We have film. Let it roll. Splice it just so. Start with a mounted menace: Masked and armed ICE agents advancing on horseback across a soccer field on Los Angeles’ MacArthur Park. It’s quite a show – scary as hell. Ah, but no one to chase down and manhandle, just frightened summer campers. Cut to…
DetailsFor a sect whose world is furnished with wild claims and rabbit-hole plunges, MAGA people aren’t very good at conspiracies. Atop QAnon articles of incorporation/initiation, after all, is the gospel truth and sworn oath that the Democratic Party is a honeycomb of child predators, and QAnon will do something about it. What then, of the…
DetailsThe river knew what these people were talking about. The morning after the Texas deluge, when the death toll along the Guadalupe was only in double digits, a commentary in The New York Times carried this subhead: “The poisonous effects of cutbacks will eventually reach you.” Add the alarm sounded by Supreme Court Justice Ketanji…
DetailsI missed the hearings, so I’m asking: When members of Congress quizzed Stephen Miran as this president’s choice to chair the Council of Economic Advisers, did anyone ask him to identify the planet on which he resides? It could not be Earth. No one from this planet would so nonchalantly have said what he did…
Details“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men hardly are created equal,” wrote the founders of this country. They continued: “Those of inherent privilege are endowed by their creator with special status; the rest can soak.” So reads the Declaration of Hierarchy, the founding document that launched a nation conceived in ideological apartheid…
DetailsFor the one-time reality-show guy, things just got real. Real except for any trustworthy explanation or justification about what happens or what he directs our military to do in the war into which he has enlisted all of us. As anyone with ears should know, truth is not what this president does. Millions of Americans…
DetailsIt says everything about the Little Dictator’s war on brown people that ICE began its June 6 raids in Los Angeles at a Home Depot. Just the place to find rapists, murderers and gang-bangers: Aisle 12 – between the yard trimmers and fertilizer spreaders. Safe we are, therefore, from workers who that day were arming…
DetailsHaving grown up just past the dawn of the nuclear age, I remember having silly romantic notions as a child about the scariest thing imaginable: Fall-out shelters. A cozy concrete hang-out: just enough room for our family of five – our favorite snacks on hand, me with a stack of comic books, curled up away…
DetailsMy wife has a way of measuring excess that’s particular to her passion. At any obscene outlay, she’ll wonder: “How many animal shelters would that build?” Let’s say your government shells out $45 million for a military parade on the birthday of a war hero-denigrating, draft-eluding president. A video I saw says it takes about…
DetailsThere’s an iron train a-travelin’ that’s been a-rollin’ through the years with a firebox of hatred and a furnace full of fears – Bob Dylan What is the Spanish word for “boogeyman”? I Googled the English-to-Spanish and found “hombre del saco” — “man of the sack.” Not sure of how that applies. Another term for…
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