In the Senate vote on Impeachment jurisdiction on February 9, just six Republicans cleared the lowest and easiest hurdle to clear of intellectual honesty; the Party has sunk irredeemably low.
That one incidental vote in the whole Impeachment proceeding, where 44 Senators put on record either their intellectual bankruptcy, or moral bankruptcy, or both, is to me the proverbial straw breaking the camel’s back. In a previous Medium blog
I had tried to maintain that the Republican Party is still redeemable, had tried to maintain that it could perhaps rehabilitate itself and get back to being a functional political party…
As a woman who is a COVID long hauler, and with health insurance that is about as helpful as a 10% off discount at a Mercedes-Benz dealership, I know I am not unique, and this multi-vehicle car wreck is going to cripple America.
Let me shoot down two current myths right at the start. Myth #1: Gender bias in healthcare is a thing of the past. Myth #2: The medical community is cognizant of post-COVID “long haulers” and it is being addressed.
In my world, where I live, those two statements simply are not true. In other places, those things…
The Senate filibuster, with its long and often shameful history of anti-democracy, has spilled out into the country at large.
Whether or not, and by what means, the filibuster is done away with, or at least minimized, in the Senate, the “filibuster culture” must be done away with in our society, or else the poison of Trumpism and the insurrection it spawned will only strengthen and grow, until the forces of anti-democracy, for whom the Senate filibuster is the best friend, ultimately win.
And before anyone raises the objection of “well what about the Democrats?” yes, of course, both sides…
We, as in Democrats, Liberals, Democracy, this Country, we need you as a functional political party again.
It was said by Jared Kushner himself that Trump had executed a “hostile takeover” of the Republican Party. Of course, Kushner meant this as praise, voiced from the depths of his 39-year-old wisdom. He clearly has a dark view of political parties, and of course Trump did run his 2016 campaign upon, among other things, draining the swamp.
Okay, I have a confession to make. As I watched the Republican Presidential Primaries leading up to the 2016 election, I quietly, discretely, and of…
One thing that really struck me when I read the Forward to Michael Cohen’s book Disloyal, was how he emphasized the fact that Donald Trump knows exactly what he is doing. I had settled into a thought process over the past 4 years, and most particularly ever since the election, as I witnessed a seemingly unhinged Trump keep repeating that he won the election and it was stolen from him, that this man simply is, to put it most kindly, a bit mentally unbalanced. In its own perverse sort of way, this had actually been comforting to me to think…
Vote suppression is nothing new in America. Perhaps what is relatively new now, however, is just how blithely (and claiming they have the purest and most innocent intentions) Republicans have been embarking on vote suppression tactics while insisting that what they are actually doing is protecting the integrity of the election. Uh-huh.
In this tragically remarkable election year, in the midst of a pandemic which is picking up steam, in the midst of a slow-motion train wreck of an economic collapse as we slide into a second Great Depression, and in the midst of a convulsive reckoning on systemic racism…
I heard it said by some pundits that President Trump contracting coronavirus and now being hospitalized with the disease is a “teachable moment” for this country, and by that they meant that maybe now the naysayers can finally all get on board with the obvious fact that we all need to wear masks, need to socially distance, etc. Yes, it is a teachable moment for that, but it is also a teachable moment for something else. This whole circumstance highlights the gross, stark and utterly indefensibly inequitable healthcare system in this country.
Let me begin by finishing what I started…
As I wish to discuss the Alternate Universes that Americans live in, and the extraordinary damage these splits in the fabric of Spacetime are doing to the fabric of our Democracy, I should begin by first disclosing my own bias, that is which Universe I live in: I avoid watching Fox News (I cannot cope with the acid stomach it induces in me), but I don’t watch CNN either. I confess I have settled upon MSNBC, though not completely comfortably with them since they do sometimes make me wince. But in between winces, I nonetheless do enjoy and am paradoxically…
As I watched coronavirus spread, and the death toll mount, as the federal government under Trump’s leadership uselessly flailed about …. as I watched the economy collapse with tens of millions of people out of work …. as I watched, yet again (losing count how many times now), a black man be murdered by a police officer, this time with a knee on his neck, and then saw the convulsive riots, followed by the inspiring nationwide and then worldwide marches and protests, with black, brown, white, red, yellow people shouting in unison Black Lives Matter ….as I watched all of…
I am a blue-eyed, blonde-haired white woman in America, which makes me the very definition of “privileged” when it comes to policing in America. You don’t ever recall seeing a police officer with his knee on the neck of a blonde white woman, right? No, I haven’t seen that either.
Now I was never among those whites who thought excessive police violence against blacks was an infrequent and only occasional thing (I don’t know what planet those whites lived on, but apparently some actually thought policing was equable across races). I most definitely was never among those whites who would…
A private person, now living mostly “off the grid.” I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science (and photo is from the 80s, I’m hopelessly nostalgic)