People aren’t doing it for the free doughnuts. But they might do it for America. — The great patriotic holiday of July 4 came and went, and so did the brief hullabaloo in the press over our failure to hit Joe Biden’s deadline for getting at least one COVID shot into the arms of 70% of U.S. adults. The president made a speech promising to go…

War, pestilence, a haywire climate, political hogwash; the whole dizzying vortex of things plaguing us is a message in itself — I’m not an economist or political scientist or even all that smart on any given day, just a guy with two ears connected by a functioning brain. …

America is just beginning to see the dangers that lurk in the judicial swamp created by the former president — Like a Roaring Twenties mobster buying up the local police department, Donald Trump spent his time in the Oval Office building a judicial safety net for his ongoing and apparently bottomless corruption. Not to mention that of his party. I can’t tell you how intentional any of this was. No…

The hullabaloo over videos of Finland’s partying prime minister is a sign we all need to lighten up, literally, as in get on your toes — My daughter is a doctor doing a fellowship in geriatrics at the big county hospital in town. When she gets a break from the long hours required by her day job of healing people she unwinds with a local dance company. I worry that it’s one more thing packed into…

War, pestilence, politics, and economic uncertainty have us all on edge, but it could have been a lot worse — I had a Zoom call recently with a human rights organization looking to create a more powerful narrative about the people laboring to do good in this world. Brand narratives are a specialty of mine and I hope I was helpful. The group does wonderful work in some of the…

If right-wing politicians will attack a pregnant 10-year-old rape victim, nothing is sacred and none of us are safe — At first, it sounded like the sort of abstract “what if” scenario you might come up with to catch a Republican congressman off-guard in a debate. “Should a 10-year-old girl be forced to bear the child of her rapist?” But to our enduring horror, the story is real. …

Is it too much to hope the work of the 1/6 congressional panel will lead to a Trump wing at the federal penitentiary? — The House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capital has begun the public phase of its hearings and the naysayers — at least all those who don’t work for Fox News or occupy a Republican seat in Congress — are eating a little crow. The storytelling is…

It turns out the central conservative legal principle of the past 50 years is a load of hogwash — All politicians lie, the old chestnut tells us. But along with that bit of certainty came the understanding that it was most often a gentler sort of lie, fudging unhelpful facts, overpromises made in the heat of a close vote, an over-parsing of words when caught in the wrong company…

A Florida judge strikes down the mask mandate for travelers and gives us a peek at just how partisan the courts have become — Hey, good news. You are now free to get on an airplane without wearing a mask, and you can go back to starting your vacation trying to get over the cold you caught from the sneezy guy in the next row just like in the old days. Wait a minute…