How to pay for Biden’s public works

 As President Biden prepares to launch of multi trillion dollar public works project – aka by the liberal gradocracy as “infrastructure” – the question arises: where will the money come from? Your editor addressed this in his 1997 book, The Great American Political Repair Manuel. A few excerpts:  The national debt is really not the …

The rise of puritanical politics

Sam Smith – I was introduced to politics in Philadelphia and Massachusetts as a teenager. I recall an FBI agent coming to our house to interview my father about a member of the Philadelphia city council and I still remember a Cambridge city council member arguing with another one and saying, “We’re all Christian gentleman …

What progressives can do now

  Sam Smith - With the Trump tyranny almost over and the Biden years about to begin, it's a good time for progressives to figure their new course. Here are a few suggestions:-- Presidents are not agents of change; they are reflections of change. From a progressive perspective, there is little doubt that Biden will …

Another way in the neighborhood

Sam Smith – Trying to figure out why the last few months have not been worse for me, I’ve come to realize that living in a Maine rural town has been much closer to what used to be normal for humans than the urban life I lived so long. The most annoying change has been …

The Civil War (Cont’d)

 Sam Smith – As noted here before, one can argue that other then ending slavery and secession, the South actually won the Civil War. One need only to consider that it took almost a century for the civil rights movement’s efforts against segregation to begin to be successful.  As a new reporter covering the Capitol …

Rediscovering the good

Sam Smith –  I’ve been watching The Godfather movie series, the first of which came out in 1972, the same year in which a bunch of men broke into the Democratic party headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington on behalf of Richard Nixon who was reelected later that year. Nixon was our first modern …

What if the Democrats acted like Democrats?

Over the past 60 years only two Democratic presidential candidates have gotten over 50% of the vote: LBJ in 1964 and Jimmy Carter in 1976. For nearly a quarter of a century, beginning with the election of Reagan, the Democratic Party has tried to reinvent itself as a party of the modified right. The effort …

What real liberals were really like

Sam Smith - Since well over half of the country hasn't ever seen a real liberal president in office, and since the media has generally bought the GOP line on liberalism, it might be useful to consider what life would be like if it hadn't been for liberals in the White House. Here are a …

Why the Schneiderman saga is especially grim

Sam Smith – I had my money on Eric Schneiderman as the last play in bringing Trump down and saving what’s left of America’s democracy – after perhaps the firing of Mueller and the legal dehydration of the New York US Attorney. Schneiderman, after all, had handled the Trump University case well and was reportedly …

Brighten things up with a new America

Sam Smith - Okay, we get it. Trump is mentally unstable, cruel, incompetent and dishonest. But if we only talk about Trump & Co, we will end up with a singularly depressive image of our land and its people. I know it's easy to do. Hell, I've been doing it myself, but increasingly I've been …

When television took over politics

Sam Smith - It's been my long held thesis that few things have altered American politics more than the arrival of television's popularity as a source of news and opinion.  As noted here before, for example, it had a profound effect on political corruption. Prior to television, corruption was a feudal arrangement i.e. politicians were …

Hey, it’s okay to talk about fascism

Sam Smith - One of the ways the editor of a progressive journal knows that things are changing is when a proposition he put forth as far back as a dozen years ago suddenly becomes respectable. This is not typically a joy but just reassurance that he wasn't as crazy as some thought back then. …

Grifter in Chief

Sam Smith - As I was continuing to puzzle over why it was so easy for me to see Donald Trump as a lying con man while millions of Americans still don't understand it, I happened to pick up an old Raymond Chandler novel, Big Sleep, featuring detective Philip Marlowe. As a teenager I had …

Reflections of a grumpy Green

Sam Smith – Although I was among those who got the national Green Party going in the 1990s, enthusiastic as I was about its goals, I was never fully pleased with some of its strategies. Even back then, fellow founder Lunda Martin called me a curmudgeon. I felt at times as though I had joined …

How we got into this mess

Sam Smith -  Disasters like President Trump don’t just happen; they typically have years of unattended, unnoticed and uncorrected precedents. For example, I have argued for at least a decade and a half that America had quietly ended its first republic and that we were in an ill-defined succession perhaps best described by a term …