Uncle Sam Wants You— If you can afford to get elected to public office! The more I think about how I make my decisions about who I want to be President or Governor or Senator or in the U.S. House of Representatives, it strikes me that it is not really about politics. It’s about humanity. I want men and women in office who seem to be in it for the noblest reason of all, public service. We’ve [...] READ MORE
Campaign slogans with and without exclamation points! Slogans have been a part of presidential campaigns since George Washington was fitted for his first set of wooden teeth. Washington himself didn’t need a slogan. He was, after all, the “Father of Our Country.” How could he lose? Then there was the I-cannot-tell-a-lie story that we now know was itself a lie dreamed up by a biographer. As we’re seeing in the preliminary rounds of the 2024 Presidential Election, [...] READ MORE
Prejudice poisons our minds into accepting inhumane acts. I find it disturbing that so many on both the left and right have sided with the militant Hamas after the butchery of men, women and children in Israel from the neighboring Gaza Strip. The latest count is more than 1,300 Israelis — at least 25 of them U.S. citizens—killed in the carnage. Dozens more were taken hostage and held in Gaza, with Hamas using them as human shields [...] READ MORE
Why the long face? A tough act to follow for Baby Boomers. I’m not so sure I like being a Baby Boomer, but I can’t do much about it. Considering that the age group preceding us is known collectively as the Greatest Generation, it seems to me that, by comparison at least, the Baby Boomer moniker is not flattering. This is a subject I pursued in a previous decade as a newspaper column, and I’m returning to [...] READ MORE
This may be the year of redefining Democracy in these United States, notably the approaching midterm elections and continuing anger and unrest in a. divided nation. Cracks about butts and bottom-half drafts invade prime-time TV ads.GoGraph.com Art This is not about that. I’m seeing something else breaking in the winds of change with the prime-time television advent of pooping women, smelly crotches and whiffy butts. It is being called, among other things, a shift in advertising to [...] READ MORE
Are we looking the gift horse of American Democracy in the mouth? As much as I try to pretend that our Democracy (capital D intended) is not in jeopardy, the harder it is to ignore clear signs that the majority of the people in one of our two dominant political parties claim allegiance to a powerful cult of personality that won’t go away. Truth and facts no longer mean anything in what I feel is a dangerous [...] READ MORE
The perceptions of good and evil can be reversed if we can rationalize a cause as moral and righteous. We’ve had it pretty good in this country. We’ve never had a military coup or any usurping of executive functions by the legislature or the military. There was that unfortunate storming of the capitol in a misguided attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election, but we can write that off a lesson learned. It’s just that we all [...] READ MORE
Winks and nudges to keep the woke mob at bay. The most highly sought state-level office across these United States —27 state races with 119 Republican and Democratic candidates from Alabama to Wyoming as we approach the dreaded 2022 Primary Elections—is that of Secretary of State. It is a battle for control of our democratic process—namely, the sanctity of our votes—with Republican Conservative candidates blatantly anointing Trump as the party savior while continuing to promulgate the election [...] READ MORE
Some chapters in American history may be difficult to process, but they should be there for us to learn. It was more than a year ago when one of my blogs posted on Facebook received an ominous “blacklisted” tag. It was only a couple of weeks after the insurgence at the Capitol. The word “fascism” was in the blog’s heading, and I thought maybe it was flagged for proliferating an unproven conspiracy or fueling anti-government sentiments. It [...] READ MORE
Sleeping through the present while dreaming of a sitcom-portrayed and idealized past. Several Februarys ago, during our return drive on what has become an annual winter excursion to Florida, we were intrigued by signage along I-77 North hawking the Andy Griffith Museum in Mount Airy, NC. We were briefly tempted to check it out. It wasn’t so much our interest in Griffith himself, star of a pair of major television hits over the years — Matlock (1986-1995) [...] READ MORE
