Members of the National Transportation Safety Board on the scene Saturday, Feb. 1, of the mid-air collision between a Black Hawk helicopter and a an American Airlines jet over the Potomac River at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. *Courtesy NTSB.*

Losing my voice to find it in the Trump era

February 2, 2025

How are we to respond to the times in which we find ourselves? Should we retreat, understanding that they are beyond our control? Or should we, knowing they are beyond our control, respond Stoically — with courage and calm, understanding, in the words of Rev. Sydney Smith, that “it is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing, because you could only do a little.”

As I pondered this over the Christmas break and into January — the so-called “wellness month” — I got very sick and lost my voice, an apt metaphor for losing the inner voice that has always been my North Star.

In the end, I concluded that reticence — even when you cannot physically “speak” — is a kind of cowardice, and that it is incumbent upon us all to speak out.

The universal timeshare on the Trump doghouse

August 24, 2019

Liberal American Jews and Muslims.. Brown border babies. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex. Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell and Chinese President Xi Jinping. Oscar-winning actresses and kneeling athletes. And, of course, the old standbys, the Democrats and the media.

Round and round it goes. And where the Catherine wheel of Trump hatred stops, nobody knows. Much has been made — hammered home, really — about President Donald J. Trump’s racism, anti-Semitism and misogyny. But if we fail to consider these under the umbrella of his narcissism, we miss the dangerous point. It’s not so much that he despises people of a certain religion or race, though there are elements of that. It’s that he apparently loves no one really except himself, not even Ivanka. (He’s been undermining her efforts on Capitol Hill to press for further gun control by telling everyone she’s nothing but a liberal Democrat. You know when Ivanka comes in for criticism that we are all in a dark place.)

Oh, no, no, no. He's a Tariff Man

December 8, 2018

The day after President Donald J. Trump was elected, I, along with scores of others, hopped on a conference call with leaders of my brokerage firm to assess whither we were going in this brave new world. There were the usual attempts to reassure — the exhortations to stay the course, the discussion of the glories of diversification, the view that things might not be so bad after all. And though shocked global markets dropped, a lot, in the immediate aftermath, the worst never happened. At least, not immediately.

Trumped

March 24, 2018

Sometimes, it’s hard to know where to begin – with the rage and frustration at what’s happening in this country, I mean.

I just filed my taxes, which have increased almost $5,000, thanks to no itemized deductions any longer, a cap on property tax deductions and the elimination of the deduction of state taxes from federal taxes. How again is the tax cut this supposed to benefit the middle class? Oh, that’s right...

Stormy weather with The Donald

March 8, 2018

Don’t know why there’s no sun up in the sky
Stormy (Daniels) Weather
Since Donald Trump and I’ve been together
Keeps raining all the time.

The howling winds, ice-laced downed branches and big, fat raindrops and snowflakes of back-to-back nor’easters are nothing compared to the bomb cyclone that is Trump-et. The man who says he loves chaos – thinking it is somehow the same as a constructive exchange of differing ideas – has plenty of it these days. He’s got porn star Stormy Daniels suing him over the nondisclosure agreement she says he never signed, thus freeing her to show and tell about her relationship with The Donald. ...