[ Posted Thursday, July 2nd, 2020 – 17:07 UTC ]
In the best of times, Americans like to call our president by a rather grandiose title: "the leader of the free world." This is a holdover from the 1940s post-war era as well as the dichotomy of the Cold War era which followed it. Back then, we were indeed leading the free world -- in direct opposition to the Soviet Union's leadership of the communist world. Since America had not been directly devastated by the ravages of World War II, our economy bounced right back and we were able to get Europe and Japan back on their feet again with generous policies such as the Marshall Plan. From the 1950s through (arguably) the end of the century, American manufacturing dominated most industries. So our political leader was not just the de jure leader of the United States but, by extension, the de facto leader of the free world as well. But Donald Trump has now left this reputation in tatters. The only superlative left to call ourselves is now "the world's best bad example."
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[ Posted Friday, June 26th, 2020 – 17:29 UTC ]
America, led by President Donald Trump and (mostly) Republican governors across the country, launched a grand experiment a few months back. Rather than following guidelines and milestones recommended by top epidemiologists, each state would reopen its economy as it saw fit. If your governor felt comfortable enough with the state of things, then the doors would be thrown open. This all started just before Memorial Day weekend, when Trump decided he was bored with the pandemic. And now it's becoming pretty obvious that this experiment has failed, and failed badly. And tens of thousands of Americans are paying a very steep price for this exercise in unfounded optimism.
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[ Posted Thursday, June 25th, 2020 – 16:48 UTC ]
What is the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic going to do right in the midst of an election season? That may sound like a rather crass question to be asking right now, so let me clearly state that this is undoubtedly going to involve a whole lot of deaths that probably could have been prevented -- which is an ongoing tragedy for all. We're already north of 120,000 deaths, and the total we eventually reach is going to depend in large part on how big the second wave turns out to be. That represents widespread human suffering on a massive scale. But it's also going to affect the politics of the 2020 election, one way or another, which is what I'm choosing to focus on today.
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[ Posted Friday, June 19th, 2020 – 18:14 UTC ]
As time goes by, it is looking more and more like the television show Trump: The Reality-Show President is just not going to be renewed for a fifth season. After all, Fox News just released a poll showing Donald Trump a whopping 12 points behind Joe Biden. That's tough news from your sponsoring network, obviously. When CNN released an earlier poll showing Trump down 14 points, he had his lawyer try to intimidate the network into retracting the poll. It didn't work, of course. So what will Trump's lawyer now have to say to Fox?
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[ Posted Thursday, June 18th, 2020 – 16:48 UTC ]
To President Donald Trump, today's Supreme Court ruling was not actually about the hundreds of thousands of young people whose legal residence in this country hung on this court case. Instead, it was about one thing and one thing alone, which is pretty much the same thing that everything is about for Donald Trump: himself. After learning of the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision denying Trump the ability to strip legal protection from the "dreamers," Trump petulantly took to Twitter to ask: "Do you get the impression that the Supreme Court doesn't like me?" Once again, Trump reduced an issue of monumental importance to the level of schoolyard gossip (about him, of course). Maybe if the Supremes really really liked Trump, things would be different? Because that's obviously what it's all about, not all that legal mumbo-jumbo or hundreds of thousands of young people's lives.
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[ Posted Monday, June 15th, 2020 – 17:14 UTC ]
Conservative Republicans just chalked up another big defeat in their continuing losing streak in the culture wars. The Supreme Court ruled today that L.G.B.T. rights are indeed included in Title VII, which mandates equal treatment for all "on the basis of sex." Discriminating against someone because they are gay or transgendered (by firing them, for example) is just as unconstitutional as it is to discriminate against all women (or all men, for that matter). To put it another way, what could be called the final battle of the Sexual Revolution just ended, and the counterculture has now absolutely routed the field of conservatives.
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[ Posted Friday, June 12th, 2020 – 18:07 UTC ]
President Donald Trump seems to have settled on a theme for his campaign, as he doubles down on blatant racism. Think that's too strongly put? We don't. Consider the following, from just the past week:
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[ Posted Thursday, June 11th, 2020 – 16:46 UTC ]
While the overall news on the coronavirus pandemic has gotten better on a national scale, we could be seeing the very beginnings of a second wave developing in individual states. This is worrisome, but what is even more concerning is that we may be about to repeat the mistakes of the first wave all over again. The process of closing down the economy and sheltering in place was painful, and the reopening and lifting of restrictions got very political, which adds up to an enormous reluctance by governors to go through it all over again. Which, if true, would mean that the second wave may prove to be worse than the first.
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[ Posted Friday, May 29th, 2020 – 17:16 UTC ]
Anyone "tired of all the winning" yet? Just asking....
In the same week America passed the grim milestone of 100,000 dead from the coronavirus pandemic, a black man was suffocated by a white police officer while three other cops stood by and either helped him commit this crime or did absolutely nothing to prevent it. Since then, there have been sometimes-violent protests in the streets of not only Minneapolis but in several other cities across the country. The dead man was accused of the crime of trying to use a fake $20 bill at a convenience store. The cops, acting as judge, jury, and executioner, provided him with a death sentence -- for the transgression of trying to pass a fake twenty.
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[ Posted Monday, May 25th, 2020 – 15:13 UTC ]
On a lonely hill outside the small town of Cobh, Ireland (pronounced: "cove"), is a mass grave marked by three somber headstones. As mass graves go, it's a fairly small one; holding not tens of thousands or even thousands, but merely a few hundred bodies. But the relative size of the grave on the scale of human misery is beside the point -- because while few, their deaths had monumental consequences for America. The dead were civilians, not soldiers (more on them in a minute). But their deaths deserve memorializing today just as much as those we remember who wore the uniform of our country. Because this is the final resting place of the people onboard the Lusitania.
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