Fake news has been around since news has been around. What’s different now is the assertion that alternate truths exist

For a few months in the early 1980’s my job was to rewrite the long stories from the 11:00 pm news of the night before into 30-second and one-minute versions for the morning news for the San Francisco affiliate of a national news network. Virtually every morning I discovered inaccuracies in the reporting of one […]

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Donald Trump: Our accidental president is a national embarrassment & a national tragedy

In imagining presidential candidates at the beginning of 2016, if someone had said to me that an erratic and narcissistic sociopath would garner even a million votes, I would have considered it a national embarrassment, regardless of that candidate’s political stances. Same feeling if even one million people had voted for a candidate without government […]

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Adult infantilization may be a byproduct of social evolution, but it could lead to demise of humans

Nowadays adults collect My Little Pony dolls and play with Legos. They read Harry Potter and comic books. They go on sleepovers at museums and down Gummi Bear vitamins. It’s called adult infantilization, adults maintaining hobbies and interests that are created specifically for children and which are relatively uncomplicated and unsophisticated compared to adult experiences. […]

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If lame duck Congress doesn’t pass sentencing reform, thousands with minor offenses will stay in jail

People who complain that there is gridlock in Washington should understand that even with Congress and the President on the same page, the enactment of legislation is always an arduous process: It has to go through committee in one chamber of Congress, which often means lengthy hearings. It is then debated by the chamber, House […]

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Ending voter suppression laws enough to overcome innate rural bias of Electoral College

Let’s be quite clear about who won the 2016 presidential election. It was Hillary Clinton, who is currently ahead by about 700,000 popular votes with the counting still underway. More significantly, when all the votes are counted, most estimates have the final total at 1.8 million more votes for Clinton than for Trump. That’s 1.5% […]

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Recession, repression & regression: the likely results if Trump-GOP legislative program becomes law

Recession. Repression. Regression. It seems fitting that 3R’s characterize the Trump-GOP legislative program since it was the lack of 3R’s—an old-fashioned, old-timey way to say education—that catapulted Trump to the White House, as uneducated white voters, and many educated ones, too, were so blinded by fear of “the other” that they believed Trump’s lies. What […]

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The good, done, bad & ugly: much of Trump’s 100 day plan will hurt America economically & in other ways

Donald Trump has released an ambitious if highly general plan for the first one hundred days of his administration. He calls it a contract, and like virtually all contracts, its literary value is nonexistent. As a document for change, it should frighten everyone, those who didn’t vote for him and those who did. The document […]

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Will all the King’s horses & men help yet another president conduct illegal activities?

Donald Trump by himself can’t get anything done. Like any president, he needs an army of managers, economists, engineers, attorneys, spokespersons and other professional foot soldiers to head and staff departments and agencies to get the actual work done and documented. We already know that when it comes to getting his way, Donald Trump is […]

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Shame on my fellow white people, but blame the news media that created Trump and distorted Hillary

Shame on us, white people. We just rejected the most presidential, qualified candidate in history to vote for a mentally ill buffoon who spews hate speech and has no impulse control. We voted against someone who has studied every issue and developed a reasoned approach to each so we could vote for someone who has […]

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Russia & the FBI: strange bedfellows in dirty election tricks

In the last week we’ve learned that a faction of the FBI wants to elect Trump… That, before deciding to announce he was looking into more emails that may not have anything to do with Hillary Clinton, the Director of the FBI quashed an announcement that Russia may have deep ties to the Trump campaign… […]

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