Category Archives: Politics

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One of the questions: Why would Russia suddenly have to bribe Afghan militants to kill Americans when they’re been doing it for free for 20 years?

What a lifetime in journalism leaves you with is a profound dislike for fake news and a heightened ability to detect it. When politicians, corporations or government agencies lie in order to manipulate the public, they commit a profound betrayal of public trust — a quaint concept, to be sure, but one that used to matter a very great deal to many of us. Today the greatest serial liar in public life is Donald Trump, and normally any news that seems to discredit him is welcome to me. But when the news that discredits him is fake, I find that I dislike the news even more than I dislike Trump.

The latest apparent revelation is that Russia (them again!) has been offering militant groups in Afghanistan cash bounties for killing American soldiers. The story appeared in the New York Times ten days ago, was subsequently “confirmed” by many other news outlets, and is now presented everywhere as established fact. Trump is accused of either knowing about the bounties and doing nothing, or not knowing about the bounties, and in either case is presumed guilty of dereliction of duty.  Continue reading →

Why do we assume this would be an alien’s first question?

It is remarkable that Black Lives Matter, one of the largest and most potent uprisings of recent memory, has no apparent leader. No one person or group announced beforehand the massive eruptions that followed the murder of George Floyd, nor did any one person or group speak to the media on behalf of the entire movement. To be sure there were plenty of activists and organizers working hard to assist every individual demonstration, but there was and is no apparent central command.

 To our culture — and I don’t mean here white European culture, but all of western civilization — this seems counterintuitive, if not impossible. In our world, no activity takes place until and unless someone has been put in charge. There are two kinds of people in our world: chiefs — CEOs, CFOs, COOs, presidents, generals, vice presidents — and the rest of us. For anything to happen, from a two-car funeral up, there must be a plan, a table of organization, and someone to tell everyone else what to do. It’s the only way to go.

Actually, it’s not. Like a lot of attitudes and viewpoints, this one is so well established, so far beyond discussion let alone challenge, that it is buried deeply in the culture of people who act like us. It is invisible. Continue reading →

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Minneapolis last night. Not all demonstrations are the same, and not all become riots.

What is happening in America this week has been simmering toward an open boil for years, and is not only about race, or police brutality, or inequality, or poverty, or unemployment, or the pandemic or despair. It is about all those things.

Nor is it 1968 all over again. I was there in 1968, and this is not the same. The sickness we had in our guts that year, the rage that combusted big chunks of our cities, arose in part from having lost three of our most revered leaders in a few years. Imagine if that had happened to Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Octasio-Cortez. Thank God that element is not here today. Continue reading →

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As lovely as it is to see one’s beliefs confirmed in headlines — and as awful to see them contradicted — a life in journalism has taught me that a headline that is too good to be true, isn’t true, and one that is too awful to be believed, isn’t true either. An example of the former appeared in media everywhere last week, confirming deliciously what some of us firmly believe about the worsening inequality in America: “American Billionaires Got $434 Billion Richer During the Pandemic.” 

Forbes Magazine ran the story! Bernie picked it up and ran with it! Oh, the outrage! Damn them! The humanity! Wait a minute.

Which billionaires? And how do we know it was exactly $434 billion, not 433 or 435? And what do they mean, “during the pandemic,” which isn’t over yet and which started, when, exactly? Continue reading →

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The owner of the dam was free not to repair it; now the residents of the city are free to deal with this.

We don’t know much about Lee Mueller yet, but there is much we can reasonably surmise. He is most assuredly a property-rights guy (as in “it’s my property and I’ll do with it whatever I want”), and I’d bet that he’s a second-amendment-rights guy and I’d be surprised if he wears an anti-coronavirus mask in public. Mr. Mueller is identified as “a manager” of, and has been for several days the only spokesman for, Boyce Hydro Power LLC, a free American company operated by free Americans in Michigan, in the land of the free.

We know more about Boyce Hydro than we do about Mr. Mueller, because Boyce has for decades been stonewalling the federal government and the government of Michigan as regulators tried to get the company to maintain and repair the four small hydropower dams it owned on the Tittabawassee River. The most problematic of them was the Edenville Dam, a mile-and-a-quarter-long, 54-foot-high earthen dam built in 1924 to form the 2,000-acre Wixom Lake. But the owners of Edenville Dam were free Americans, free to ignore their tyrannical government’s orders to keep their dam safe. Continue reading →

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Our public conversation these days is thick with heated references to Rights — rights denied, rights claimed, rights deserved. We have a Constitutional right, it is proclaimed, to ignore public health restrictions and refuse vaccinations; we have an unlimited right to possess guns; we have a right to health care and a living wage (the latter two being described as human, not Constitutional, rights). We really need to talk about this. 

One way to begin is with our Declaration of Independence, which declares life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to be “inalienable” rights. And then of course there’s our Constitution, whose Bill of Rights conveys ten additional “rights,” such as freedom of speech, assembly, worship, etc. Continue reading →

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We plan to be back in our apartment by next weekend, as soon as the decorators are finished.

The low-information, low-IQ ICPs (Intellectually Challenged Persons — I have been told I should come up with a more graceful way of referring to them than “idiots,” which is my preference) who are taking to the streets demanding that someone somewhere throw a switch and start the economy running like it used to, have not looked over their shoulders. The economy they walked out of just a few weeks ago isn’t there any more.

With nearly half of all American workers in serious trouble the first week of May — having severe difficulty paying rent, mortgages, credit-card and other debt, auto loans, health care and even food — the pain is only beginning. With the unemployment insurance systems overwhelmed, the first wave of a tsunami of state and local government layoffs is just now beginning.  Continue reading →

Joe Biden and his fellow Republicrats have vowed to protect us from Bernie Sanders and his threats to take away our beloved health insurance policies, forgetting to mention that what Sanders actually proposes is replacing them with a far superior and cheaper policy. The people who don’t support Medicare for All seem to be members of two groups: healthy people who believe that they will never get sick, and comfortably employed people whose employer takes care of the hassle of providing them with health insurance, and who seem to believe they will never lose or change jobs.

Now comes Mr. Coronavirus to demonstrate two truths: you might well get sick when you least expect it; and you might lose your job when you least expect it; and both those things could happen at the same time. About half of all Americans depend on employer-sponsored health insurance. Last week — last week — 3.3 million people filed for unemployment insurance. An historic number of people, more than ever recorded in a single week, lost their jobs, their income and their health insurance in the middle of a deadly pandemic. That was just the first bad week, with many worse weeks to come.

Even if you still have your health insurance, getting the coronavirus could break you. Not to worry, says the Tweeter in Chief, the for-profit insurance companies have generously agreed to waive co-payments for coronavirus testing and treatment. How splendid of them, that’s a big hit to take for the team. Except they didn’t. As their trade organization said almost immediately after the president’s grand announcement, “Like hell!” (I’m paraphrasing, but the sentiment was clear.) They were prepared to give people a break on the testing, but not the treatment. That would have involved real money.

So rest assured, besieged Americans, that while your business is closed, your income is gone, your children are marooned at home, your rent and car payment are coming due, even with all this there are plenty of American companies gorging themselves on profits derived from your misfortune. Thank God we don’t live in a socialist country.

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Dear Bernie:

For the record, for what it’s worth, I never thought that you could save the world. That would have been far too heavy a burden to lay on you. But I did think that a government led by you might provide some palliative care as the industrial world continues its inexorable, slow-moving crash. Now it looks like we’re not even going to get that.

And the thing is, man, you almost did it. Four years ago you showed us how an individual candidate could take big money out of presidential politics and run a credible race on small donations. Before you did it, there wasn’t a political person on the planet who thought it was possible. Freed from the constraints of the oligarchs, you advanced policies that actually would have helped ordinary people, at the expense of the morbidly wealthy. Continue reading →

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The murder of another human being is forbidden by every religion and outlawed by just about every civilization in the history of the world. “Thou shalt not kill” is supposed to be non-negotiable. Of course we’ve been negotiating it forever.

There’s the “just war” tradition, a long series of awkward arguments to the effect that a soldier can slaughter thousands without a technical violation of the commandment, so long as the war was declared for good reasons by morally superior people — which of course we had, and are, and they didn’t, and aren’t. 

British imperial forces in 18th-Century America sanitized their souls with the doctrine that firing a volley in the general direction of an enemy force that was lined up and firing at you — and that was how everybody was supposed to fight — did not constitute murder, should you actually hit someone. But when Indians and frontiersman began shooting at the British from behind cover, requiring the soldiers to actually aim their weapons at individuals — well, that required a whole new series of ethical gymnastics. Continue reading →