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 [...]

Commander Covid seems to be retreating to the next ditch in his losing battle to hold on to an office he does not know how to fill. It appears that his battles to get recounts and to have perfectly legal votes cast by perfectly legal voters in a mostly secure election had gotten him and his minions nowhere in both state and federal courts. It’s been so bad for him that even solidly Trumpkin officials in two of “his” states, Arizona and Georgia, have followed the only course open to them -- the legal course -- and certified the returns [...]