Saturday Bag o’ Nuts

The Nut Tree was a landmark of my younger days in California. In my last year of high school and first year of college, my friends and I expressed our newly-found independence and adulthood by driving from Sacramento to San Francisco on weekends. The Nut Tree, just off the freeway south of Sacramento, was a mandatory coffee stop. That […]

Snakes & Ladders

Consider the great gains we’ve made in this country: from universal suffrage to civil rights, from labor unions and protections for workers to minimum wages and unemployment insurance, from Social Security to Medicare, from free public education to womens’ athletics, from good highways to the postal system.  If you follow the news you know that […]

Ground Rules

I grew up thinking there were a couple of ground rules to the sport of democracy as it is played in the United States.  One is the separation of church and state, the other is the protection of minority rights. If you’re a typical American, you don’t want your government taken over by a religious […]