that it is based on the belief that the phases of the moon affect behavioral disorders.  In fact, a fairly recent article in a prestigious psychiatric journal notes that “as many as 81% of mental health workers” believe that the full moon correlates with people losing their minds.  That would make it once every twenty-eight days.  And while this journal disputes this notion in their article “Psychiatric Presentations During All 4 Phases of the Lunar Cycle,” I must...

MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN

With the 2024 general election barely five months away, I wanted to explore the theme of Donald J. Trump’s campaign, “Make America Great Again.”  Win or lose, it has remained the same since he ran for president in 2012.  It has become a brand among Mr. Trump’s followers and a mantra for any Republican politician who hopes to keep his job or avoid threats against his family. Nor have women of integrity in the political hierarchy of the Republican Party (such as Liz Cheney) been...

IMAGINATION VERSUS MYTH

Some of you may have been aware of the controversy when Halle Bailey was cast as Ariel in Disney’s “The Little Mermaid.”  The author of the original story, itself, Hans Christian Andersen, described Ariel by saying “. . . her skin was as clear and delicate as a rose-leaf, and her eyes as blue as the deepest sea.”  How does this description fit Ms. Bailey?  And were the outraged fans simply literalists who insisted that the director and producers of the movie follow Andersen’s plotline...

Barn Burning

BARN BURNING

Around 1848, the Democratic Party in New York State was split into two factions over the issue of slavery. The moderate of the two factions (called the “Hunkers”) wanted to “hunker down” and hope that the issue of slavery would disappear or resolve itself somehow without leading to war. The more radical of the two factions were the Barnburners who wanted to rid the country of slavery so badly that they were willing to destroy the Democratic Party in the...

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