Wayward Landlubber

     The Constitution of the United States of America was signed on Sept 17, 1787, two hundred and thirty-five years ago. Most great political movements have had about a three hundred year life-span. The November 5 elections of 2024, may tell us unambiguously if we have reached the end of our great experiment in democracy. The sad thing is that one of the two influential parties has given up on legislating in favor of insult and invective. They fail even at that, in spite of being on the road to aquire those questionable qualities since at least the 1980s. Yet they manage to succeed at getting people elected. We know how this occured. We know who the culprits are. Political pressure groups that call themselves think tanks, state Republican officials gaming the elections in red states to exclude or discourage some voters from voting, and then the Electoral college. Add in a compliant Supreme Court which owes their loyalty to the Federalist Society, a group that sees that conservative ju

People are weird. Even people who are not part of that other party. The weird party. I was walking into my volunteer gig at our county's Democratic Headquarters. The morning guy, Mike, was hanging up the phone with a WTF look on his face.                                                                       " This woman just called, she wanted our help finding her ID."                        "Where did she lose it?"             Mike smiled.                        "She was held in the basement of the Whitehouse for 30 years," he said. Naturally, Bill Clinton was part of it. But wait till you hear the rest of the trio. Kevin Mannix, and whoever is the President of Willamette University."                       " Kevin Mannix? The perennial loser in Oregon politics? That Kevin Mannix?"                       "The same", Mike replied.                        "What did you tell her?"                       " What coul9d I

I'm a Democrat. A liberal Democrat, to be sure, but I have never found any other political organization that gives me a plausible possibility of accomplishing a minimal amount of the issues for which I advocate. Democracy aint a sure thing. As you might expect, I'm often in a sour mood following our elections, every two and four years. Sometimes we have a brief sugar high, after which we return to bitter disappointment. Where we remain until a new face gives us hope that this time we might have reason for hope. Not unqualified hope, to be sure, but a too-brief reason for hope for our future. It is the fate of the Democratic mind-set. We are not in the habit of obtaining adherence by trickery or force. After confronting a candidate that has the chutzpah to say out loud that he wants to be a unitary executive. After watching the Heritage Foundation coalesce behind the man that threatened a post-Constitutional America, then skitter away when their Project 2025, or Agenda 47, or wh