VOICES

TRUMPISM - The Orange Beast Runs Free, Dreaming of Vengeance.  Two seemingly separate news stories are darkly and intimately related to each other in ways that you will not see intelligently discussed on “Meet the Press” or “Washington Week.”

ANTI VAXX - Dear Aaron Rodgers,

VOTING RIGHTS - My Dad skated for the Minnesota Gophers hockey team after he finally got done serving “for the duration” in World War II in the Philippines.

THE VIEW FROM HERE - Let’s skip over the troubling question “Why Biden did it?” and move on to whether he can recover. 

PARDON ME - Blasting "over a century of failed and racist cannabis policies," a trio of progressive U.S. senators on Tuesday urged President Joe Biden to use his executive authority to issue a blanket pardon for all nonviolent federal marijuana offenses.

SUPPLY CHAIN - Out Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg fired back at conservatives attacking him for taking paternity leave after his kids were born – going so far as to accuse him of canceling Christmas for supposedly ignoring supply chain problems – by telling them to get vaccinated.

POLITICS WATCH - Arghh. In desperate response to Biden doing some good and building some roads, the gonzo party of Former Guy and head-spinning, self-serving hypocrisy is ever-more-feverishly fear-mongering,

CALIFORNIA MATTERS - Well, that was awkward.

JUDICIAL WATCH - Beth Robinson will officially become the first out LGBTQ woman in the country to serve on a U.S. appeals court.

COVID POLITICS - I live near Middlefield Ohio, the center of the fourth largest Amish settlement in America.

COMMENTARY - This is the one story that I have not wanted to write.

LGBTQ NATION - Religious right organizations and evangelical leaders are bragging that they are responsible for Republican Glenn Youngkin’s election in this week’s Virginia gubernatorial race.

THE COURT - Ralph Waldo Emerson once told about a guest who came to dinner and spent the entire evening prattling about his own integrity: “The louder he talked of his honor,” Emerson wrote: “the faster we counted our spoons.”

A POV - I waited almost three months for some acknowledgement, but it never came. Not a bottle of champagne. Not a congratulatory note. Not an email of acknowledgement. Not one media request.

ANALYSIS - Populism was the big winner in the Virginia election yesterday, after Terry McCauliffe ran on his past as a Bill Clinton Democrat and Glen Youngkin ran as a rightwing populist.

BORDER WATCH - To: Baja California Gov.-elect Marina del Pilar Ávila and California Gov. Gavin Newsom

VOICES - Stop with the telemarketing calls, already. They are a plague on our society - invasive, abusive, and waking people who need their sleep. Annoying to the point of affecting many people’s health. 

VOICES - The CalTrans response on Nov. 1st to remove the homeless encampment on the San Fernando Mission Blvd. southbound 405 freeway on-ramp left a lot of trash behind.

ANOTHER VOICE - In a recent article, dated November 1, 2021 "Talk About Teetering Edge of a Regime", your reporter stated that an event for Turning Point USA was held at Northwest Nazarene University, which in fact, it was not.

GENDER POLITICS - The U.S. issued its first passport with an “X” gender marker this week, which LGBTQ advocates hailed as a historic moment for the legal recognition of non-binary gender identities.

HISTORY REPEATS - When Richard Nixon died, those of us on the antiwar side of the barricades during his misbegotten presidency were driven to new lows of cynical despair by the image-washing, sometimes from mainstream media, but most often from other politicians who seemed to want to set an extremely low bar for presidential legacies.