If you are an independent who most often votes Republican or if you are a card-carrying Republican partisan, don’t vote for Republicans until sanity and decency returns to the party. Messrs. Boot and Taylor and Governor Whitman in their recent Op-Eds* were spot-on in their strategy to overcome the present malaise which has perverted and…
Year: 2021
But What About… ?
The past year or so I’ve received a number of criticisms challenging my point of view on current politics, my recounting of history or my sense of disbelief or outrage over a particular event. I’ve always taken these comments seriously, thinking that maybe the reader just might be right. I have tried to learn from…
Conversations With My Dogs
As I’ve mentioned before in these pages, I frequently talk to my dogs. They are always around and make good sounding boards for thoughts and observations that strike me as brilliant, if not seminal. Perhaps, they are best when it comes to venting my spleen about politics, saying things that I would never put to…
Covid Vaccination Success in Canada
In my continuing efforts to include news from Canada and other countries, here is an interesting article from the Toronto Star, a daily newspaper with also a large online following. It relates in detail how Canadians have successfully gotten people vaccinated. Apparently, Canada has many of the same problems as the United States getting people…
Our Biggest Crisis
There is no shortage of political crises to talk about, including infrastructure, climate, healthcare, the economy and political reform as well as the perennial questions about the nature of government itself. The most serious immediate challenge, however, is the ongoing crisis with our two major political parties. The breakdown of our two-party system is a…
Never Forget!
If there are two things that we must never let those who voted for Trump and his supporters forget, it’s the twin atrocities of the January 6 attack on the Capitol and his unconscionable handling of the coronavirus pandemic. They may be able to make excuses and downplay his other actions, but these two actions…
Ditch the Filibuster?
I have always sided with conservative scholars when it comes to proposing changes in the Constitution or long held political traditions. Why change something that has served us so well for a long time. Frequent calls to eliminate the electoral college still seem risky to me. The Framers had good reasons for embracing it. Recent…
Sunday Reading
I found this to be an interesting take on things, something worthy of our Sunday reading time. Forwarded by my friend George Shafer from Almonte, Ontario, it was published in yesterday’s Globe and Mail. David M. Shribman, the author, is an American journalist and Pulitzer Prize winning writer and teaches at McGill University in Montreal….
Political Fatigue Syndrome
I resumed writing these pages in earnest initially as a response to the 2016 election. Like many Americans I couldn’t believe that Trump won. My concern was quickly borne out as his administration took form and coalesced into a political nightmare for the country. His subsequent denial and behavior toward the coronavirus pandemic further convinced…