Donald Trump doesn’t reason like a typical politician and has no fiscal discipline, says David Hoppe, Paul Ryan’s former chief of staff.  (“Hey, Paul Ryan, What’s Up?” by Anna Edgerton, Bloomberg Businessweek, Dec. 17, 2018, pg. 40.)  Hoppe blames Trump for a looming finan

In my freshman year in college, I discovered The Communist Manifesto was on my reading list.  After years of hearing the book was pure evil, I gasped.  A few pages into the material, however, and  I learned what I’d been told was nonsense. What’s wrong comaraderie?  Coca-Cola

Monika Bauerlein, CEO of Mother Jones, thinks President Donald Trump’s apparent madness has method in it.  (Why Does the Press Keep Helping Trump?” by Monika Bauerlein, Mother Jones, Jan/Feb 2018 pg. 5.)  She accuses him of spinning the truth each day, not to influence, but to c

The week of George Herbert Bush’s funeral showed us an America divided.  Republicans, the party of disgruntled whites, lionized the deceased president in an effort to reclaim the moral high ground.  Democrats spent their time pointing to the gaping disparity between the conduct of

Recently, I sat down to lunch at a gathering of former colleagues, all of them eager to discuss the outcome of the 2018 midterm elections. Several expressed hope for the future, but one skeptic reminded us of the numerous executive orders President Donald Trump had signed in the past

Recently, someone posted a remark by playwright Harold Pinter on Facebook.  It read, “How can you write a happy play? Drama is about conflict and general degrees of perturbation, disarray. I’ve never been able to write a happy play…”  I did a thesis on Pinter when I was

Nobody likes a multi-billionaire who stiffs his workers.  Donald Trump accuses Jeff Bezos of greed and Bernie Sanders agrees, suggesting a man who pockets $157 billion a year while his warehouse workers live on food stamps is a man whose conscience is questionable.*  While Trump’s

Weaponizing anger is a dangerous game.  Bernie Sanders tried it in the last Presidential election and so did Donald Trump.  Trump did it better and he remains a beacon for those who feel disenfranchised.  What both candidates did was tap into the residue loathing still with us from

Is America becoming more conservative or more liberal? That depends upon how you read the demographics.  Four out of five Americans live in urban areas, (“Notes” The Week, August 17/24, 2018, pg. 16), and if your believe  a report in the Washington Post, urban areas tend to vote

Dinosaurs ruled the earth for 65 million years.  They may have managed it because they had  small brains.  They didn’t possess enough grey matter to imagine how to tinker with their environment.  Homo sapiens used theirs  to disrupt the planet.  So many changes are  far f