Posted inDonald Trump National politics

It’s time to be really scared about Trump

Reading "How Democracies Die" right now is akin to watching a scary movie at home by yourself, then hearing what sounds like footsteps in the kitchen. I'm terrified at what could happen, yet ignoring the danger isn't an option. The authors of How Democracies Die, Stephen Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, are Harvard professors who, according to the book jacket,  "have spent more than twenty years studying the breakdown of democracies in Europe and Latin America."  They consider that our American democracy is in danger -- from President Trump and his willing Republican co-conspirators. I've only finished three chapters of their…
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Posted inNational politics

Here’s 5 good reasons not to shop at Salem’s Hobby Lobby

Even if you love Hobby Lobby for its craft supplies, here's some very good reasons not to shop at the Hobby Lobby store that just opened in the Willamette Town Center mall (which used to be called Lancaster Mall).  The biggest reason was given in a Slate podcast interview with Candida Moss, a Professor of Theology who wrote a book about the company's efforts to Christianize this country, "Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby."  After hearing Moss talk about some Hobby Lobby horror stories that I'll summarize below, at about the 21:14 mark Mike Pesca, the interviewer, says…
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Posted inDonald Trump National politics

Of course FBI staff have political opinions, clueless Republicans

I survived, barely. Watching part of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein's testimony before the House Judiciary Committee this morning, I felt like my head was going to explode -- a common side effect of listening to Republicans talking about anything relating to the Mueller investigation. GOP members of the committee were shocked, no, let's make that SHOCKED!!!, to learn that an FBI agent and a FBI lawyer exchanged text messages about their desire for Trump to lose the 2016 election. Well, so did most of the country, judging from Trump's huge popular vote loss by some three million votes. So there was…
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Posted inNational politics

Great November election for Democrats. What a difference a year makes.

I needed this -- resounding victories for Democrats in the races that mattered most in this off-year election. Let's count the ways my progressive spirit was lifted in these oft-depressing Trumpian times. (1) Closest to home, the Salem Library Bond passed handily, 63-37 in the first big round of results. OK, this wasn't exactly a Dem victory, but the progressives on the Salem City Council were most in favor of making the Library earthquake-safe when the subject was discussed last year. And it's well recognized that reality has a liberal bias, so approving money for a place that deals in facts…
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Posted inNational politics

Hell, yes, today is the day to talk about American gun violence

The White House doesn't want to have a debate about gun control today, because last night 59 people were killed in the largest mass shooting in American history, with 527 injured.  That's incredibly wrong. This is precisely the day we need to start talking about why the United States has so many gun deaths compared to the rest of the world. After every mass shooting I roll out the same plain fact: more guns means more gun violence. Today Vox updated their excellent  explanation in "Gun violence in America, explained in 17 maps and charts." America is an exceptional country…
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Posted inCitizen involvement National politics

Pluralism — fox’y rather than hedgehog’y — is what Salem (and the nation) needs

We live in a polarized political world, both locally here in Salem and nationally. This is extremely bothersome. There's no way a city or a country can thrive when roughly half the population is viewed by the other half as worthy of disdain, because they hold views opposed to a supposedly Obviously Clearly Correct position. Today I finished reading Stuart Firestein's book, "Failure: Why Science is So Successful." In a concluding chapter Firestein praises pluralism. Specifically value pluralism, a notion promulgated by philosopher Isaiah Berlin. He writes: Berlin's value pluralism was at once far more radical and more constrained than…
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Posted inNational politics

Cable news, stop talking about Trump’s stupid tweets!

I've got MSNBC and CNN prominently displayed on my VW's satellite radio -- along with a couple of music stations, Classic Rock and Chill. I'm a news junkie. Especially political news.  But today I listened to a lot more music than usual, because almost every time I tuned in to MSNBC or CNN they were jabbering on about Trump's morning tweet fest about "Morning Joe" host Mika Brzezinski. Sure, the tweets were tasteless, crude, and sexist. Which isn't exactly new news when it comes to Donald J. Trump. Yet MSNBC, CNN, and other news outlets rose to Trump's bait in…
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Posted inCitizen involvement National politics

Twenty-nine years ago, Oregon showed how health care planning should be done

Many years ago, twenty-nine of them, I was the lead staff person for an Oregon Health Priorities for the 1990s project. In 1988 it culminated in a Citizen's Health Care Parliament organized by Oregon Health Decisions, which is still in existence (I was the first executive director of Oregon Health Decisions). In May 2009 I wrote a blog post just before the Affordable Care Act became law that focused on a paper I wrote for the Citizens Health Care Parliament, "Quality of Life in Allocating Health Care Resources." In the post I said: Like most Americans, I'm hoping that a viable…
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Posted inNational politics

Let’s not let horrors of Trumpism infect Salem politics

Yesterday's approval by the House of the dreadful TrumpCare replacement for the Affordable Care Act made me think: we've got to fight this sort of political craziness not only nationally, but also locally.  Understand, I'm not at all denying the need for us here in Salem to support the resistance to Trump -- who threatens to destroy the foundations of what makes American great, despite his lies about doing the opposite. I happily donated $50 to Act Blue yesterday after hearing about a campaign to fund 2018 candidates who will be taking on congressional Republicans who voted for TrumpCare in…
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Posted inCity of Salem National politics

Police officers involved in another Salem social media uproar

Following on the heels of the Daniel Benjamin scandal, which ended with his resignation as a city councilor after he shared a Facebook post about Black Lives Matter protesters being run down by cars, now Salem is getting more bad social media attention. This time a Salem police officer and a Marion County Sheriff's deputy are in the news. A Chicago woman has accused them of "trolling" her after she left a comment -- I am going -- on a Facebook link about a Women's March on Washington the day after Donald Trump's inauguration. Here's a KGW video about the…
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Posted inNational politics

Trump is more than a fool. He’s a danger to democracy.

Donald Trump scares me. And I've never been scared of a presidential candidate before, not once in my 50-some years of closely f0llowing national politics.  I supported Al Gore for President. But I never thought that George W. Bush would be an unmitigated disaster for the United States. I just correctly thought that he'd be a bad Commander in Chief and a bad leader of this country.  Ditto for John McCain and Mitt Romney. I could see them as functioning as president -- just not in a way that would be positive for the United States. Trump, though, is a…
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Posted inCity Council National politics

An anti-science candidate shouldn’t be president. Or, a Salem elected official.

Facts matter. Objective reality is too precious to waste. Personal opinions need to be based on impersonal knowledge of how the world really is. I hold those truths to be self-evident.  So did my deeply conservative mother, an avid Republican who also was a big lover of science. I was raised reading both National Review and Scientific American. My mother was as thrilled with discoveries in particle physics and genetics as she was when Ronald Reagan became governor of California (where I grew up). That was then, when "conservative" and "science-loving" were totally compatible words. Today, the editors of Scientific…
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Posted in2016 election National politics

An idealistic ex-flower child has some thoughts for diehard Bernie supporters

Let's bridge a generational gap, Berniacs. Many, if not most, of you are about the age I was in my most revolutionary period: circa 1966 to 1971, my college years at San Jose State (the Berkeley of the South Bay in my decidedly deluded imagination). Here I am, in my 1970 yoga-and-meditation-dude guise. If I look more than a little messianic, that's because I was. I thought I was well on my way to grokking the deepest secrets of the cosmos. Guess what... (as the old saying goes, you've got two guesses, and the first one doesn't count). That didn't…
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Posted inNational politics

A plea to Sanders supporters to remember 2000 and vote for Clinton

I'm both an avid Bernie Sanders fan and a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton. If Sanders had won the Democratic presidential nomination, I would have unhesitatingly jumped on board the Bernie Train, hoping that it would lead to the White House. So it's been painful and perplexing for me to peruse my Facebook feed now that Sanders has dropped out of the race and formally endorsed Clinton. I keep seeing posts from Salem-area Berniacs along the lines of "Hillary should have been indicted," "Sanders had the nomination stolen from him," and "Keep the dream alive, vote for Jill Stein." Stein, of…
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