Our state Legislature is controlled by Democrats. They like to tout an abiding affinity for solving the manifold troubles imposed on the American consumer by the American oligarchy’s often unfair corporate business practices. Yet in the last legislative session — against the backdrop of a climate-driven homeowners’ insurance crisis — five Democratic bills that would […]
Hello?
Hello? – Must Winthrop be the next Lahaina?
Do I have your attention? No, Winthrop isn’t necessarily doomed to be the next Lahaina. But last month’s Hamilton Fire — which for the first time in climate change memory breached Winthrop’s downtown limits — vividly underscored how easily it could be. “The fire would have taken all of downtown if not for the fast […]
Hello? – Happy 250th Birthday, America
The wonder is, frankly, that we’ve made it to 250 years, given our nation’s hardwired state of cultural disunion. The United States of America got off to an unpromising start. Did that set the table for our present constitutional crisis? We seem giddily to have embarked on nationhood, optimistically ignoring our radically different notions about […]
Hello? – Energy musings from a Western road trip
I do not read the language of rocks. Even so, I once spent 12 days floating, hurtling, through the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River, struggling to decode the perplexing story written on canyon walls. We embarked near Page, Arizona, just below the contentious Glen Canyon Dam, which created Lake Powell — and the American […]
Hello? – Let’s not use ICE detention centers as profit centers
Last month in this space I red-flagged our government’s newly crafted definition of “antifa”-inspired domestic terrorism, a definition as wide as it is vague. This month a federal judge for the first time tried a domestic terrorism case that relied partly on that brazen attempt to treat constitutionally protected speech as “antifa”-adjacent terrorism. It was […]
Hello? – The real state of our union
The President’s right. Time to check on the state of the union. How far offshore has the United States drifted from the safe harbor of its Constitution? We the People handed the presidency to a man indicted for bribery by a grand jury and twice impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives. That’s on us. […]
Hello? – Downsizing Donald at Davos
That loud cracking noise you heard rolling out of Switzerland last week was the sound of the old world order breaking apart. The unspoken consent agreement that’s allowed three post-WW II superpowers — China, Russia and the United States — to call the economic shots has ruptured. This history-shattering breach was publicly exposed during the […]
Hello? – A Christmas gift from the European Union
What’s the price of “Peace on Earth”? In Ukraine alone, peace requires billions of dollars — and courage. More than wistful holiday wishes for peace are needed to get to peace on this planet. The remarkably good news is that in Ukraine, the European Union last week gave the world a priceless Christmas gift. Let […]
Hello? – Be thankful you live in Washington
Here’s something to be thankful for when counting your Thanksgiving blessings: you live in Washington. Why? Because Washington has more of its residents covered by health insurance than any state; only 4.8% of us are uninsured. However, that’s about to change. We have less to be thankful for when it comes to hunger, though we’re […]
Hello? – The day Jane Goodall met a famous caged chimp
When the world’s most widely admired scientist died this month, still on the job at 91, her meeting with a now largely forgotten chimpanzee leapt to mind. Jane Goodall and I found ourselves standing inside a dismal room on the campus of Central Washington University in Ellensburg one day in the 1980s, looking at something […]
