Preserving American Values

Our nation stands under attack … not from without but from within. American values, our politics, and our culture have been corrupted.

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about

Websites: www.westillholdthesetruths.weebly.com; www.preservingamericanvalues.com; www.thepracticalbuddhist.com. A graduate of Brown U. and U. of Chicago Law School, I’ve had a varied career as a legal aid lawyer, survey researcher, nonprofit executive, management consultant, composer, teacher, and author. I have authored 7 books on topics as varied as Buddhism, child rearing, and politics, the latter of which received a pre-publication endorsement from James Fallows, National Correspondent, The Atlantic. My Buddhist blog was selected as one of the top 50 Buddhist blogs on the web.

Category: Politics

  • A Plea to the Conscience of Conservative Republicans and Independents

    The question for you on Tuesday is:  do you vote for Donald Trump because he’s the Republican candidate and just hold your nose, or do you vote for Hilary Clinton because, although she’s a Democrat and a disliked Clinton at that, her presidency would clearly be in the better interest of the country than a Trump…

  • The Presidential Election: Where Is Our Country Heading?

    The purpose of democratic government, as stated in the Declaration of Independence, is to secure the rights of the people to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  We may have never pursued this perfectly, certainly not for all the people.  But we have now, unfortunately, reached a point in our history where the best…

  • Understanding Rage and Bringing Us Back from the Brink

    Many people would look at the phrase “understanding rage” as an oxymoron.  To them rage is irrational.  It’s craziness.   And because it’s not a rational state, it cannot be understood.  It’s true that there is no reasoning with rage.  The rational forces of democracy are not only helpless to hold it in check, the…

  • White Working Class – The Republican Base?

    While reading a recent New Yorker, I came upon a sentence that made me stop in disbelief. “The base of the[Republican] Party, the middle-aged white working class, …” I was aware that many working class Whites had become Reagan Democrats and that many were at the heart of theTea Party’s strength. But that things had…

  • What Drives Policy Decisions? The Theory v The Reality

    Since the establishment of representative democracies, the role of government has been to promote and secure the safety and well-being of their people. As stated in the Declaration of Independence, the first official document stating this concept of government, “That to secure these rights [life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness], governments are instituted among…

  • When Is a Socialist Not a Socialist?

    When Barack Obama was running for President, the Republican Right branded him a “Socialist.”  They have also branded Obamacare as “socialized medicine.”  These claims were so ridiculous that neither Obama nor anyone else ever took the time to set the American people straight on the meaning of these words and the lie they spoke as applied.  Thus for…

  • Understanding Why America Is No Longer, and Perhaps Can Never Be, As Great As It Was

    People either go on about how great America is, or they lament that America is not as great as it used to be.  In the first case, people typically ignore reality.  In the second case, they often ignore fundamental factors.  When people say that America is great, they are either referring to the strength of our military…

  • When Is Justice Not Justice?

    For the last few decades, certainly since President Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork, the nomination and confirmation process of Supreme Court and lower Federal court justices has been political theater.  It was not always so.   Chief Justice Roberts stated in a recent talk reported in The New York Times that earlier in the 20th century “The Court was…

  • The Real Issue in 2016 – Electing a Democratic Congress

    In the recent Democratic presidential primary debate, the candidates trotted out programs that they would sponsor to address a variety of problems our nation is facing.  But an article in the New York Times  astutely noted that no one said anything, nor were they asked, about how they would get these programs through Congress given the current control…

  • Shell Oil Withdrawal Not a Victory

    After Shell recently announced that they were ceasing all exploratory work in the Arctic, I received a flood of emails declaring “victory” from the various organizations who had been trying to pressure the Obama administration to not let Shell drill.  This was as deceptive as Bush’s infamous “Mission Accomplished” fiasco in the early days of the…