Basic Human Decency Naomi Judd died by suicide in April at the end of a long battle with mental illness. That’s bad enough, but this story gets worse. Law enforcement did their investigative work following the suicide, creating a dossier of private, intimate conversations and information that may be released to the public. Daughter Ashley… [read more]
What Should We Do About That? – v 1.0
Sun Tzu The great soldier, leader and philosopher Sun Tzu offers wisdom from 5th century BC China that is valuable even today. Here’s a case in point. Donald Trump has shown repeatedly that he doesn’t care a bit about America, democracy, the law, truth, reality – this list could be quite long. All he cares… [read more]
Over Just The Past Few Days
Education Ron DeSantis blasted President Biden’s student debt relief program – just another entrant in the “Nothing So Stupid That the Republicans Won’t Say It” contest. We established publicly funded public schools 170 years ago to educate our people. From How Stuff Works: “Massachusetts passed the first compulsory school laws in 1852. New York followed… [read more]
Rent, Rights, Stupid & The Best
Rent Recognizing the reality of the very present question of whether we can still govern ourselves, I offer to you two questions from a Thomas Friedman essay, flavored by a quote from Muhammad Ali: “Do [we] want a country that is inclusive and capable of offering respect and dignity to all of its citizens or… [read more]
Means Testing and Rip-offs
A new report in STAT details the financial support that hospitals and medical centers are receiving from FEMA. That’s the federal agency tasked with dealing with ordinary stuff like tornadoes, earthquakes, hurricanes and massive fires. You know, the once-in-a-century stuff we now experience several times a year. The Rs assure us that there is no… [read more]
Human Being 101
You might reasonably wonder why Neil Steinberg recently wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times that he found a frightening comparison of sociopath and mass murderer John Wayne Gacy and sociopath and democracy murderer* Donald Trump (my descriptor). Trump has gotten away with so much because he has appealed to long simmering American anger and because he… [read more]
The Woe Factor
I wring hands. You wring hands. He, she and it wring hands. Woe is us. There’s plenty of worrisome stuff over which to obsess and bad stuff is in our faces constantly. That’s part of why so many Americans don’t watch or read the news any more. They’ve dropped out of the cycle of woe,… [read more]
Guest Essay: Elections Have Consequences
Boyhood pal, smart person and activist Frank Levy cares about justice, fairness, inclusiveness, freedom, rights and more. Come to think of it, he’s a lot like you in that way. That’s why I asked his permission to share his recent FB post about what we must do to make sure all those good things we… [read more]
Campaigning
Sen. Edward “Ted” Kennedy died in 2009, leaving a vacant Senate seat, which triggered a special election in Massachusetts for someone to serve out his term. Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley became the Democratic nominee to face Republican Scott Brown. He had respectable credentials but – and I say this without snark – he won… [read more]
Any Representative Democracy . . .
. . . should be representative of the people. Ours isn’t. Well north of 80% of us want far greater regulation of guns than we got with the recent milquetoast bill. And even that weenie bill required accumulating hundreds of thousands of murdered people to sufficiently motivate legislators captured by the gun industry to find… [read more]
