King Charles III addressed a joint session of Congress on April 28, replete with top military brass and of course the Speaker of the House and Vice-President Vance.

During World War II the U.S. War Department, predecessor of today’s Defense Department, published a pamphlet called “Army Talk” for the soldiers.

There used to be corruption in high places in America.

Trump’s magic power with his followers is they believe in him. With him and his purple crayon, what he sketches and proclaims is real. For his followers, it’s real because he says so.

Stand back from the political scene here in July 2024 and search for an analogy in history or culture.

What can be said about last week’s lamentable presidential debate? Quite a bit.

So much is coming so fast it’s hard to keep track. Readers of this column already know of my disdain for Donald Trump.

Last week brought forward a contest between two views of the U.S. Supreme Court: one romantic, the other cynical. Which is more current?

Holmes wrote: “Great cases like hard cases make bad law.” The 14th Amendment Trump qualifications case making its way to you is certainly one of those.

…to know which way the wind is blowing. That’s Bob Dylan’s wisdom. Holmes’ famous quotation says the same thing, differently: “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.”

We have been here before. In the 19th century we had a civil war about deeply felt divisions. Abraham Lincoln, correctly revered as an American leader, wanted to avoid exactly this.

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Dear Mr. President, Tonight’s “Soul of the Nation” speech was powerful and you delivered it well. Thanks for that. But something was missing, namely what you can and will do about it.

Dear Judge Reinhart, Please do not unseal the FBI affidavit showing probable cause to approve a search of Mar-a-Lago.

This column is called Common Sense for a reason. It begs the reader to use common sense to resolve what’s bothering them, and in the world today that is quite a lot.

The news of the week is several-fold. Republican voters, nearly half of them, would again vote for Trump for president.

The old joke asks, “why does a dog lick its balls?” Answer: because it can. That’s the real holding of Dobbs v. Jackson.

Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse.

In an important op-ed piece in the New York Times on May 20, David Brooks addresses and analyzes the culture wars going on in the U.S. today.

Roe v. Wade was probably a mistake. That case divided America like few cases in our history have. Brown v. Board of Education overruled Plessy v. Ferguson and held that separate was inherently unequal.

God bless TV in an open society. We can sit and watch the carnage in Ukraine, a privilege the average Russian does not seem to have.

Ringling Brothers is gone, but in its place we have the US Congress, most recently the Judiciary Committee of the US Senate.

And so it continues. Now into week three of the Russian invasion, a word Americans but not Russians are free to use, our TV news is repetitive.

One puzzling aspect of our world today is how normal working people can celebrate and adore the lying grifter from Queens. The Access Hollywood tape might have broken that connection a few years ago, but…

Here we are, 155 years after the Civil War, facing another insurrection. A substantial minority of the country resists vaccination and thereby risks everyone else’s health. They disbelieve climate change and the looming environmental catastrophes.