Despite having the highest ambitions for himself, Donald J. Trump was convicted in New York State for the lowest-level felony: Class E. Will his ego withstand the slight? Based on this petty conviction, will he be able to incite his followers to mount a new assault on the American government? Do not doubt the man. It has already begun. Continue reading
An effective way to curry favor with an irascible benefactor is to scold its critics at a public event those critics don’t attend. Uncontested accusations tend to stick and the speaker gains a point with the benefactor. Joe Biden did this in his “antisemitic” speech delivered at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Days of Remembrance on May 7. The charge: antisemitism. The accused: the students holding pro-Palestinian demonstrations on college campuses across the country protesting Israel’s assault on Gaza since Hamas’s attack on Israel October 7, 2023. The question: who’s the benefactor? Continue reading
We little guys of democracy, the billion wiggling arms and legs, hands and feet, fingers and toes of today’s behemoth governments, must expose their treacherous double-talk as the deliberate attempt to deceive us that it is. If we do not, they will exploit our confusion to encroach further on our rights, fracture our societal bonds, and expropriate our collective wealth until the power, discretion, and orientation we once had to stop them has been stripped from us as well. Two examples suffice. Continue reading
Nothing testifies so tragically to the limits of Vladimir Putin’s transcontinental power than the death of his favored ward of the state, Aleksei Navalny. It does lift one’s heart, though, to know Putin tried to save him. How he tried! We know he tried, because he told us. Continue reading
In his assault on Gaza, Netanyahu employed an ingenious tactic. He called it war. Had he called it slaughter, the world might have intervened. But he tricked us. He called it war, and we’ve been discussing it ever since. Continue reading
Aleksei Navalny’s choice to return to Russia had been sheer stupidity. He had climbed back into Putin’s ring. To have the man once again in his power so intensely delighted the Russian potentate that he did not trust himself to be near him, to pronounce his name, even to know who he was. Wisely, Vladimir Putin outsourced his cherished prisoner. Continue reading
Keeping something in the fridge too long makes our minds up for us. It’s a wasteful approach to handling leftovers, but once they start to stink no one blames us for throwing them out. Not to be passed off as lightly are politicians who resort to the same flabby practice. Continue reading
No day passes without a news story broadcasting that Trump has lied again. So what? None of us are surprised. At this point in Trump’s public frolic, we know he lies. But what if we were to learn that Trump’s words are not lies, but law? Continue reading
There you have it from John Adams himself: Equal distribution of wealth among the people is requisite for turning out a mature constituency that will vote rationally in its own interest, thus electing a government that will attend to the interests of that multitude, thereby preserving a true democracy. But not all of us want that. Continue reading
Jesus is recorded as saying the poor will be with you always, perhaps his politic way of saying the money changers will be with you always, that is, the rich, who create the poor. This has turned out to be true. Our pox today is how monstrous large the discrepancy between poor and rich has become. Continue reading