In 2017, one of President Trump's key advisors, Steve Bannon, said the administration's goal would be the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”
Years earlier, Republican theorist Grover Norquist said he aimed to shrink government “to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”
Given Trump's unprecedented staff turnover rates, estimated at 65 percent, his refusal to fill important positions in the State Department and other agencies, and the ongoing government shutdown, it appears that extremist Republicans are having their way.
...Voting in the United States has again become a proprietary right, as equal access to the ballot box is not open to all. The history of voting in our country is one of exclusion, inclusion, and suppression. Initially, the Constitution excluded women, slaves, minorities, Native Americans, and white men...
Recently, Trump enabled the American people to “sleep peacefully at night” by singlehandedly disarming the North Korean nuclear threat at his fake summit with Kim Jong-un. Then came the Helsinki meeting where Trump transformed the Russian adversary into an ally by believing Putin over our national intelligence agency regarding...
It took months for the mainstream media and politicians to use the word “lying” in reference to Trump and his regime's public statements. Now the media is using the words “separation” and “detention.” When will they screw up their courage to use the terms “kidnapping” and “incarceration” to describe U.S. immigration policy?
The scourge of gun violence in our schools and society has spawned a renewed debate about the causes. We can blame the National Rifle Association for sure; it is a significant co-collaborator. But of the 70 million gun owners, only 5 million are NRA members, and the rest are unaffiliated or members of other, perhaps less-extreme gun-rights organizations. Numerous other political advocacy organizations are better funded than the NRA. We can also blame our neutered politicians. The vicious irony here...
The United States has an annual base military budget that is larger than the next eight countries combined. It has more than 800 bases around the globe. According to the Defense Department, from 2011 to 2014 “special operations forces deployed into more than 150 countries.” Nearly 50 percent of the annual discretionary budget goes to the military, close to $1 trillion. According to a Harvard Kennedy School study in 2013, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are the most expensive...
After nearly 40 years, Bob Backus is retiring. Dr. Bob joined the medical staff of Grace Cottage Hospital in the early 1970s. The indispensable nurse-choreographer of the office, Sue Clark, would greet you as Dr. Bob buzzed out to escort you to his office and into a rocking chair draped with a well-worn crocheted throw. You'd sit amidst his museum/office festooned with photos of the people of the valley, his medical-related cartoons, and posters offering some none-too-subtle advice about smoking.
The Trump administration has an ongoing conflict with the truth. The mainstream media continues to torture itself and consumers with its euphemistic language used to describe Trump's delusions: “untruths,” “falsehoods,” “misrepresentations,” “contradictions,” “unsubstantiated information,” and now - best of all, from Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway - “alternative facts.” The media needs a thesaurus. How about the words “lies” and “hypocrisy”? Perhaps we are expecting too much from media corporations that gave Trump some $2 billion worth of free coverage during...