People sometimes mistake cunning for intelligence. The attributes aren’t related.  Cunning comes from the gut, an animal instinct that assesses danger or opportunity and is necessary for survival.  A cat, hiding in the grass, its eyes fixed upon a birdbath is a visual expression o

I picked myself up off the floor after the first Trump-Biden presidential debate and asked myself what I’d witnessed.  A debate, it wasn’t.  A debate is an exchange of differing ideas argued between adults.  It has rules and procedures which allow each side to make its case. Wh

Whenever I get into trouble on Word Press, the platform for my blogs, I call my technician and ask him to fix it.  If he can’t, he goes to a site where technicians hang out and share information.  Usually, someone has a solution. This open-source watering hole has been a staple th

Recently, I wrote a review of John Updike’s Bech at Bay, a book  I didn’t want to read but did.  Now I’ll turn to two books I have yet to read but hope to do so. The first is The Hunting of Hillary, by Pulitzer prize-winning biographer Michael D’Antonio. The second is Pelosi

Recently, a Bernie Sanders supporter floated a conspiracy theory on Facebook: U. S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi deliberately delayed delivering the  Articles of Impeachment to the Senate in order to keep Sanders in Washington D. C. for the trial, away from the Iowa campaign, and to le

I opened my ACLUmagazine, recently, to read a young woman’s statement:  “I realized that I didn’t want to work within the system anymore.  I wanted to help reform it.” (Activists in Conservative Country,” by Tim Murphy, ACLUmagazine, Winter 2019, pg. .) I understood her wo

Poor Barbara Streisand.  While promoting her new music album  Wall, she made a boo-boo.  She said white women didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Presidential election because they didn’t know their minds and followed the advice of their husbands.  The remark  caught

Understand, there are decades between me and the new arrivals to feminism. I’ve welcomed the Baby Boomers, the Gen Xers and now the Millennials.  Each generation interprets the movement according to its values.  For a time, there were those who thought being called a “fe

Several years ago, a woman, who would later become the first female governor of Oregon, snapped at my observation that politics would be better off without political parties.  People should vote directly for candidates without needing approval from an “old boy” network, I said. 

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton described Donald Trump as “temperamentally unsuited” for the office.  How prescient her words were.  Most of us now know the holder of the nation’s highest office is, indeed, temperamentally unsuited.  Neither a prudent n