Month: April 2025

Remember Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the dystopian novel about book burning in a future America where people memorized entire books to save them for posterity. Published in 1953, the book was supposedly inspired by the Second Red Scare and McCarthy era as well as the book burnings by the Nazis. Today, during the “Trump Scare”…

Footnotes left off yesterday’s posting, "The Genie and the Joker." Sorry for the confusion. *The Joker, an infamous comic book character introduced in 1940s, was the arch villain in the BatMan stories. He was a sadistic psychopath who revelled in spreading chaos while seeking revenge against the establishment, most frequently depicted by BatMan and Gotham…

As the second Trump administration continues to foment chaos, it has become clear that the president and his advisors are intent on suborning both Congress and the judiciary to its power. On day 75 since inauguration, the genie is out of the bottle – the horrible truth is that the American people have elected an…

When I was teaching history and politics, many years ago now, I used to pontificate about the genius of American politics being its locus somewhere in the center of the political spectrum. American politics could not be defined as either left or right, radical or reactionary. In short, our politics eschewed the extremes and was…

I just wanted you to know that I’m with you. I am on your side if you never want to visit the United States again, never buy another bottle of Jack Daniels, or even refuse to go to war with us, no matter how righteous the conflict. You have been insulted repeatedly, underappreciated and thrown…

If you need a respite from the incessant braying of Trump and the MAGA crowd, pick up Mathew Hongoltz-Hetling’s comedic account of the Libertarian attempt to take over the town of Grafton, New Hampshire. A Libertarian walks into a Bear; The Utopian plot to Liberate an American Town (and some bears) is a laugher with…

The frenetic pace of executive orders and actions during the first couple months of the second Trump administration has been unsettling at best and downright frightening at worst. The truth is that it is all a con job by a man driven by revenge and an unquenchable need for recognition and power. Many. if not…

Where are the libertarians, both the Libertarian Party faithful and those fellow travelers who profess libertarian values? They are AWOL, that’s where they are, keeping their mouths shut as they gleefully watch the Democrats and Republicans self-destruct. Usually sanctimonious in their disdain of contemporary politics, they are conspicuously quiet while the Trump administration runs roughshod…