America’s shadow third party
Poles of partisan alignment have been scrambled by a rare event, something unprecedented in our history. One of those three parties just completed a decades-long shift in its affiliation and it will take time for our system to establish a new equilibrium. This journey toward a redefinition of political parties has no certain endpoint, no roadmap, and no promise of a happy ending.
Impeachment, coup, or “other”
A group of people who struggle to operate fancy light-switches will be lucky to escape a White House tenure alive, much less un-indicted. Complexity and partisan scrutiny combine to make this an extremely dangerous place for an idiot to earn a living.
The growing value of a corporate passport
The rising power and influence of corporations is not a happy development. However, in a climate dominated by an increasingly unstable US regime, it is a comfort to know that there is an alternative power center available. A corporate ID offers at least some protections against abuse by police and immigration officers in the ‘land of the free.’
Partisan purchases
In a Forbes post I outline how the emerging Trump resistance seems to dovetail with another force I described over a year ago on GOPLifer: the dawn of a possible 4th Era of Capitalism. Old assumptions about the essentially non-political nature of economic decisions may be falling apart in ways that will extend beyond the Trump Era. A group of people who are politically under-represented, even perhaps disenfranchised in a counter-intuitive sense, have found their power. It has been sitting in their wallets all along.
Jesus loves the ACLU
Scour the scriptures. Read them backward and forward, upside down and sideways. You will not find one prohibition on abortion, a practice as old as civilization, maybe older. Meanwhile, you can drop a Bible open to a random page and likely find a scathing passage condemning those who turn away refugees, strangers, the poor, the needy. Jesus was pretty explicit about the kind of matters that defined good and evil. Almost nothing in the present-day Republican Platform falls on Jesus’ good side.