Category Archives: Politics

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Why is this man smiling. Does he think winning is a good thing?

As I try to imagine what’s likely to befall us in the coming months, there’s a group I’m increasingly concerned about — a group in addition to the sick, the uninsured, the unemployed, the homeless, the bankrupt ( If you have unsecured debt like medical bills, you can consult an attorney to help with filing your chapter 7), all of whom will surely suffer greatly. I’m worried about the Democrats. 

I think they’re going to win the election, and for weeks and months afterward will be on a terrific high — the Prince of Darkness gone, decency and competence restored to the White House, our country no longer the laughingstock of the world. What I worry about is what happens when it dawns on them that it hasn’t made any difference. Continue reading →

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

It is becoming more difficult every day of this long, hot summer to avoid the possibility that the United States of America may not survive the 2020 presidential election.  The existential threats gathering around us are so numerous and ugly, our governments at all levels are so incompetent, corrupt, and stupid that a critical mind searches in vain for a reason to expect a reasonably good outcome. The stress on our entire society is so extreme that the glue that holds us together, that keeps us civil, is breaking down and when it is gone instead of civil people we might well have civil war.  Continue reading →

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

“Business has been pretty good this year despite everything. We’re pretty much back to normal, wouldn’t you say, dear?”

Frank Sinatra’s iconic song about “a very good year” will never apply to 2020, which is shaping up to be a very bad year indeed. We (in the mid-Atlantic United States) are like people on a small island, awash in a recent tsunami, facing incoming ranks of equally severe tsunamis, one after the other, as far as any eye can see.

We are, of course, still up to our asses in the first tsunami, the coronavirus pandemic,  which has receded a little bit here but is still rising elsewhere in this very large country. America’s handling of this public-health crisis has been the worst in the world, with the possible exception of Brazil. It is the only country in the world whose leaders have encouraged the politicization of an infectious disease, with one party belittling it as inconsequential, even imaginary, while it has stricken three and a half million people and killed 140,000 (one-third the number of American service members killed in World War Two). Continue reading →

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

One of the questions: Why would Russia suddenly have to bribe Afghan militants to kill Americans when they’re been doing it for free for 20 years?

What a lifetime in journalism leaves you with is a profound dislike for fake news and a heightened ability to detect it. When politicians, corporations or government agencies lie in order to manipulate the public, they commit a profound betrayal of public trust — a quaint concept, to be sure, but one that used to matter a very great deal to many of us. Today the greatest serial liar in public life is Donald Trump, and normally any news that seems to discredit him is welcome to me. But when the news that discredits him is fake, I find that I dislike the news even more than I dislike Trump.

The latest apparent revelation is that Russia (them again!) has been offering militant groups in Afghanistan cash bounties for killing American soldiers. The story appeared in the New York Times ten days ago, was subsequently “confirmed” by many other news outlets, and is now presented everywhere as established fact. Trump is accused of either knowing about the bounties and doing nothing, or not knowing about the bounties, and in either case is presumed guilty of dereliction of duty.  Continue reading →

Why do we assume this would be an alien’s first question?

It is remarkable that Black Lives Matter, one of the largest and most potent uprisings of recent memory, has no apparent leader. No one person or group announced beforehand the massive eruptions that followed the murder of George Floyd, nor did any one person or group speak to the media on behalf of the entire movement. To be sure there were plenty of activists and organizers working hard to assist every individual demonstration, but there was and is no apparent central command.

 To our culture — and I don’t mean here white European culture, but all of western civilization — this seems counterintuitive, if not impossible. In our world, no activity takes place until and unless someone has been put in charge. There are two kinds of people in our world: chiefs — CEOs, CFOs, COOs, presidents, generals, vice presidents — and the rest of us. For anything to happen, from a two-car funeral up, there must be a plan, a table of organization, and someone to tell everyone else what to do. It’s the only way to go.

Actually, it’s not. Like a lot of attitudes and viewpoints, this one is so well established, so far beyond discussion let alone challenge, that it is buried deeply in the culture of people who act like us. It is invisible. Continue reading →

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Minneapolis last night. Not all demonstrations are the same, and not all become riots.

What is happening in America this week has been simmering toward an open boil for years, and is not only about race, or police brutality, or inequality, or poverty, or unemployment, or the pandemic or despair. It is about all those things.

Nor is it 1968 all over again. I was there in 1968, and this is not the same. The sickness we had in our guts that year, the rage that combusted big chunks of our cities, arose in part from having lost three of our most revered leaders in a few years. Imagine if that had happened to Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Octasio-Cortez. Thank God that element is not here today. Continue reading →

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

As lovely as it is to see one’s beliefs confirmed in headlines — and as awful to see them contradicted — a life in journalism has taught me that a headline that is too good to be true, isn’t true, and one that is too awful to be believed, isn’t true either. An example of the former appeared in media everywhere last week, confirming deliciously what some of us firmly believe about the worsening inequality in America: “American Billionaires Got $434 Billion Richer During the Pandemic.” 

Forbes Magazine ran the story! Bernie picked it up and ran with it! Oh, the outrage! Damn them! The humanity! Wait a minute.

Which billionaires? And how do we know it was exactly $434 billion, not 433 or 435? And what do they mean, “during the pandemic,” which isn’t over yet and which started, when, exactly? Continue reading →

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

The owner of the dam was free not to repair it; now the residents of the city are free to deal with this.

We don’t know much about Lee Mueller yet, but there is much we can reasonably surmise. He is most assuredly a property-rights guy (as in “it’s my property and I’ll do with it whatever I want”), and I’d bet that he’s a second-amendment-rights guy and I’d be surprised if he wears an anti-coronavirus mask in public. Mr. Mueller is identified as “a manager” of, and has been for several days the only spokesman for, Boyce Hydro Power LLC, a free American company operated by free Americans in Michigan, in the land of the free.

We know more about Boyce Hydro than we do about Mr. Mueller, because Boyce has for decades been stonewalling the federal government and the government of Michigan as regulators tried to get the company to maintain and repair the four small hydropower dams it owned on the Tittabawassee River. The most problematic of them was the Edenville Dam, a mile-and-a-quarter-long, 54-foot-high earthen dam built in 1924 to form the 2,000-acre Wixom Lake. But the owners of Edenville Dam were free Americans, free to ignore their tyrannical government’s orders to keep their dam safe. Continue reading →

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Our public conversation these days is thick with heated references to Rights — rights denied, rights claimed, rights deserved. We have a Constitutional right, it is proclaimed, to ignore public health restrictions and refuse vaccinations; we have an unlimited right to possess guns; we have a right to health care and a living wage (the latter two being described as human, not Constitutional, rights). We really need to talk about this. 

One way to begin is with our Declaration of Independence, which declares life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to be “inalienable” rights. And then of course there’s our Constitution, whose Bill of Rights conveys ten additional “rights,” such as freedom of speech, assembly, worship, etc. Continue reading →

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

We plan to be back in our apartment by next weekend, as soon as the decorators are finished.

The low-information, low-IQ ICPs (Intellectually Challenged Persons — I have been told I should come up with a more graceful way of referring to them than “idiots,” which is my preference) who are taking to the streets demanding that someone somewhere throw a switch and start the economy running like it used to, have not looked over their shoulders. The economy they walked out of just a few weeks ago isn’t there any more.

With nearly half of all American workers in serious trouble the first week of May — having severe difficulty paying rent, mortgages, credit-card and other debt, auto loans, health care and even food — the pain is only beginning. With the unemployment insurance systems overwhelmed, the first wave of a tsunami of state and local government layoffs is just now beginning.  Continue reading →