Florida ramps up its effort to break the Union

The Florida legislature has now blatantly joined Florida’s Governor in open contempt for peaceful, mutually beneficial cooperation with progressive states or with the District of Columbia.  Last fall, Florida governor Ron DeSantis joined other Republican governors in arranging and funding the transport migrants in southern border states to destinations in northern states and in the … Read more

Raising money as a form of protest

I’m cheerleading for the small public library in South Ryegate, Vermont, which needs $5000 to stay open this year, 2023. I stumbled across the library’s plight here. Increasingly, right-wingers, white Christian nationalists, and Republican officeholders are attacking institutions of learning and education, particularly those supported with public funds. This is part of a concerted effort … Read more

Revisiting self-care as a political act

I hate the term “self-care.” It is always sounds too woo-woo to me. It carries connotations of superficiality, summoning up the image of people relying on scented candles to handle oppression, injustice, subordination. Because the phrase has been hijacked by “influencers” and by marketers, it can seem that self-care is not-politics, that it requires inattention … Read more

Who sets the terms for our understanding of Ron DeSantis

Ron DeSantis’s book drops on February 28. The book’s subtitle is Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival, signaling DeSantis’s ambition for national office. Despite the book’s imminent publication, major national news outlets’ coverage of DeSantis has been mostly piecemeal. This is a a dereliction of journalistic duty. It allows DeSantis to set the terms of the … Read more

The Women’s Health Protection Act falls by the wayside, again

Today, the House Republicans unanimously nixed further consideration of the Women’s Health Protection Act (WHPA). Too often, the WHPA has been described only in shorthand, depicted as an attempt to codify the now overruled Roe v. Wade. The WHPA, however, made a much bolder statement about women’s equality in the U.S. than Roe ever did. … Read more

Today’s American Nazis are gaining the same kind of power the German Nazis did in the 1930s

I neither know nor care why George Santos, the newly elected Republican Congressman from Long Island, NY flashed a white supremacist sign while voting for Kevin McCarthy to become Speaker of the House. I care greatly, however, that none of the House Republicans seem to think that because he did they should immediately eject Santos … Read more