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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