But guns have long signaled something different in rural places than in urban ones. Just as significant, guns now signify something radically different than they did a few decades ago. In short, guns have become highly politicized, both a cause and a symbol of our nation’s accelerating polarization
“The West Wing”, Season 3, Episode 12: “100,000 Airplanes” (January 16, 2002) SCENE: The team is gathered in the Oval Office. President Bartlett has told them that he wants to include something in his State of the Union speech to say that we will cure cancer. His advisers explain, one by one, why he can’t…
The speech is a lesson in the tactics, large and small, that hold a message together and burn your ideas into your audience’s consciousness. Repetition. Litanies. Framing. Promoting your Values, naming the Villain, holding out a Vision.
Lena Epstein’s unusual pre-primary attack ad may have revealed her fear of facing a female Democratic opponent in the November General Election. Epstein, a leading Republican candidate for Michigan’s 11th Congressional District seat, launched a television ad attacking Democrat Tim Greimel. The ad criticised Greimel for being “anti-Trump” and pro-choice. Epstein’s campaign has emphasized her loyalty…
We designate one historic day each year to serve as our “Independence Day” holiday, but what about the rest of the year? Perhaps, in today’s America, we need to designate one day per week, not one day per year, as a day to reflect on and celebrate the origins of our country.
That day should be designated as “Declaration of Independence Day” – a day set aside to revisit the document that expresses why we assumed a “separate and equal station” among other nations.
One day each week to be a citizen-hero, to look carefully at what our government is doing and measure it against the ideals of those 56 heroes who dared be traitors so our rights were protected.
Uncertainty damages business … and people too. Too bad about the student loan forgiveness plan. I remember (in 2012) when the Bush tax cuts of 2003 were scheduled to expire. Republicans raised a hue and cry about the “uncertainty” that this cast upon our economy. Businesses didn’t know how to plan – should they expect…
“I am not sure how we parse out how much of [the result] might have been related to reaction to Clinton and how much of it is motivated by the panic so many Democratic voters seem to be expressing in their desperate search to decide which candidate will beat President Trump,” University of Wisconsin political…
perhaps these months away from the job have allowed workers to think about the work they were doing, the pay, the benefits, the responsibilities, the supervision, the hours. Perhaps they took the time to examine the path they were on – to re-imagine the career path that they had once dreamed of, the one they were now too busy – too exhausted – to pursue at the end of the day.
In the wake of a bipartisan agreement to establish new spending levels through fiscal year 2019, the Republican Administration sent out an official White House statement: …we were forced to increase spending on things we do not like or want in order to finally, after many years of depletion, take care of our Military… Discretionary…
Trump has two top legislative priorities: “Tax Reform” and “Repeal the ACA”. Today, they intersected: his “Tax Reform” plan cuts exactly one tax from the ACA – the 3.8% Medicare tax on Net Investment Income for high-income taxpayers. It has long been a badly-kept secret that the driving force behind “repeal the ACA” has been…
