The midterm election is over, and the House of Representatives has turned blue. So have state legislatures and governorships around the country. What will we really do with this important change in our national make-up? We still have Donald Trump as President. But in many places throughout our country, especially in the districts where Democrats […]
Donald Trump
Index to the Third Year
Thank you as always for checking in with WisdomWordsPPF! Here is a guide to the past year of blog posts (note that some posts appear in several categories). If you want a guide to the first year (October 2015-October 2016), you can find it here, and a guide to the second year (October 2016-October 2017) […]
What is the ADF and Why is Jeff Sessions Praising It?
Once again we in the United States of America are facing an egregious example of “doublespeak” by the Trump Administration. Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III has announced a “Religious Liberty Task Force” that is, in effect, a vicious attack against the LGBTQ community. Here is how the dots are connected: The ADF is the […]
Crisis “Management” the Trump Way
Most of us, one might hazard to guess, try to avoid crises; our lives are crazy, complicated and chaotic enough. We in the West crave moments of serenity, sanity and normalcy. Not so our current President, Donald J. Trump. Here we will not only show ways in which he creates false crises and then rides […]
Ben Carson and HUD Being Sued
As the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) marked its 50th anniversary in April 2018, several civil rights groups, led by the National Fair Housing Alliance, were suing the agency and its Secretary, Dr. Ben Carson, “for suspending an Obama-era rule requiring communities to examine and address barriers to racial integration.” According to reporting […]
Mr. Kobach and the Judge
Remember Kris Kobach and President Trump’s Voter Fraud Commission? The story of Kobach and the most recent news about him is one of those examples of the intersection between an activist right-wing politician, immigration, voter suppression, Trump’s basic bigotry and racism, fear-mongering, a brave judge, the impotence of current Republican lawmakers to challenge Trump’s policies […]
Neo-Nazi Group Unravelling, Spencer Backing Off: Positive Steps in the Battle against Racism and Bigotry
A group that few of us have heard of, which “advocates for racially pure nations and communities and blames Jews for many of the world’s problems,” is having some problems lately. The neo-Nazi Traditionalist Worker Party (TWP) lost both its primary spokesperson and its leader in mid-March. [SPLC “Weekend Read/ Issue 71,” March 17, 2018] […]
Disrupting Toxic Masculinity
Stephanie Ruhle of MSNBC recently interviewed a number of young men about the connection between mass shootings in the US in recent years and the pressures on teenage males. In the introduction to the segment, MSNBC senior national correspondent Chris Jansing noted the sobering statistics: 94% of all mass shootings in the US are committed […]
Reasons for Hope
In the midst of disheartening news in the trying times in which we live, it is important for our national conversation and personal well-being that we bring to mind the positive things that are happening all around us. Here’s a sampling. DACA stays the law of the land! “The Supreme Court on Monday [Feb. 26] […]
Revisiting Quality-of-Life Issues in Our Sister Nations
Earlier posts have looked at quality-of-life statistics of the United States compared to other advanced democracies, especially in the European Union. As we have noted, a number of European nations have far higher standards of living than the US. By many measures, Finland consistently ranks as having one of the best education systems in the […]