It is a Damon Runyon story, but without the character voices
A labor of love and a tribute to Senate staff
A 27-hour audiobook that took more than 100 hours to produce
I just completed the narration of the Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence on Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election, Volume 5: Counterintelligence Threats and Vulnerabilities. The narration was an opportunity for me to explore some of the most troubling aspects of the current administration’s direct and indirect connections with truly malign actors here in the U.S. and overseas — mostly in Russia and Ukraine.
The long and winding road
Patient readers and audiobook listeners will travel the report’s long and twisting road that is paved with obvious…
The disruptions, fears, and uncertainties of today’s politics are rooted in the nation’s past behaviors — those which were hateful, those which were helpful
Religion, action, and reaction
On this day in 1963 I was a 14-year-old high school freshman attending Jesuit High School, in Shreveport, Louisiana. The news of John Kennedy’s assassination hit me in three ways:
The Jesuits reached for faith
First, the Catholic leadership of the school were devastated and their sadness swept through the halls and into the classrooms like a flash flood of sorrow, fear, shock, prayers, and disbelief. The usually rock-steady voice of the school’s president wavered and broke as he announced the…
The presidential transition thus far is a drama straight from the Bard’s darkest tales
I think it’s fair to say that most Americans — and, frankly, most citizens of the world with access to some degree of news and information — are glad the 2020 election is, for the most part, all over but for the sore-loser shouting “Stolen election!”
Personal experience
As I write this, on the Monday after the election was called for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the Trump administration (really, mostly Trump himself) is doing its best to throw a wrench in the works and prevent the Biden transition team from getting underway with what has, until now, been a very orderly…
A visit to Australia in November 2016, turned sad on election night
Author’s note: Four years ago I traveled to Australia during the 2016 election, and was at a bar in downtown Canberra watching the results come in from the far side of the globe. As the 2020 election nears, I retrieved my journal from November 8–9, 2016, and offer it here as a cautionary note…in the hope that the outcome will not be the same.
Wednesday, November 9, 2016 (still Tuesday, November 8 in the U.S.)
Bungendore, New South Wales, Australia
It’s 6 a.m. on a rainy, dull blue-gray dawn in Bungendore, Australia. The cockatoos and magpies are squawking and muttering in the trees. Small…
Sometimes you just have to take the fork in the road
My advice? Have an opinion
From nightmare to inquiry
I was lying awake in bed at 4 a.m., unable to sleep, irrationally contemplating the dawning of yet another day of more national uncertainty. The snatches of sleep I had been able to grab were torn with nightmares. In one, I was in a small boat in a splintered jade sea, and it was taking on water amidst fearsome waves of doubt with their frothy, ragged crests and black abyssal troughs on all sides. …
Civic responsibility starts with the truth, no matter how inconvenient
The bottom line
There will be no glory in saying, “I worked in Donald Trump’s administration.” There will be no civic adulation, no honorary degrees awarded, no thanks from a grateful nation, no corner offices earned through the honest labors of one’s work or as a reward for making the world a better place. No. …
An already imperiled nation is on Trump’s chopping block
Trump wins
With the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the final veil between president Trump and his adoring public has been lifted; he no longer needs to even pretend to woo them as their savior.
Now he gets what he’s always wanted
Before Justice Ginsburg’s body has cooled and the celebrations of her vast contributions begin, Trump turned away from her dying plea, and readied his troops for the fight he has longed to wage — the battle to dismantle all that is left of an already Trump-tattered Republic. …
The November election is our chance to save ourselves from ourselves
How others see us
We are no longer a picture of health (if we ever were)
Writing in the Canberra (Australia) Times (July 11, 2020), Crispin Hull, former editor of the Times, put a jarring coda to the herky-jerky, disjointed Ivesian symphony that has become the sad opus of American politics. In Hull’s view,
“The underlying weakness in present U.S. democracy is that partisanship has become so extreme that the nation is incapable of dealing with the major issues that face it. COVID-19 has illustrated that starkly, with every word and act predicated on party allegiance. Meanwhile, other problems like race, police violence, gun control, inequality, the health system, climate change and energy policy go unattended.”
…
Remembering a trip to Aspen with my Dad, thanks to his receipts
An unearthed paper trail tells a tale
A father-son trip more memorable to him than I knew
Parents can find ways to surprise you even when they are gone…have been gone for many years.
Case in point: In the process of going through family records and various documents to support a book I’m writing, I found a small stack of receipts and lined note paper with accounting notes that my father organized after a trip he and I took to Aspen, Colorado, in late March into early April 1969. …
Comforting the afflicted is a life’s work
Introducing Mr. Martin Dooley
In October, 1893, Chicago Evening Post journalist and humorist Finley Peter Dunne created a newspaper column written by the fictitious Irish bartender, Mr. Martin Dooley, a Dunne avatar whose jabs and barbs, witticisms and knife-edged humor skewered the political elite, and discomfited the socially well-to-do.
I first began reading Mr. Dooley’s 750-word columns when I was a teenager in high school here in Virginia in the late 1960s. As a kid raised by a mother whose biting editorial lashings took deadly aim at local politicians she accused of malpractice when it came to…
Jim Moore
Journalist, former Capitol Hill staff (House and Senate), former Cabinet speechwriter, editor, photojournalist and bird photographer. Top Writer Quora 2016–2017
