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...

Endangered species. Kansas. Montana. Georgia. South Carolina. Four Congressional vacancies. Four special elections. Four opportunities for Democrats to turn President Trump's historic unpopularity into a warning to Republican leaders on Capitol Hill: if you value your job, start representing the majority of your constituents, rather than pandering to the wealthy few. But if those elections were referenda on the Presidency, the net result fell far short of those national figures: every one of them went to the Republican candidate. Democratic responses run the gamut of disappointment to despair to fury at party leaders. As understandable as those feelings may be, I think they're all misguided. Don't get me wrong: I very much wanted every one of those elections to go the other way, to send four strong messages to Congress that the American people are fed up with Republican efforts to kill the ACA and transform its funding into massive tax cuts for the 1%. But in every...