New Jersey blueberry pageant princess and senior Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway explained Mike Pence as a “full-spectrum conservative.” Vice presidential historian Joel K. Goldstein called Mike Pence the “Sycophant-in-Chief.” And this week, America learned that the most loyal sidekick in vice-presidential history since William Rufus King can be remarkably funny…

Opponents can vote their conscience — if they jump through the right bureaucratic hoops. Make sure you know them. — Plutarch said the tyrant never grows old but it seems neither does Trump’s perpetual impunity. The self-proclaimed “business tycoon” had already been embroiled in more than 4,000 lawsuits¹ before he became the president of the United States — and a sneering grotesque golem of American hypocrisy, transmuted into a celebrity…

If the exhilaration of a big win justifies and excuses grabbing another human being with both hands by the head and kissing them on the mouth is anyone responsible for their behavior when celebrating? Like so many famous men who only apologize when they get caught, Luis Rubiales is repeatedly…

Small-town living in country music is not without its murder ballads and is almost synonymous with its neverending anthems of cheating and heartbreak. There are no perfect places. But there are better small-town songs than a costume cowboy’s thinly-veiled racist angst. When Jason Aldean got called out for filming “Try…

Jason Aldean’s response to accusations of dogwhistle racism in his Try That In A Small Town video is a failed attempt at a rebrand. It should’ve been an apology. His defensive statement does not acknowledge how different other people’s “small-town” experiences are while simultaneously invoking fear as a threat. You…

17-year-old Celeste Burgess did not get herself pregnant. But she is the one being frog-marched all over the news for terminating the pregnancy. Meanwhile, the media wholesale failed to mention, let alone equally cover whoever got her pregnant. The Norfolk teenager was tried as an adult for one felony and…

15,000 years ago the Missoula floods broke the Columbia River Basin ice dams and poured fertile layers of silt from Spokane all the way down to the Willamette Valley where I grew up. My favorite farms still grow their produce in soil rich with glacial melt from Montana. I don’t…

The casual misogyny in classic and modern literature is breaking my spirit — I’m reading a book about a library cat. Abandoned as a kitten, someone shoved the poor little thing through a book drop in an Iowa library on a winter night. Christened ‘Dewey Readmore Books’, I don’t know yet if the story of his rescue and the subsequent adoration of his…

The US leads the world in per-capita incarcerated people with more than 1.2 million people in state prisons throughout the country.¹ And it has a long and troubled history with incarceration as an enduring modern extension of slavery dating back to the 13th Amendment in 1865. Ten US states still…