California and Its Contradictions: Rumblings of Realignment Beneath a Solid-Blue Surface

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California remains deep blue, but the good news from this week’s elections is that it has not yet achieved complete ballot-box unanimity.  read more »

Texas is Still Texas — For Now

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For a generation, Texas has been the stronghold of the Republican Party. Democrats hoped to break its grip this year, but despite media fixation on a new, Democratic Texas, the state is not about to turn blue, as some progressives believe—though a purple future seems plausible.  read more »

The Dark Side of Governor Newsom's Gas-Powered Vehicle Ban

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California Governor Newsom has convinced himself that green EV’s made from “fairy dust” must replace those dirty gas-powered vehicles. Sharing a few realities of the darker side of his fairy dust beliefs may burst his bubble.  read more »

Escape from the Working Class

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Discussions about policies to help the multiracial American working class majority as a whole typically take a detour into the completely unrelated subject of how to help individuals escape from the working class.

Helping as many individuals escape from working-class occupations as possible is the goal of both the conventional center-left and the conventional center-right.  But the proposed escape routes differ.  read more »

The Limits of Rhetoric

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Deep-blue cities and states are eager to declare their social-justice credentials.  read more »

The "Other America": The Poverty and Peril of Domestic Workers

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America is mired in a crisis of unprecedented scope and depth. The disruption of the pandemic is draining for all of us, but for many, its consequences are dire.

For the millions of people who’ve had little or no work for pay for as long as six months, life is immeasurably stressed.  Prospects for jobs seem nil.  Their savings, if they were lucky to have them, were depleted long ago.  In this “other America,” to borrow the title of Michael Harrington’s 1962 expose of poverty as our national shame, they confront intolerable burdens.   read more »

Subjects:

America After COVID: What Demographics Tell Us

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“When there is a general change in conditions, it is as if the entire creation had changed, and the whole world altered.”  —Ibn Khaldun, 14th century Arab historian  read more »

America's Center Needs to Make Itself Heard

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The intensity surrounding the coming election, the nastiness of the debates and general rhetoric, and the unending protests and rallies and even regattas in support of President Trump paint a picture of a very polarized nation. Our divisions are real—and concerning—but some context is needed.  read more »

Democrats' Energy Dilemma

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The biggest challenge facing a putative first-term Joe Biden administration and the Democratic Party may lie with energy policy, where gentry and green wishful thinking confront the daily realities of millions of middle- and working-class Americans.  read more »

Biden's Quote: "We're Not Getting rid of fossil fules for a long time, probably 2050"

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Former V.P. Joe Biden’s climate policies and the litigation and regulation grandiloquence are toward the energy industry that was virtually non-existent before 1900. Today, America has only about four percent of the world’s population (330 million vs. 8 billion).  read more »