Yes, I am still among you. The past week was utterly without breathing room, but hopefully things will slow a bit for the next couple of weeks.
In what little time I had, I also found myself a bit stumped in terms of anything interesting to say. My general impression as I scanned political headlines is that the Republican Party has predictably enough reverted to form, that its phony post-election moment of reflection has passed, and the consensus remains that there is nothing wrong in the party's positions that cannot be improved upon by going further right. The result has been a whole flurry of recent crazy, breathtaking in its brazeness: Tax cuts for the rich remain paramount, the social safety net should be destroyed in order to obtain them, people making minimum wage are overpaid, that minority voters need to be more sensitive to Republican needs, abortion rights should be gutted completely, while the run to own any kind of gun and ammunition should be sacrosanct. This is a party that has moved somewhere beyond doubling down on its agenda into a far right netherworld.
And the bottom line is that until the GOP is convincingly and overwhelmingly defeated at the polls on multiple occasions, they are going to continue to be a plague on our society. Only their complete removal from the levers of power will allow for a sane path forward in this country.
We have got to get people to vote in mid-term elections with the same level of enthusiasm that they bring to presidential races. We need to undo the grotesque gerrymandering that has magnified Republican voting power well beyond what it should be. This is difficult. painstaking, and slow work. some of it will take at a minimum four or five more election cycles to accomplish. But it strikes me as the only way forward in which we can stop this kind of crap -- which is clearly out of step with majority opion -- from continuing to dominate our political agenda.
What's on your minds?
