As the 2022 election season draws closer and the so-called majority party in the U. S. Congress seems frozen by the incredibly bad behavior of the senior senator from Arizona accompanied by the fossil fuel-loving senator from West Virginia. It appears to me that the cavalry will not ride to the Democratic Party’s rescue. It will be up to us at local levels to get voters out and count the votes fairly. Because lawyer time moves exceedingly slower than the election calendar is moving, the possibility is slim that legal efforts and judicial action will protect our voting and election [...]

2001 has passed into 2002. The first mid-term election of the Biden-Harris administration looms ever closer, and it appears that the Democrats in Washington and throughout the nation are living up to Will Rogers' description when he said, "I belong to no organized political party; I am a Democrat." In 2022, this is no longer funny. As things look to me, the Democrats are the only political force that stands for an effective democracy. At the same time, the Republican Party seems dead set on continuing the Trump administration's crusade to scrap our democracy and replace it with an autocracy [...]

An opinion piece in the Washington Post by Katrina Vanden Heuvel jolted me into a gnawing fear. Our Party is failing to face up to the hardening Republican opposition to any action to address such as infrastructure needs, the economic position of middle-class families, and protecting the integrity of our election systems (in the face of Republican-led state legislatures to torque them in favor of Republicans). I have seen this play before. In 2009, the Obama Administration and the feckless leadership in the Senate failed to portray the Affordable Care Act as an essential step toward better health care. I [...]

The veteran columnist and commentator, Elizabeth Drew, wrote an essay entitled The Big Lie and Its Consequences. She says that the Republican Party has taken the Big Lie about the 2020 presidential election to new lengths to suppress voting and to manipulate voting results to benefit their candidates up and down ballots. She goes on to conclude: "Republicans at the state level are rushing out legislation designed to make it harder for Blacks to vote," says Elizabeth Drew. "By questioning the very integrity of America's electoral system [the Republican Party] now represents an open threat to the US [...]

The Republican opera bouffe “audit” of Maricopa County ballots is attracting national attention now that Georgia and the major players there have gone silent. The issues raised in Georgia’s legislation are surely going to the courts there. Arizona’s situation is absolutely nuts. In the Legislature, the most damaging legislation that would torque a perfectly good election system into a Republican-run set of Lego blocks has been blocked—not by the Democratic Senate minority—but by a single Republican member who thinks the bill doesn’t go far enough. In the meantime, the “auditors” handpicked by Senate President Karen Fann appear to be wholly [...]