(Political Ramblings from a Little Left of Center)
Trump & Intelligence: Two words that should never be used anywhere near one another. Earlier this week, the directors of our major intelligence agencies appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee to present their Worldwide Threat Assessment. The report itself is a tough, depressing read and is best paired with a bottle of good Scotch. Those…
So here I was, in the midst of composing multiple blog entries that weighed in on possible Democrat strategies and candidates to win the Presidency in 2020. Mostly, I was trying to organize a surfeit of suppositions into coherent postings of humane length. I had almost managed to compartmentalize the daily onslaught of insanity from…
Starbucks founder and former CEO Howard Schultz was just on 60 Minutes. The man is considering a third-party bid for the Presidency in 2020. Bloody hell. Folks, that’s the ballgame if he runs. Schultz is a billionaire with the money to make a serious dent in the contest. He has no chance of winning the…
With sincere apologies to William Blake and to a well-remembered English teacher whose passion for “The Tyger” was contagious. [Edit: And to several readers who thought this posting was weird: Yeah. It is.] Donald Donald, breeding blight, In the House that once was White, What indifferent shrug or sigh, Could frame thy imbecility? In what…
“I’m not a member of any organized political party…. I’m a Democrat.” – Will Rogers, 1935. Some things never change. While Democrats have thus far shown remarkable solidarity in response to the shutdown, there are numerous party battles on the horizon that could make Game of Thrones look like a baby shower competition. There’s the…
I couldn’t bring myself to listen to Trump’s prime-time border diatribe last night, but I did read the transcript. Wow. Numerous media outlets have done a decent job fact-checking the cornucopia of outright lies, so there’s little reason to do that. However, I will add a few thoughts to my previous take on the subject.…
Paging 2020 Democratic presidential candidates: Where the hell are you? The government shutdown over border wall funding should be your opportunity to break out early. This is a slam-dunk, folks. Trump has shuttered part of the government causing paychecks to stop for some 800,000 federal employees …. … over a wall that doesn’t have popular…
Trump recently announced that American troops will immediately withdraw from Syria and will decrease their presence by 50% in Afghanistan. As a proud Army Brat (the self-descriptive term used by those of us who grew up in career Army families), I am perhaps a bit more attentive than most when American troops are deployed into…
Last week, federal prosecutors called Donald Trump a felon. In their sentencing memo for Michael Cohen, Trump’s long-time lawyer, the prosecutors noted that Cohen paid off two women who claim to have had extramarital affairs with Trump. Since the payments were intended to influence the Presidential campaign, they violated campaign finance law when they were…
In the recent elections in Wisconsin, Democrats won every single statewide race. Voters chose a Democratic U.S. Senator, a Democratic Governor, a Democratic Attorney General, a Democratic Treasurer, and a Democratic Secretary of State. In addition, Democrats won 54% of votes cast statewide for the U.S. House and 54% of votes cast statewide for the…