Columns

It’s a terrible thing to think that the leader of our country brings out the worst in us and stifles and demeans the best. But that’s where the hate speech, the bombastic demeanor and draconian policies of Donald Trump and his administration have taken us — to a hate-soiled nadir that we have not seen […]

As climate change tightens its grip on the Southwest and the rest of the nation, a feeling of hopelessness can seep into our thinking. And yet, if there was ever a time for clarity, for facing up to facts, for honing our adaptive skills, this is it. As always, it’s a matter of putting first […]

In the wake of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) dire predictions earlier this month, a New York Times editorial by Auden Schendler and Andrew P. Jones had this headline: “Stopping Climate Change Is Hopeless. Let’s Do It.” The IPCC had given the people of our planet a mere dozen years, until 2030, […]

Listening to Associate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s opening remarks at his Senate confirmation hearing two weeks ago, I heard a roar of vitriol toward liberals, Democrats and “the Clintons” that reminded me of a book by Anne Coulter, arch liberal hater and basher, a rage-intoxicated screed of Rush Limbaugh, or a time-lapse explosion of […]

Kavanaugh, Trump, and the Republican Congress are finally on the verge of doing what right wingers and centrist Democrats have been trying to do for decades — crush the values and achievements of American liberalism, especially as it expressed itself in the counterculture in the United States in the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s. If there […]

When members of the United Nations laugh at the President of the United States, not at a joke, but at a preposterous ascertain of being “the best,” you can viscerally feel what the rest of the world really thinks about American exceptionalism and about Trumpian exceptionalism. When Judge Brett Kavanaugh and Senate GOP misogynists claim […]

American government and politics look more and more like the three-layer structure of the internet as described in the September AARP Bulletin out last week. That’s part of the reason why it is increasingly difficult for citizens to understand what their government is doing. Most of us live in a distracted vacuum dominated much of […]