Among the saddest and cruelest acts in the first five weeks of chaos in the Republican controlled U.S. government was directed at one of the most vulnerable and besieged populations in our country – transgender school children. The Trump Whitehouse countermanded guidelines for non-discriminatory bathrooms and locker facilities in public schools issued last year by […]
Presidential Hate Speech: A Veiled Threat of Violence?
The President, at a talk recently, exercised his constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech by calling the “media” the “enemy of the people.” Using the word “enemy” to describe a vast, constitutionally protected profession caused many worrying questions. It prompted retired Navy Adm. William McRaven, a former Navy SEAL and head of Special Operations Command, to […]
Neil Gorsuch: Originalism and Thinking Backwards in the Information Age
Federal appeals judge Neil Gorsuch, the current President’s Supreme Court nominee, is apparently a gentleman Coloradoan, cordial, cultured, profoundly conservative, an all around charming guy, a witty writer, a fly fisherman, and a man who espouses a curious judicial philosophy known as originalism. He shares this view with the late Justice Antonin Scalia, in which […]
Sabotaging the Golden Rule: Bullies, Bigots, Narcisists and the “Philosophy” of Selfishness
American political thinking is being infected by a mind-eating form of philosophic sadism sold as something called a rational virtue, the virtue of selfishness. It arises from the writings of a cult author of the 1940s and 1950s with the pen name of Ayn Rand whose ideas were conveyed into popular culture via her two […]
Chaco Canyon, Otero Mesa, and the Sacrifice of the American West
Water, land and respect – those are three imperatives for a life worth living in New Mexico and in the desert Southwest. All three will be under attack from arch-conservative Washington over the next four years. A climate change waffler with no management experience will run the $21 billion budget of the Department of the […]
Degenerate Patriarchy
The Woman’s March on Washington last week was by many accounts the largest of its kind in American history – one million people (500 or so from New Mexico) peacefully moving through the capitol without a single arrest or act of violence. It was an utterly amazing and ultimately civil insistence on fairness and decency […]
Excluders Against the Rest of Us
It’s three days after the inauguration. For a majority of American voters who did not vote for the new president, it feels as if the country has stepped through the looking glass into a political bedlam that is the mirror opposite of what most of us have been taught all our lives to believe are […]






