Dog Zen

Mindfulness is big. People read books, search online and pay good money for seminars and personal instruction. I get free, daily Zen instruction from a true master: a six-year-old rescue dog named Ringo. Ringo practices walking mindfulness. He takes me along for lessons. He doesn’t go for a walk like you and I do, straight from…

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Connecting the Dots

It turns out President Obama’s case of the wobbles, when it comes to whipping ISIS, isn’t confined to putting ‘boots on the ground.’ There’s a story in The Hill telling how the Homeland Security Department got the wobbles too, stopping an investigation dead in its tracks to ‘connect the dots’ between outright terrorists and other…

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“He isn’t politically correct”

Those are the code words often used by Donald Trump’s supporters. Meaning what? Judging from what Trump says, it must mean, “We like it when he says things that offend people, like women, the handicapped, the poor, Hispanics, Muslims and anybody else we don’t like.” These people appear to like it when he suggests most…

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This Little Problem

After what happened in San Bernardino you’d think, now, down in the bowels of the Immigration Department they’d be hard at work fixing the problems with granting visas. But, instead, they’re having a knock down drag-out fight over an odd bit of esoteric Orthodoxy: When it’s right and when it’s wrong to use social media…

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The Drawbridge

It was a long dry trek across an arid desert, reading through newspaper after newspaper looking for one editorial with a kind word to say about Donald Trump denying Muslim’s visas. Trump, the greatest newspaper editors roared, has torn the Constitution to shreds. Trump has desecrated America’s finest virtues. Trump is lower than pond scum.…

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Ghost of Christmas Future

My last blog – a scenario wherein Donald Trump wins the Presidency – depressed some Democrats. And more than a few Republicans. So here is a Happier New Year scenario, in the form of a news story that might be written at the end of next year: In the wake of sweeping election defeats in 2016, Republican leaders…

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Crazy as Loons

Speaking in measured cadences the President explained reassuringly, over and over, how his visa screening program is sure to catch terrorists disguised as Syrian refugees – then the New York Times reported Tashfeen Malik slipped past Obama’s screeners after talking about jihad on social media. Then another newspaper reported the head of the Department of…

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A nation at risk

Has America really come to this? Have we come to where we must rely on the Republican Party to save us from electing a President who is an arrogant, egotistical blowhard with the vocabulary and maturity of a fourth-grade boy and the potential to wreck our economy and start World War III? What have we…

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As Rome is Burning

Sunday morning I stayed in bed, read the newspapers and watched the morning political shows and when I was done I’d learned two facts: No one in the Democratic political elite, the Republican elite, or the media elite likes Donald Trump. He’s lower than a snake’s belly in a wagon rut to all of them.…

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Strange Budfellows

There was anti-union, pro-free market Phil Berger. On a Teamsters Union truck. Decrying corporate plans to close the MillerCoors plant in Eden. I’m reminded of that great political philosopher, Groucho Marx, who once said, “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.”  

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