I was going to write about oil today, until I came across a scathing article about Ivanka Trump.  At the  Berlin conference on women entrepreneurship, which she attended as a guest of German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, the audience booed when she responded to a question about her fa

“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” historian John Dalberg wrote at the end of the 19th century. A truism today, but scientists have begun to wonder if power is to blame for corruption or if people who seek power have aspects of character that are corr

I’ve never been clear how Hillary Clinton, who left the Secretary of State’s office with a 65% approval rating, could fall into disgrace the moment she decided to run for President of the United States.  (“Hillary: Should she just go away?” The Week, April 21, 2017, pg. 17.)

The political upheaval that put Donald Trump into the White House has left me pondering.  Why did so many women ignore his sexists attitude when they voted for him? Why do his supporters remain loyal, insisting he is fulfilling his promises, when by any objective measure, he has betr

The letter began, “Don’t you dare defend the Constitution because it was written by Christians for Christians.” (“Crank Mail,” FFRF Free Thought Today, Jan/Feb, 2017, pg. 27.)  The comment is kinder than most which the Freedom from Religion Foundation receives on a daily ba

The current political climate in the United States can only be described as jaw-dropping.  At the moment, all eyes are focused upon our newly elected president who seems to have come from nowhere to gain both the nomination of the Republican Party and the White House. By no means sho

My Facebook page is rife with pictures of crocuses and daffodils springing from the damp soil.  Temperate weather is ahead, my friends want to assure me   I see their selfies as they stand in waiting lines at airports or pat a camel somewhere on the African continent.  Winter is l

Writer Keven Baker’s modest proposal, tongue-in-cheek, is spiked with enough telling arguments to make me wonder why blue states go on funding the insanities of red states.  (“Bluexit,” by Keven Baker, New Republic, April 2017, pg. 19-25.) In 2015, when Texans circulated t

My Yahoo news page came up with the following headline, recently: “Bernie Sanders followers are among the smartest…  They don’t believe anything.  The post must have proof…”   I didn’t read further. I’m not a Bernie Sanders fan, though some of my Facebook friends hav

James Wolcott in a recent essay pokes his finger at the thorn of my discontent.  We are in a period of hysteria where the political alt-right and alt-left, overblown with fears and secretly hoping for a revolution, begin to sound the same.  As Wolcott explains, the two sides may not