On Tuesday morning, Donald Trump posted the following on his Twitter account: “Crime is out of control, and rapidly getting worse. Look what is going on in Chicago and our inner cities. Not good!” Something about that didn’t seem right, so I checked crime statistics for both Chicago and for the nation as a whole. […]
Mrs. B’s Blather: The search for authenticity
How might our search for authenticity manifest itself? So many articles about The Don, Trump, Donald Trump….We know he is crass, bigoted, brash, nasty, bold, unrestrained, uninhibited and shocking. Yet so many Americans are drawn to the fact that he is real. Did reality TV get us ready for the underbelly of our personality […]
Bruce Robinson: “A foolish consistency” or the “iron string”?
(Note: This was originally published in the May 1, 2016 edition of the Herald) It has been 174 years since the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson first published his 10,000-word essay titled “Self-Reliance.” [http://www.emersoncentral.com/selfreliance.htm] Throughout the first half of the 20th Century, school and college textbooks included at least a condensed version of this essay […]
Grant Cooke: Our Age of Discovery threatened by new demagogue
Coming from a cloistered Central Valley farm town to the Bay Area of the late 1960s was a transformational experience—a personal age of discovery. At UC Berkeley, I realized that it wasn’t just me, but in fact, the world stood at the beginnings of a remarkable new era of discovery. A few decades later, we […]
Matt Talbot: A bright, flashing warning
Mark Twain supposedly once said, “History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes,” and I think he was onto something. The United States is not Weimar Germany, but there are some non-trivial similarities that ought not to be dismissed. While Americans are not post-Great War Germans half-starved by years of reparations payments, I suspect a […]
Devon Minnema: The void left by Bernie Sanders
Now that the primary here in California is over and we have a fairly concrete idea of who the two nominees will be, it’s time that we dispel some false ideas before we etch this primary into history. One that I have heard a few too many times is essentially that Bernie Sanders’ popularity among […]
Solano County primary election results mirror that of state’s
On Tuesday, voters across California turned up in droves to vote in the state’s primary election. In Solano County, the results were no different than how citizens voted in the rest of the state. As in the state’s Democratic presidential primary election, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton won in Solano County over Vermont Sen. […]
Dennis Lund: And they wonder why we are angry?
Human nature tells us that everyone experiences anger, to some degree or level. What needs to be understood are the triggering and venting mechanisms and how those factors play into today’s politics. We are told that the current rise of Donald Trump is the result of the classic “Angry White Male” syndrome. But that is […]
Matt Talbot: Some thoughts on the Republican Party
Early 20th century humorist Will Rogers liked to say, “I am a member of no organized political party: I’m a Democrat.” I suspect there are more than a few Republican voters who could make the same remark about the chaos currently consuming their own party. In the wake this week of the Republican primary voters […]