Putin's proudest purchase: American democracy
Every day, more evidence of the conspiracy to install a puppet to run the executive branch of the United States government comes to light.Last week, Carole Cadwalladr and Stephanie Kirchgaessner of The...
View ArticleOne thing that 'M*A*S*H' got wrong about the Korean War
Aside from the fact that it did not take place in Southern California, the popular television series M*A*S*H rarely showed just how bad the weather was in Korea. Filming in the California sunshine made...
View ArticleBorder Patrol and ICE, what will we call them next? Trump's troopers?
Perhaps it is because I have only lived in Maine for a year and a half, and everything is still new to me, that I hadn’t really noticed the massive influx of Canadians trying to escape from their...
View ArticleAfter normalization comes collaboration
When I woke up on November 9, 2016, to news of the election results, my immediate reaction was not grief, but suspicion. I did not believe that the American people would have voted an idiot into an...
View Article'God, guns and ... Russia?' is no longer a question
Last October, in “God, guns … and Russia?” I wrote about the magnanimous contribution that the NRA made to the election of Donald Trump. The gun group endorsed him on May 20, 2016, much earlier in the...
View ArticleThe creeping privatization of public libraries
At 17,566, there are more public libraries in the United States than there are Starbucks coffee shops. And just like at Starbucks, patrons have access to free wi-fi. But unlike Starbucks, public...
View ArticleIn spite of advances, gender bias still exists
As Sher Watts Spooner wrote last week, 2018 promises to be the year of the Democratic women. In addition to running, women are donating to the campaigns of Democratic women and we are voting, in large...
View ArticleHey, progressive white people, it is time to talk about our own racism
In July of 2009, Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was arrested for disorderly conduct by a white police officer who was responding to a call of a break-in at Gates’s home. Returning from a...
View ArticleThe 1968 Chicago riot that everyone seems to forget
Fifty years ago last week, the Democratic Party held a convention in my hometown of Chicago and every August since it seems that someone, somewhere is doing a retrospective of that tumultuous time....
View ArticleDonald and the attorney general who won't cave—yet
Poor Donald. He is very upset with his Attorney General, Jeff Sessions. Sessions refuses to do what Donald wants him to do: break the law. Or at least bend it so that the GOP can retain its hold on two...
View ArticleWomen are angry.
Right after the Civil War ended in 1865, enslaved Africans were granted, not just their freedom, but their full rights as America citizens. For a brief, all too brief, period, they made immense...
View ArticleStress in America, or how Donald Trump is making us sick
Not a big fan of reality television, I never did see why so many Americans wanted to watch a jackass fire people from fake jobs on a weekly basis. Like most reality TV shows, The Apprentice appeared to...
View ArticleJust what are we teaching our children during lockdown drills?
When I was a little girl, the elementary school that I attended in the suburbs of Chicago held regular fire drills, where we all lined up and calmly marched out of the school building in single file....
View ArticleWomen and weed
By the end of 2018, the marijuana business in the United States was worth $10.4 billion and employed one-quarter of a million people in work directly involving the plants, according to Beau Whitney,...
View ArticleAmerican democracy for 'fun and frolic': Should our leaders entertain or govern?
No, I did not watch the so-called leader of the free world deliver his nationally televised address which only re-hashed some of his favorite lies about our southern border. I followed along via...
View ArticleWhen Joshua Tree National Park was my home
It was late afternoon when we pulled into the Cottonwood Springs Campground on that September day in 1989. The only ones there, we sat outside of our motorhome and enjoyed a glass of wine and watched...
View ArticleThe measles virus is not a benign childhood disease
My kid brother could not have been more than five years old when one of those “benign” childhood illnesses led to double pneumonia. Doctors did make limited house calls in those days and since Kenny...
View ArticleThe creeping privatization of public libraries
At 17,566, there are more public libraries in the United States than there are Starbucks coffee shops. And just like at Starbucks, patrons have access to free wi-fi. But unlike Starbucks, public...
View ArticleIn spite of advances, gender bias still exists
As Sher Watts Spooner wrote last week, 2018 promises to be the year of the Democratic women. In addition to running, women are donating to the campaigns of Democratic women and we are voting, in large...
View ArticleHey, progressive white people, it is time to talk about our own racism
In July of 2009, Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was arrested for disorderly conduct by a white police officer who was responding to a call of a break-in at Gates’s home. Returning from a...
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