"All politics is loco," Senator Ed Markey told a gathering of the New England Council on Monday, paraphrasing a favorite saying of House Speaker Tip O'Neill of Cambridge. Just part of the craziness this week is the President's unilateral decision to activate the California national guard and use active duty Marines to control crowd protests …
Continue reading Markey fights Trump assault on Massachusetts – and beyond
This time the pollsters were right. They had held all along that the election outcome was within the margin of error. It could go either way. And so it did. But in the wrong direction. Donald J. Trump won on a campaign of lies and grievances, fear and loathing. We’re a deeply divided nation, preferring …
Continue reading Margin of error won. We lost. A first look.
Our phone has been ringing off the hook; our electronic mailboxes flooded. Friends, even staunch supporters of Joe Biden, have come to accept the idea that he is not well enough to serve another term. Worse, that he didn't have the stamina even to win a second term. The stakes could not be higher. Now, …
Remember when we scoffed at Richard Nixon telling David Frost that the President couldn’t be prosecuted for Watergate because “when the President does it, that means it’s not illegal.” We thought that our Constitution established “a government of laws, and not of men” and that no person, even the President of United States, was above …
Continue reading Remind me, why did we fight our Revolution?
It wasn't long ago that I wrote that I thought there was nothing to be gained by a Trump-Biden debate. Knowing that presidential debates are usually more about style than substance, I said that, if there were to be a debate, there should be real-time fact checking. Without it, I feared that Trump's repeated falsehoods …
How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion by David McRaney offers what could be an eye-opening look at how to talk to “the other.” It’s about much more than when every day becomes Thanksgiving Day and seemingly reasonable people turn out to be crazy Uncle Harry. McRaney shares what he has …
Former Ambassador Nikki Haley and Governor Ron DeSantis were like two playground kids pretending to be scorpions in a bottle in Wednesday night's debate, jabbing at each other, oblivious to the big foot about to crush them both. You lie. Nah, you lie. Back and forth they went, with slanted opposition research about each other's …
Continue reading Haley and DeSantis – a So’s ya mutha! debate
Marjorie Arons-Barron 