As I wrote last time, the Knight Foundation recently reported the lowest levels of trust in our government since Gallup began tracking the issue sixty years ago. In 1964, for example, 74 percent of Americans trusted the federal government to do what is right at least most of the time. Today that figure is less than 25 percent.
Read MoreThis is a dangerous place to be. Donald Trump shows no interest in finding common ground, but seeks only to divide us for his political advantage. My fear is that too many Democrats seem to be following the same path.
Read MoreWe have so politicized the tragedy of mass murder that we can’t even come together as a country to mourn.
Read MoreHaving passed on the State of the Union (SOTU) speech on Tuesday, I’m gearing up for this week’s other Great American Show (GAS), the Super Bowl (SB).
Read MoreMany supporters of Maine’s governor and America’s president would have you believe that the changes are not a good thing, that they exemplify the shifting demographics that are making the country increasingly unrecognizable to them. Others would argue that Portland’s vitality – and its continuing attraction to young people – derives in no small part from its diversity.
Read MoreBecause I have an early dentist appointment, I wrote the following post, which was intended as satire, last night . . . only to wake this morning to Billy Bush’s op-ed piece in The New York Times. It took courage to write, and it brought to mind Hans Christian Andersen’s story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”
Read MoreIn an interview with BBC earlier this week, an expert on North Korea from Johns Hopkins made two unsettling points.
Read MoreThis week Team TRUMP sent me the following email:
Friend, CNN is at it again. Their latest phony poll claims that 64% of Americans have less confidence in President Trump than they did one year ago. Yet of more than 1,000 people interviewed, just 24% were Republicans.
Read MoreThree movements marked my coming of age five decades ago: civil rights, environmental protection and peace. They share a simple theme: respect for the earth, for each other, and for other nations and cultures.
Read More“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,” W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903) .
Read MoreSome years ago when my daughter Gayley was in preschool, her friend Niles would assume the characters of his favorite Saturday morning cartoon villains and terrorize his classmates, for whom the distinction between reality and television cartoons was not yet fully developed. Since we didn’t have a television back then, Gayley had no idea what Niles was doing; and when she told him to stop being so silly, he seemed relieved to drop his tough-guy facade and just be a four-year-old again.
I thought of this story as I read about the role three Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Shelley Moore Capito, played in the final collapse of their party’s healthcare follies, which had come down to repealing Obamacare and replacing it with nothing.
“We’re not going to own it. I’m not going to own it,” said Donald Trump, washing his irresponsible hands of a matter that seems to him little more than a way to score political points. “We’ll let Obamacare fail.”
Compare that with Capito’s “I did not come to Washington to hurt people.”
Capito, Collins and Murkowski are no fans of Obamacare. But they also seem much less afraid of bullies than so many of their male counterparts – perhaps because they see through the persona of the locker-room lout and perhaps also because they see their roles as actually trying to do something to help their constituents.
Maybe gender has nothing to do with it. And maybe it’s just a coincidence that 169 years ago today the first Women’s Rights Convention met in Seneca Falls, N.Y. and condemned the “history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman.”
One of the problems raised by the Trump creation story I wrote about last time is that America already has a creation story of its own. It begins in Boston Harbor in 1630, when John Winthrop counseled his parishioners to build “a city upon a hill.” His was an exclusive vision, his community included only the Puritan elect, but over the course of our history that vision expanded in response to an increasingly diverse America.
Read MoreAlthough it’s a traditionally Democratic region, with a strong labor history and an 8.5% edge in Democratic voter registration, this is Trump country. Donald Trump crushed Hillary Clinton by 25 points in the county, and he remains hugely popular here.
Read More"If at first you don't succeed - call an airstrike."
Read MoreDonald Trump’s two major initiatives to date have failed spectacularly, and Democrats have yet to cast a vote.
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