Because artists pursue their passions whether or not anyone pays them, art thrives in the best and the worst of times.  And, as Charles Underwood reminds us, like a weed, it gains strength during periods of adversity.  (“Art in the Age of Trump,” by Charles Underwood, Town&C

I have held two publicly elected offices in my life.  I served as  a counselor with a regional government known as Metro.  Later, I won a seat on the Multnomah Board of County Commissioners.  Both times, the governments I served defended me against lawsuits while I performed my pu

To survive the Trump presidency, a person must either develop a sense of humor or go mad.  I’ll say this for atheists, they have a sense of humor.  Since Trump’s inauguration, members of Freedom From Religion, (FFR) have contributed $100,000 on behalf of Mike Pence to their orga

No one could accuse me of being a Donald Trump fan.  Nonetheless, I do feel sympathy for him as he attempts to change the rules of political gamesmanship in Washington D. C.  Already he is paying a heavy price for attempting to “clean up the swamp.” Never mind that his n

One of the difficulties for Constitutional literalists, those who seek to interpret our laws according to the intentions of our founding fathers, is that the country these men created no long exists.  As Gareth Sitaraman writes in “Divided We Fall,” those leaders lived in

The circle of coffee gals at the retirement center (Blog 5/3/2017) had already arrived for their morning break when I entered their magic circle, sputtering a few words about the appalling leadership in the country.  A  94 year-old women wheeled up with her walker to join us.  Barb

Mark Zuckerberg and his nerdy cohorts have  a dream to turn the internet into a global village that will spread ideas and possibly democratic seeds to all parts of the world.  (“Connection can breed contempt,” by Jamelle Boule, excerpted from Slate in The Week, May 5, 2017, pg.

Donald Trump’s promise to revive the coal industry gives a false hope to miners who haven’t seen a paycheck in a while.  Fossil fuels are on their way out and coal, being the dirtiest, is already feeling the effect.  Oil will be around a while longer, but if I were a young inves

I was going to write about oil today, until I came across a scathing article about Ivanka Trump.  At the  Berlin conference on women entrepreneurship, which she attended as a guest of German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, the audience booed when she responded to a question about her fa

“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” historian John Dalberg wrote at the end of the 19th century. A truism today, but scientists have begun to wonder if power is to blame for corruption or if people who seek power have aspects of character that are corr