Sunday Morning Coming Down

Freedom of the press isn't free.  It takes money to do research and write stories.  The money comes from subscribers and advertisers. Television, radio, newspapers and the internet provide the information we need as citizens. It's the news.  Understanding the news requires requires an element of critical thinking.  What are the facts, what is the data, and what is the evidence.  One of the main functions of the free press is to ask questions of those in power. You may not get all the answers you want in a form that leads to easy analysis and simple answers. Who, what, when, where, and why are typical journalistic questions.  How good is the information, how good the source of the information.  I'm convinced that too often we substitute opinion and unspoken beliefs for hard evidence and we continue to believe what is familiar and reinforced by the same sources.  This is not very scientific and one reason it is so hard to change.  We may ...

This is being written as a cousin of mine was told to evacuate his house as the Carr Wildfire spreading near Redding, California. It is hard to explain but being told to evacuate isn't easy.  You almost never make adequate plans for even a minor disaster let alone something huge like losing your home and almost all your belongings.  Twice I've left my home as hurricanes approached in Miami.  This seems simple compared to an uncontrolled fire. You almost always think it will happen to someone else and you can and will escape with little or or damage.  Even a near miss can rattle one's self confidence.

Abolishing ICE is not an answer.  The country needs people to enforce the immigration laws, control the borders, and administer other laws related to customs and duties.  The popular pleas to abolish ICE is obviously a demand for reform of the laws that are on the books and a protest about the ways the laws are being enforced. The misuse of language in political debate might fire up some but you can't be sure who it fires up more.

California has a population of of almost 40 million people and it has only two United State Senators.  Wyoming has a population of about 579,000 people and it has the same number of United State Senators as California. Texas has a population of about 28 million people and it has the same number of United State Senators as California, Wyoming and Vermont. Florida has a population of almost 21 million people... The idea of the President of the United States being elected by a minority of the population as a matter of course is almost unavoidable. Maybe it is time to look closely at the Electoral College and the power it gives small states.

Now we are a country of 350 million people in a world 7.6 billion. Distraction, division, distort, lies, conspiracies, accusations may work for some but it is not a good strategy for the long term.  The current President of this country has the world in a state of flux. President Trump in his travels overseas was strongly critical of NATO members for not paying their fair share of GDP for defense.  And then the President goes to meet Vladimir Putin and then questions the existence of Russian meddling in our election of 2016.  The President of the United States questions the opinion of our own intelligence agencies. The State Department, the Department of Defense, Homeland Security and various economic agencies have had to do damage control as the President careens between immigration issues, Korean issues, trade wars and now a denial of the threat that Russia poses to the United States and the rest of the free world. Russia is still an adversary. This is not a p...

I'm a fan of more and better immigration from other countries.  I wish there was a policy other than separating families from their children and branding people asking for political asylum as law breakers.  Borders that are next to impossible to cross and walls do not always make for good neighbors. If you live near a border the immigration issues are a more local and sometimes personal because of experience. You may be much more likely to cross the border often.  In land away from the border the immigration issue seems more abstract, more cut and dried.  And if this seems a little bit jumbled I can understand folks that live in border towns bitching about the unintended consequences of where they might live. The politics of immigration don't often lead to a grand bargain. There are racial, ethnic and language issues that are unspoken but real.  There are economic issues about jobs, wages, housing, health care and education.  No country is perfect in th...