VOICES

THE COURT - Ralph Waldo Emerson once told about a guest who came to dinner and spent the entire evening prattling about his own integrity: “The louder he talked of his honor,” Emerson wrote: “the faster we counted our spoons.”

A POV - I waited almost three months for some acknowledgement, but it never came. Not a bottle of champagne. Not a congratulatory note. Not an email of acknowledgement. Not one media request.

ANALYSIS - Populism was the big winner in the Virginia election yesterday, after Terry McCauliffe ran on his past as a Bill Clinton Democrat and Glen Youngkin ran as a rightwing populist.

BORDER WATCH - To: Baja California Gov.-elect Marina del Pilar Ávila and California Gov. Gavin Newsom

VOICES - Stop with the telemarketing calls, already. They are a plague on our society - invasive, abusive, and waking people who need their sleep. Annoying to the point of affecting many people’s health. 

VOICES - The CalTrans response on Nov. 1st to remove the homeless encampment on the San Fernando Mission Blvd. southbound 405 freeway on-ramp left a lot of trash behind.

ANOTHER VOICE - In a recent article, dated November 1, 2021 "Talk About Teetering Edge of a Regime", your reporter stated that an event for Turning Point USA was held at Northwest Nazarene University, which in fact, it was not.

GENDER POLITICS - The U.S. issued its first passport with an “X” gender marker this week, which LGBTQ advocates hailed as a historic moment for the legal recognition of non-binary gender identities.

HISTORY REPEATS - When Richard Nixon died, those of us on the antiwar side of the barricades during his misbegotten presidency were driven to new lows of cynical despair by the image-washing, sometimes from mainstream media, but most often from other politicians who seemed to want to set an extremely low bar for presidential legacies. 

VOICES - Texas’s cruel new anti-abortion law is more than just an unconstitutional restriction on reproductive choice. It’s also an egregious new frontier in late capitalism.

SUPPLY CHAIN MELTDOWN - To some in the Biden Administration, the supply chain crisis can be dismissed as a loss of East Asian-made consumer trinkets that, as Vox tells us, we could all be better off without—or as White House spokesperson Jen Psaki suggested, amounts to little more than “the tragedy of the delayed treadmill.”

COMMENTARY - The recently released preliminary financial report for the City of Los Angeles by Ron Galperin is a refreshing breeze in an atmosphere defined by corruption.

AT LENGTH - If you were looking at things from the outside over the past four years, it would look like the plot of a crazy movie that only a genius screenwriter could concoct: 

MEDICAL FAIRNESS - In California, pregnant women begged for help, their cries were ignored, and they died from preeclampsia, forcibly removed placentas, and internal bleeding.

WORK FORCE - I've seen a lot of good folk die, Who had a lot of bills to pay

POLITICS WATCH - Hey, here's another day of Arizona's "Democratic" Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, aka "A Pharma favorite" in Congress and Corporations' "Million Dollar Woman,"

MILITARY COMPLEX - Although critics of the Biden administration’s Build Back Better plan to increase funding for U.S. education, healthcare, and action against climate catastrophe say the United States Can’t Afford It, there are no such qualms about ramping up funding for the U.S. military.

WORLD PERSPECTIVE - Respect for the United States has skyrocketed around the globe now that former president Donald Trump is out of office.

LGBTQ POLITICS - Republican Josh Mandel can’t stop obsessing about transgender people and pronouns.

HEALTH CARE POLITICS - The emergency room. You go there for help when you’re really in trouble or have no place else to turn.

PETCARE - Question: What does a packet of M&M’s and your local veterinarian have in common? Answer: Both are owned by Mars Inc., the global candy monopolist.