Category Archives: Current Affairs

Washington Post: More In Sorrow, But With PLENTY of Anger

 

 

 

NOTE: “Corruptio optimi pessima” = Corruption of the best is the worst of all.

I can’t remember when I started reading the Washington Post. I was following it through the Watergate years, but was a mostly broke rookie trying to find my footing as a writer to afford a subscription. By the early ‘80s, though, when I lived inside the Beltway, it was slapped down outside my front door every morning. After detours in Pennsylvania and then a move into North Carolina, I became a regular again. I was not an early adopter of the digital edition, but soon got used to it.

When Bezos killed the Harris endorsement, I didn’t like it, but mostly shrugged. After forty years as a working writer, I knew that endorsements rarely move the needle and  understood the Golden Rule of Journalism (& the rest of corporate America): Them With the Gold Make (& Break) the Rules. I was more upset by watching the once-titanic paper shrink and shrivel with the wasting disease of internet competition.

But now we’ve turned the page into the wilderness of Project 2025, and anyone can see its progress, like a rapidly-metastasizing tumor. The Post’s bending of the knee is tragically just about on schedule.

There are other news sources, mainly in the half-underground of Substack. But the loss of the Post is gall and wormwood, a bitter pill.

And not the last one.

Shot Down & Sunk: Pete Hegseth’s “American Crusade” Bags its First High-Ranking Victims: A General, an Admiral, — and Black History Month

 

If Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth should fall off the wagon and be dragged off the public stage to rehab, his Pentagon tenure, however brief or long, will surely be remembered for one thing; or maybe two.

The second would be turning into the answer to a question of the sort that haunts a generation, to wit: “Who lost Ukraine?”

During his maiden visit in mid-February to U.S. bases in Europe, he seemed to be auditioning to head the  honor guard that salutes Vladimir Putin’s victorious entry into the rubble of Kyiv. He acted ready to serve it up on the faux silver platter of MAGA incompetent, arrogant indifference. That would surely be one for the record– and textbooks, fodder for many poignant Banksy wall murals.

But I digress. That is one possible landmark, and (hopefully) the less likely one. Continue reading Shot Down & Sunk: Pete Hegseth’s “American Crusade” Bags its First High-Ranking Victims: A General, an Admiral, — and Black History Month

“Peace” In Our Time? A Look Into Our Future

 

As a retired antiwar activist, I have long called for big cuts in the war budget — and I long ago got used to being ignored, while war spending kept growing.

But today I looked up from the email inbox and glimpsed one of those “I-Never-Thought-I’d see this” sights —

Hegseth taking aim — for “peace”?? “Eight percent a year, or else.” (Or maybe  I need to clean my eyeglasses.)

Namely that in this anti-arms race I had suddenly fallen behind — wait for it — behind the Secretary of Defense, Trump’s own Crusader-in-Chief, Pete Hegseth.

Hegseth grabbed the lead by ordering military planners to send him budgets that cut eight percent of current spending per year for five years, which equals 40 percent of the total.

Continue reading “Peace” In Our Time? A Look Into Our Future

Military Schoolkids: Kiss These Books Goodbye! – Hegseth /Trump Censorship Starts

The DOD “guidance” memo was blunt:

”Identity Months Dead at DOD.” 

Besides banning Black History Month observances in the military, Hegseth/Trump is now pressing their anti-DEI extermination mission by purging the shelves of Defense Department schools, which  67, 000 elementary & secondary students attend at 160 locations worldwide. (One of them was me, a long time ago.) The goal is, in the words of a presidential executive order (EO): “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.” Continue reading Military Schoolkids: Kiss These Books Goodbye! – Hegseth /Trump Censorship Starts

Guest Post: Our “Friend” Il Papa Joins The Pushback & Kicks Authoritarian Anti-Immigration Butts

I’m not sure Pope Francis would endorse my headline. But I didn’t ask his permission. He ostensibly wrote this letter to the (all-male) U. S. Catholic bishops, not to Quakers (or Quaker adjacents, who make up the bulk of this blog’s audience).

Vatican logo

But instead he released it to via the official Vatican website, in English & Spanish, which amounts to sending it to the world. And for that matter, Quakers flatter ourselves as being open to the movings of the universal Spirit from other corners than our own; if that’s so, this letter is a fine opportunity. So I don’t think Francis will mind my turning it into a guest blog post.

Which I decided to do after reading it over, and finding it one of the best statements about the combination immigration-and-governance crisis we’re sinking into here in Orange Gringo land.

Let’s hope his missive is arriving in the nick of time.

The letter is superior in many ways: first of all, clearly written, easily understandable even by non-religious folks; yet it shows full command of some of the deepest & most broadly appealing points of Roman Catholic social witness, borne lightly, but presented cogently.

Continue reading Guest Post: Our “Friend” Il Papa Joins The Pushback & Kicks Authoritarian Anti-Immigration Butts