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 […]
Columns
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 […]