A Layman's Look

While listening to an episode of The Gist recently, I was shocked to hear Mark Lilla make the statement that Republicans need only win complete control of two more state governments in order to call a constitutional convention.  You read that right.  In case you weren't aware, the Republican party currently holds complete control in 32 of the state governments.  This is from Wikipedia: A  Convention to propose amendments to the United States Constitution , also called an  Article V Convention , or  Amendments Convention , called for by two-thirds (currently 34) of the  state legislatures ... Once that threshold of 34 states is reached, they can call a convention to amend the US Constitution.  That should strike fear into the hearts and minds of any red-blooded, freedom-loving American.  According to Gallup, as of September the US breaks down into 29% R, 30% D, and 40% Independent.  Either party gaining such power in the state govern...

I have been struck this morning by something that seems so simple now that I see it, and I am sure I'm not the first to have realized it.  Journalists of many stripes have taken to referring to the actions of some NFL athletes as "anthem protests".  That is, quite simply, inaccurate.  The taking of a knee during the national anthem is not to protest the national anthem, rather it is to protest police brutality against minorities.  It just so happens that it is taking place during  the national anthem.  Imagine if we referred to people who were evacuating before Irma as "fleeing to get away from their homes."  That, too, would be inaccurate.  They were evacuating to escape the dangers presented by the wind and rain that were coming with the storm.  They were doing what was necessary to protect themselves.  To refer to their actions as a flight to leave their homes and get away from their lives and belongings would be silly, because it's...

Imagine with me, if you will, a non-railed causeway that is just  wide enough for two cars to pass. Now imagine that you are driving a car on that causeway when you look up and see another car coming at you.  You need to get to the other side.  They need to get to the other side.  It seems scary and dangerous to move over.  There's no railing, and a precipitous drop into the water awaits if you go too far.  As I see it, there are five options: 1) Back up until you get to the start of the causeway so that the other car can get past you and out of your way. 2) Force the other driver to back up until you can get past him. 3) Sit there bumper to bumper and don't go anywhere. 4) Try to shove the other car off the causeway. 5) Carefully move to the side while the other driver does the same in order to provide space for both cars to get where they're going. Options 1 and 2 put one of the drivers in the position that they might encounter the same situatio...

So I've been trying for a while to get my mind around what the main problem is for the Democratic party going forward.  There are many problems, of course, including but not limited to a weak message, apparent inability to find the right candidates, and lack of authenticity in their efforts to fight the Republicans on the R's terms rather than on their own.  I have finally come to a point where I've been able to boil it down to something that is easily communicated. The Dems have a distribution problem. Having just released a CD I now realize just how important distribution is.  If the CDs aren't out there and available, if the message isn't spread, the interest will not be there to want to purchase them.  The Democrats have the opportunity to spread the word about their message through the media.  They have a product they want to sell, and they have buyers for the product.  The distribution problem is not one of product or of buyers.  The problem ...

I was flying recently and as we were banking during the initial ascent I was able to look out of the window at the city with its skyscraper-abundant skyline getting further and further away.  Suddenly a suburb came into view and I noticed that the tallest structure was unmistakably a church steeple and was reminded of something I read years ago.  I don't remember who wrote it, but the gist of it went something like this: The Gospel of Matthew tells us "where your treasure is, there will your heart be, also."  For centuries before the Industrial Revolution, the largest building in any city or town would have most likely been the church.  It was the central meeting place.  The citizens came together and gave their money to build large, beautiful churches, edifices to stand as a testament to the importance of that faith in their lives.  The people might not have had much, but they spent their treasure to build those churches because it was so important to th...

I just wrote this letter to Rachel Maddow. Hi Rachel, and her team, (Disclaimer: I wanted to write something shorter and more to the point, but this wound up being shaped in my mind like one of your A-blocks, with a somewhat-random-and-seemingly-out-of-the-blue starting point that comes around to underscore the point that is being crafted for the end just before the break.  Please understand that as you start this.) While I love to laugh and know the value of laughter to help us through tough times, I have been frustrated on occasion with the laughter that happens on any number of news shows when describing our illustrious President's behavior.  Don't get me wrong, I understand that things are so bizarre for normal, rational people that it seems uncomfortable and inconceivable that someone would act the way he acts, and so we laugh.  However, it is my opinion and belief that serious times and serious actions call for serious people and serious responses.  ...

Here's just my thoughts about the exchange rate for the currency pair.  It seems to me that the low around 1.057 was a failed fifth wave after a long sideways trend.  From the 1.057 mark, I think we're headed up over a long, multi-year trend.  The question is, "What is about to happen from 1.117?" I think there are two options.  Option one is that 1.057-1.099 was the first leg and we're in the third leg now, which would mean moving upwards towards 1.15.  The other possibility, and what I fear is the probable scenario is the move from 1.057 to 1.124 is wave one and we're now in a correction for wave two that will bring us back down to around 1.08.  That would also fit nicely into the gap of the close of 4/21 and the open on 4/24.  We'll see, but I think that's where we're headed next.  After that, it would be off towards 1.18 or higher. Only time will tell.

I just saw a beautiful image of the Lincoln Monument at night.  It is so majestic, and such a wonderful monument to a fallen leader who held this country together by sheer will during the Civil War.  It got me to thinking if today's government would see fit to memorialize a fallen leader, military or civilian, in such a magnificent way.  Then I had to ask myself the question, "Do we have such monumental leaders today?  Where have they gone?" I realize leaders such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King, Jr. only come along once every several generations.  The question still lingers in my mind, though.  Do we have such monumental leaders in our midst today?  If they are, it seems to me that they are needed.  Will they step into the spotlight?  Can you, can I, provide a smaller version of that leadership in the corner of the world in which we find ourselves?

I got to sit for about an hour this morning and listen to the discussion between President Obama, Chancellor Angela Merkel, and two moderators in Berlin during the German Kirchentag (Church Day).  It was wonderful to hear them answer questions in such a thoughtful and deliberate way.  They touched on refugees, wealth disparity, separation of church and state, conflicts between different religious ideas, and much more. A statement by the Chancellor struck me in a particularly deep way.  She said, "My freedom is not unlimited.  It is, indeed, limited by the freedoms of the people around me." Think about that for a minute. We Americans love to talk about our freedoms and our rights.  These are wonderful things, and yet we forget that they are, indeed, limited.  We have a certain sense of privilege as a nation, and the trick for us, as I see it at this point, is to learn anew how to respect the freedoms and rights of those around us and to see the impact ...

In most families with kids, the siblings fight.  Throughout their lives there are dust-ups, disagreements, falling outs, and brawls, unless the parents are able to calm the older sibling and keep them from killing the younger (thanks Mom and Dad for not letting my annoying ways cause my untimely demise!). What happens, though, when the school bully or the mean kid from around the corner harasses the younger sibling?  Right, generally speaking the older sibling will come to the defense of the younger because blood is thicker than water.  It's what you do.  It's what's right.  It's what's expected. I have a theory that our political parties have been like those un-harassed siblings since the end of the cold war.  Republicans have been wedgied by Democrats, and Democrats have been nuggied by Republicans.  There's been short-sheeting of the beds, saran-wrapping of the toilets, and each has left the constituents of the other party left to be picked last...

In case you missed it, a major turning point in the movie Frozen  is the song "Let it Go".  It is during this song where Elsa literally takes off the gloves and lets her special power come out.  What results is spectacular.  While she still feels strange or dangerous, it is at this time that she starts to at least be able to grapple with the reality of what she can do and she begins learning how to harness the power that she has.  I feel like Hillary Clinton needs to embrace what she really is at this point, a failed and defeated presidential candidate, and let it go. I won't go into the myriad reasons people enumerate as to why Clinton lost the presidency.  You can find those on YouTube or the nightly news archives.  What I will say is that it is my opinion that, though Hillary's presence on TV talking about likely Russian involvement in the election, the sexism she feels is still alive and well, or any other perceived reason she was defeated might ...

Take a look at  President Trump signing some documents  and see if you see what I see. When I watch our president sign his name, I see a man moving his arm back and forth with some significant, and unnecessary, fervor.  I realize that the D, l, d, J, and T are tall letters, but I have some tall letters in my name, too, and I don't have near that much arm movement in my signature.  I also sign my name relatively large, and yet most of my writing is finger movement, not arm movement. I acknowledge that I might be making too much of this, but they say you can tell a great deal about a person by their signature. Watching this large movement, where small movements suffice, makes me think of his over-sized aggression towards Hillary Clinton (and his Republican opponents before her) during the campaign.  I think of his huge, bold statements about walls, health care coverage, restoring America's greatness, his superior knowledge of things military, and so much mor...

Our world has been changed by the digital age.  Do you doubt that or would you like to have some more confirmation?  Read this brief article about  shortened attention spans  and I'll see you back in a minute. It shocked me to find out that our attention spans have shrunk to 8 seconds.  Knowing that, I'll keep this brief.  In this world where we have the opportunity to seek out any entertainment we want with a few button clicks or screen taps; where we can instantaneously eliminate our perceived boredom in any way we desire; where murders get solved before our very eyes in 60 minutes, repeatedly; and where written responses to personal or professional questions can be sent and received in seconds between correspondents halfway around the world, we run the danger of not being able to enact change in our politics. We who did not vote for the Trump administration must stay patient.  We must stay focused.  We must stay motivated.  To enact ch...

Well, here we are in the off-season for the NFL and all teams are heading towards free agency and the draft, perpetually preparing for bettering the roster and the team.  I read an interesting article recently that the Dallas Cowboys have actually drafted more defensive players than offensive players in recent drafts.  They have been spending their premium picks, however, on offense.  Now it seems to be time to reverse that trend and start building the defensive front. Something important to keep in mind as we prepare for 2017 is that the Cowboys drafted two young defenders last year who never saw the field.  One, Charles Tapper, shows great speed and seems to have a pretty high ceiling as a DE in Dallas's 4-3, but it remains to be seen if he will live up to the hopes and expectations from the coaches and front office.  He was a fourth round pick last year, so chances are good that he could materialize and be a difference-maker on this defense. The other pla...

I just finished and published the article about how the SBC can be an instructor for the Democratic Party in how they act and react to moves made by the GOP.  I just want to quote David Leonhardt here as support for my sentiments and link you to his article in the NY Times. "I understand that all of these options sound aggressive and partisan, and it makes me deeply uncomfortable to make such an argument.  But Democrats simply cannot play by the old set of rules now that the Republicans are playing by a new one.  The only thing worse than the system the Republicans have created is a system in which one political party volunteers to be bullied." Check out his article  here .

When I was a boy, something important happened in the Southern Baptist Convention.  Three men got together and devised a plan to gain control of the leadership of the convention.  As far as I know there was nothing that they did which was technically out of bounds as seen through the SBC Constitution and bylaws, but part of what they did was definitely ethically questionable. I don't know how it is today, but at the time, the president of the SBC could appoint a certain number of people, unopposed, each year to leadership positions.   That wasn't generally a problem since the leadership of the SBC shifted from conservative to moderate on a regular basis.  These three men, however, and here comes the questionable part, realized that if they had enough people present to elect their candidate for the presidency at the opening meeting of the convention, and then have those people leave before the next sessions began the next day, they could create a large enough mass o...

Well it seems that once-candidate Trump's strategy of throwing up anything he sees fit, factual or otherwise, just to pollute the air and make it harder to see what is being planned and/or done is finally causing a reassessment of means of combating said strategy.  Journalists that I have seen in the last few days seem to be trying new approaches including The New York Times  implementing footnotes to present the factual version of the President's statement, and Rachel Maddow beginning, it seems, to sidestep the lies and look behind the cloud at what is being done on the ground. It is a bit like herding cats, isn't it?  They run all over the place, are completely independently minded, become harder to catch the more they are chased, and continually take you further and further from what's most important.  It seems to me that these approaches are sound.  It seems to me that allowing the lies to run off on their own steam and not chase them, thus giving them mor...

There are so many things to say, so many things that have been running through my mind over the last two-and-a-half months.  My mind feels a bit like responsible journalists must feel in their attempts to corral the untruths and contradictions foisted upon us during the presidential campaign.  There's so much frustration noise that I can't seem to focus in on one thing.  But I shall try! I don't know about anyone else, but I went to bed upset and I woke up mad. I don't usually put much stock in horoscopes, but I've always found it interesting that I have such a desire for things to be fair, and I happen to be a Libra which, in case you don't know, is symbolized by a set of scales in astrology. Fairness.  Balance. That's one of the wonderful things about a democracy, is it not?  The majority will carry the day and we will move forwarded guided by the ideas and ideals shared by more than 50% of our fellow Americans.  And yet, here we sit, on January 2...