So…..what’s up with Facebook?
I usually begin these posts with a historical event used to introduce the topic at hand. But social media, and Facebook specifically, is relatively new and thus, I really have […]
Letter From a Birmingham Jail
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. – Martin Luther King Jr. April 16, 1963 On the evening of April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr., stepped onto the […]
Parkland is about more than gun control. The next progressive (yes, liberal) era has begun.
Rosa Parks did not know that historians would point to her act of civil disobedience as the moment the modern civil rights movement began. On December 1, 1955, she refused […]
Polonium, Bullets, and the Gulag. How the Cold War Got Hot – Fast.
Rus·sian rou·lette /ˌrəSHən ro͞oˈlet/ noun noun: Russian roulette the practice of loading a bullet into one chamber of a revolver, spinning the cylinder, and then pulling the trigger while pointing the […]
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address – American Liberalism Announced
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. […]
It’s More Than Guns. And Mental Health. And the NRA. We Lost the Common Good When We Let Them Demonize Government
Over these last couple of days, I’ve read a lot of posts about the Florida massacre. Guns. Violence. Mental Health. Congressional Inaction. Gun Lobby. They are all that you would […]
What. Just. Happened?
On December 16, 1773, about 60 Bostonians, dressed as Native Americans climbed onto ships and proceeded to dump about $700,000 (in today’s currency) worth of British tea into the murky […]
Memos, Dossiers and Kompromat
I haven’t decided if this is a good or a bad soap opera. In the 1980s, CBS aired Capitol, a thirty-minute daytime serial that revolved around two or three upper-middle-class political families […]
Read the Label. Ingredients Matter and So Do Ideas
For a short time during the 2016 presidential cycle, Gary Johnson and his running mate Bill Weld seemed a viable option for voters who did not want to cast their […]
Time for a Historical Reckoning: Progressive and Liberal, not Conservative Policies Built America
I grew up on a 160-acre farm in northeast Kansas. Far from being remote, I lived a mere 25 minutes south of Lawrence, home of the University of Kansas and […]
Stop Defending Your Right to be Offended
Since the latest news from the White House broke at 4:30 pm this afternoon, the media and those of us who watch it have been aflutter with disgust at the […]
Fire and Fury: My God, Do We Have to Relive 2017 So Soon?
I had originally planned to spend my free time this weekend writing the first blog in a new series about progressivism. I read my books, did my research, and had the […]
John Oliver, British Running Shorts and James Bond: Surviving 2017 and Preparing for 2018
Last night, my dear friend Susannah (of Nutcracker fame) and I saw John Oliver live at Foxwoods, a casino near Norwalk, Connecticut. I bought tickets when they went on sale last summer […]
Making America Great Again
To the foreign observer, it might be hard to appreciate just how abnormal 2017 has been in America. As a citizen, I assure you, there was not even a facade […]
How the Right Lost It’s Mind
Last year, MSNBC added several well-known conservative and Republican analysts to their coverage of the 2016 election. Michael Steele, former RNC chair, Nicole Wallace, former communications director for the George […]
Sex and Congress
Who remembers Anita Hill? If you are my age, you likely remember a few details but millennials may need to rely on Google. Perhaps the most overt ‘tell’ of where […]
If I Had a Time Machine
If you had a time machine, what point in history would be your first stop? It is not a question meant to try to change history in stopping an assassination […]