Recap: The newly minted secretary of the Department of the Interior, Barbara Nascovar, slowly settled into her job in Washington, D.C. The president of the United States, however, asked her to do some work for him back at her home near Pocatello, Idaho. The Thanksgiving recess came, and Barbara packed her stuff and the kids’ […]
Recap: After meeting with President Blankenship and White House Chief of Staff Corsican, Barbara confided in the latter: She was having second thoughts about accepting the position of secretary of the Department of the Interior. All of a sudden the job seemed tremendous in scope and terrible in scheme. The first part of Blankenship’s scheme […]
Recap: In her first sit-down with the president of the United States, Barbara Nascovar, the brand-new secretary of the Department of the Interior, got an earful from the man. Oh, she was on her best behavior, but the president tolerated no sign of what he called “weakness.” Weakness was anything that strayed even slightly from […]
Do we know how to vote in our own best interests? The easy answer is, “Yes, of course.” But isn’t that lackadaisical answer, born of the desire for ever more facile and rapid solutions, at the root of our problems? For instance, does a fictional “Bob Smith,” a more qualified and more responsive candidate for […]
Recap: John Q. Private, Sr. completed his second term as governor of Mississippi. His son Johnny immediately succeeded him, and everyone got to stay in the governor’s mansion! On his first day in office, he was whisked away to an expensive, liquid lunch by “Wild” Wanda Watkins. Too much wine, too much champagne. And Johnny’s […]
“Jeez, Wanda…” said Johnny Q. Private, the new governor of Mississippi. He felt he ought to say something, but that’s as much as he could come up with. In the back of that black limo, with the fractionally dressed Wild Wanda Watkins, in broad daylight—let’s face it—Johnny didn’t stand a chance, not by a longshot. […]
The Man Who Represented Himself (Part II) John Q. “Johnny” Private, Jr. felt a bit strange on the morning of January 20th. He was now the governor of this great state, but he had awakened in his parents’ house! Well… it was complicated. You see, John Sr., his father, preceded him as governor, and they […]
His career became much more lucrative when he whittled his constituency down to one Imagine the unimaginable: an elected official who never even thinks about the people who elected him. Instead, he—let’s call him John Q. Private, Jr.—works for the highest bidder. Every vote he casts is bought and paid for by special interests. “Special” […]
Veto power of U.S., Russia, China stands in the way of making treaty binding One hundred and thirty of the 193 total United Nations member nations have drafted a proposed treaty which aims to ban the use or possession of nuclear weapons worldwide. Dissenters and supporters tally up squarely by whether they believe they benefit […]
100 years after the creation of the Committee on Public Information, propaganda lives When I was a kid in school, our teachers and textbooks taught us that the United States of America was the greatest country—the greatest democracy—that had ever existed. Somehow, that might still actually be true. I say “somehow,” because especially in recent […]