This column was sent in the day before Thanksgiving, appearing now the day after. I trust everyone remains in a pleasant tryptophan buzz. Because we’ll have spent it on the Oregon coast with our son’s family, including two much-loved grandkids, I’ll assume we had a wonderful time. So, rather than…

Last week’s election results, some of which are still pending, turned my unrelenting pessimism into chary optimism. Nearly all Trump-touted terribles were defeated, including, importantly, every one of his election-denying, would-be secretaries of state, who’d have been able to decertify future elections if the wrong people won. The truly awful…

Despite being mostly happy about it, I find myself uninterested in commenting on Tuesday’s elections. Maybe next week. So here’s something corny I wrote, years ago, for an obscure medical publication: Being a surgeon, having the lives of fellow humans literally in your hands, is intimacy that only surgeons can…

Far be it from me to blame the attack on Paul Pelosi by a guy who posts typical Qanon/Trumpofoxian blather, on people like Marjorie Taylor Green, who called Speaker Pelosi a traitor who should be executed; or Tucker Carlson, et Fox, who demonize her in the most inflammatory language; or…

How divided are we? Polls show 80% of Democrats and 80% of Republicans “believe the political opposition poses a threat that, if not stopped, will destroy America as we know it.” I’m in the first group. The Republicans I know personally are in the 20% of their side, but they’re…

If the January 6 Committee hearings have changed minds, there’s only one direction they can have gone. But people who needed to watch probably didn’t. Taking cues from Trucker — partisan witch hunt, fake news — despite the fact that the witnesses were lifelong Republicans, they stayed away. Maybe some…

Dan Evans. Mark Hatfield. Tom McCall. Everett Dirksen. Jacob Javits. Dwight Eisenhower. Nelson Rockefeller. Margaret Chase Smith, John Lindsey, Arlen Spector, Howard Baker, Lowell Weicker, Chuck Hager. Ulysses Grant. Abraham Lincoln. My remarkable aunt. What’s become of the party that once embraced people of conscience, ideas, believers in democracy, cooperators…

I almost passed on writing a column this week. Thinking hard enough about our political future to put it into writing is becoming depressing. For example: how can Hershel Walker be deadlocked with Raphael Warnock in Georgia’s senate race? Is it because Trump endorsed him? If so, then how, after…

Come November we’ll be voting in yet another “most important election, ever.” Not to be the wolf who cried “boy oh boy,” but if this isn’t THE one, it has a heck of a lot more riding on it than any in memory. Like, you know, survival. Literal and figurative…