Collaborative Writing
How war in Ukraine became a punch line to a joke
When I drove by a liberal church in my neighborhood recently and saw that they had replaced their Ukrainian decorations with 19 little chairs – Uvalde, get it? – I had to ask myself, “Is there still a war going on in Ukraine?”
A few months ago, Ukrainian President Zelensky could be forgiven for thinking that liberal America had no higher priority than to see him repel the dread Russian invaders. If proof were needed, during a one-month span from mid-February to mid-March, the three main broadcast TV networks – CBS, NBC, ABC – dedicated more air time to the war in Ukraine than they had to the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan during any given month.
The issue Naomi Wolf needs to take on next
Former consultant to Bill Clinton and Al Gore, and one time poster girl for third wave feminism, Naomi Wolf has seen the light, and it was COVID mania that turned on the switch. For those of us who lived 
our lives in 2020-2021 much as we had in 2019, Wolf’s new book, “The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, Covid-19 and the War Against the Human,” comes as a revelation.
Wolf shows us from the inside what happened to “my people, my tribe, my whole life, the progressive, right-on, part of the ideological world” during the presumed pandemic, and it wasn’t pretty. “It was as if these communities were in the grip of a collective hallucination,” Wolf writes, “like the witch crazes of the sixteen and seventeenth century.”
“Whole understandings and belief systems were abandoned overnight,” she continues. “Intelligent, informed people suddenly saw things that were not there and were unable to see things that were incontrovertibly before their faces.”
When Dem gun rhetoric gets downright dangerous
The Democrats’ plan to shift the blame for inner-city mayhem from their own self-destructive policies to guns in general, and the AR-15 in particular, reached something of a high-water mark on Saturday.
At the Missouri variant of the so-called “March for Our Lives Rally,” Kansas City’s ambitious young mayor, Quinton Lucas, fired away with a comment so false in so many ways that even deposed San Francisco D.A. Chesa Boudin would have been embarrassed to utter it.
Said Lucas for the ages, “I feel like in Missouri these days, if you cross the state line, they say, ‘Welcome. Here’s an AR-15. Good luck.'” Knowing Kansas City as well as I do — I live in one of its more liberal neighborhoods — I almost choked on my arugula when reading this. Lucas, I suspect, is banking on the Kansas City Star’s paywall to protect sensible people from calling him out on this nonsense.
Are the Obamas prepping for the Apocalypse?
I got a tip from a friend who describes himself as the “hated conservative on Martha’s Vineyard in the Peoples’ Republic of Massachusetts.” According to a June 7 notice in the MV Times, the Obamas of 
Turkeyland Cove Road made an unprecedented request of the Edgarton select board.
As reported, the Obamas asked the board’s permission to install a 2,500-gallon commercial propane tank on their property. “We’ve never had a private propane tank come to us,” select board member Arthur Smadbeck told the MV Times. Board member Michael Donaroma added that a private-residence propane tank is typically a fraction of the quantity being requested.
On an island that is as prone to storms as Martha’s Vineyard, it would not be unusual for a home to have a back-up generator, but no one apparently has a commercial-grade 2,500-gallon tank at a price tag that could range as high as $75,000. It should be noted that propane is a byproduct of either petroleum refining or natural gas processing. This means propane is subject to the same law of supply and demand as its sources. People who heat their homes with natural gas are told to expect a 54% increase in next year’s energy costs, but then again the Obamas stopped looking at price tags long ago.
