Midlife Meditation

Nothing up my trunk... The most conservative thing about today's Republican party is the dirty tricks it's employing to extend its white, male, moneyed gerontocracy well into the future. New York Times  columnist Jamelle Bouie summarizes this electoral abomination beautifully in an op-ed published yesterday. The GOP strategy is so complex, so wide-ranging, so long-term that the 21-movie Marvel Cinematic Universe saga that just concluded in Avengers: End Game  pales by comparison. Reading the signs of the times that foretell the inevitable transformation of the United States to a truly multi-cultural melting pot in the next few decades, Republicans began their work of electoral nullification with the 2000 Presidential election, as they used protests and Supreme Court packing to stymy a full and fair Florida recount that would likely have handed the race to Al Gore. As Bouie points out, in the last seven Presidential elections, only one Republican has achieved a popu...

Consequences, Schmonsequences. They'll think about it tomorrow. Fiddle-dee-dee! War, war, war; this war talk's spoiling all the fun at every party this spring. I get so bored I could scream. Besides... there isn't going to be any war.--Scarlett O'Hara It's almost as if they think tomorrow will never come. On climate change, health care, tax reform, civil rights, renewable energy, immigration, issue upon issue that directly affects their constituents, Republican legislators in both the House and Senate have acted, since taking office, as if they care nothing for the continued existence of the nation, the planet, or even their jobs. Of course, with the exception of getting far-right justice Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court (and only by virtue of first unprecedentedly freezing out President Obama's perfectly moderate nominee for a year, then altering Senate rules to avoid a Democratic filibuster), the first (and, hopefully, only) Congress of the Trump E...

Lucky me: I got to have the same root canal twice in one week. You may sense some irony in that statement, and you wouldn't be entirely wrong. Last Monday, I endured one of the most painful dental procedures I've ever been through, and that's really saying something. All four of my first molars and cuspids--one in each quadrant--have been crowned, and all but one of them root canaled multiple times. I noticed in October that there was a lump on the gum below my right cuspid. I tried to get an emergency appointment before flying to Atlantic City for the AOSA National Conference, but wasn't able, and had to wait until after that horrible election. Then I was supposed to get a phone call from an endodontist. I waited another two months before finally calling myself. That means I was living with an abscess for three months. It didn't hurt, but I was worried about what it might be doing to my jaw, not to mention my breath. So last Monday, I got to have the canal on...

Just over half the Republican Presidential candidates. In the end, will there be anyone left to vote for whomever survives the GOP presidential nomination race? Donald Trump set the tone for the campaign with his vicious, unapologetic assault on immigrants. He started by slandering Mexican immigrants, and under criticism, doubled down to propose eliminating birthright citizenship, the crown jewel of post-Civil War Constitutional reforms. Following Mitt Romney's embarrassing defeat in 2012, the Republican Party did some deep navel-gazing. One of its conclusions was that the party had to start appealing to immigrants if it was to have any chance of ever winning the White House again. Trump's two-month tirade against immigrants is a brutish repudiation of that conclusion, and the speed with which so many of his opponents for the nomination jumped on the Constitution-scrapping bandwagon demonstrates the shallowness of the introspection. Ted Cruz has downplayed the immigra...

It's not just the funny hats that are rendering Republicans irrelevant. It started with health care—at least, that’s what the movement claimed. They showed up at town meetings that were seeking to gather a consensus on reforming the American health care system, but they didn’t come to discuss, or even to engage in constructive criticism. They came to shout and scream, to shut down the grass roots part of the process, and they succeeded. They were a tiny minority, but the volume of their protest drowned out all the hopes and dreams of the rest of America. They reacted to what they considered unconstitutional nationalization of corrupt, bloated industries that were bankrupting both individuals and collectives with the mountains of expensive red tape they erected as barriers to the product they were supposed to be delivering. Some of them dressed up in colonial costumes, others suspended teabags from wide brimmed hats, and they called themselves the Tea Party. Over time...

Fearless blogger to the rescue! All twenty of my followers will, no doubt, rise to the occasion to turn back this scourge! In the latest bald-faced evil Republican plot to steal the White House from the popular vote, Tim Draper, a Californian billionaire, has gathered over a million signatures on a petition to divide the state of California into six smaller states, thus diluting the impact of the huge liberal urban vote and tipping the balance of the US Senate solidly in the direction of the GOP. It's gerrymandering on a macro scale, and it's hard to imagine anyone but the petition signers and the handful of conservative billionaires living in California voting for it,  not to mention the challenge of getting it through Congress, which has to approve changes in state borders by much larger majorities than the Republican party can generate, but even so, one has to give a nod of respect to the sheer audacity of the scheme. Claiming that this is in the best interests of Cal...

First the shocker: until I was 23, I considered myself a Republican. You probably find that hard to believe. If you've ever read this blog or had a conversation with me, even if it was when I was in high school or college, you'll knit your brow at this confession. Funny, you never seemed like a Republican. And certainly since graduate school, when I abandoned the party once and for all and started calling myself an independent (I only officially affiliated with the Democratic party in 1991), there's been no question about my political persuasion. Even in college, while still clinging to the GOP label, I found myself leaning socialist. I blame my parents. In fact, most young people I know adhere to their parents' political ideals up to the point when they are developmentally motivated to declare independence. In the 1970s, my parents were a variety of Republican that no longer exists: socially progressive, really New Deal Democrats at heart. Theirs was the party of...