Calling all women
There is at least one thing in America not shut down over the weekend.
Women power.
"Call it payback, call it a revolution, call it the Pink Wave, inspired by marchers in their magenta hats, and the activism that followed," writes Charlotte Alter for the new Time magazine cover story. "There is an unprecedented surge of first-time female candidates, overwhelmingly Democratic, running for offices big and small, from the U.S. Senate and state legislatures to local school boards."
That surge translates to four times as many Democratic women as Republican women seeking House seats, and twice as many Democrats in Senate races.
We can thank Donald Trump - or at least disgust with Donald Trump.
"In 2016, they were ordinary voters. In 2017, they became activists, spurred by the bitter defeat of the first major female presidential candidate at the hands of a self-described p--y grabber. Now, in 2018, these doctors and mothers and teachers and executives are jumping into the arena and bringing new energy to a Democratic Party sorely in need of fresh faces," reads the Time piece titled, "The Avengers."
This weekend, we watched women in streets across the country again on Saturday and Sunday - Chattanooga, too. But this time, they didn't just march to protest the election of Donald Trump or his first year in office.
Newsweek put it this way: "Women's March 2018 isn't about Trump - It's about upending the entire political system."
Already, Democratic women in Virginia unseated 11 male Republican incumbents in the House of Delegates. First-time candidate Ashley Bennett defeated a New Jersey politician who last January shared a sexist meme on Facebook that read, "Will the women's protest end in time for them to cook dinner?"
He has plenty of time now to fix his own dinner.
Don't look for this movement to slow anytime soon. It's just getting started.
Forget the affair, focus on the cover up
The Wall Street Journal reported just over a week ago that a lawyer for Donald Trump paid a porn star with the stage name Stormy Daniels $130,000 one month before the 2016 election in exchange for her silence about an alleged sexual encounter with Trump 10 years earlier.
Surprised? Of course not. Trump is Trump, after all. We're neither surprised that he might have had an affair with a porn star nor surprised that he might have bought her silence.
Yes, it would be nice if our president could have a modicum of moral standards, but what all Americans should be more concerned about is his propensity to use money and bullying to get absolutely whatever he wants - or needs when he could face blackmail or extortion.
This is what makes all the Trump administration's Russian links so frightening. What will Trump do if Russia is blackmailing him (or his family) or calling in chips? This is exactly the kind of thing that drove intelligence officials and former acting Attorney General Sally Yates to warn that former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was vulnerable to foreign agent blackmail.
What the Trump/porn star saga shows us is the length Trump seems willing to go to in order to avoid truth and sunshine.
Just weeks before the 2016 election, Trump's lawyer, Michael Cohen, formed a private LLC to pay the woman in exchange for not speaking publicly, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. Cohen reportedly created Essential Consultants LLC, in Delaware, a state which offers a higher standard of privacy to business owners, and used aliases to hide the names of those involved.
According to Mother Jones' Kevin Drum: "The affair itself is not that big a deal. However, the agreement to pay Daniels $130,000 to stay quiet is a very big deal. How is this happening? How can the president of the United States get away with what looks like hush money paid to a mistress in the middle of an election? How is it that this isn't front-page news until Trump tells us what it was all about and shows us the agreement?"
How, indeed. But - sad as it seems - the real import isn't our leader's morality. The real import is one of much deeper, shadowy ethics.
Is this all about bias and bigotry?
While politicians continue to use immigration and pending dreamer deportations to tie our country in knots, the Supreme Court announced Friday that it would consider a challenge to President Trump's latest effort to limit travel from countries - most predominantly Muslim - said to pose a threat to national security.
Just add it to a list of growing docket blockbusters, and ask yourself if this all isn't just about bias.
This case concerns this administration's third and, according to The New York Times, "most considered bid" to make good on a campaign promise to secure our borders. But challengers say his September proclamation still is tainted by religious animus and not adequately justified by national security concerns.
Trump's first travel ban, which seemed to read like a religious litmus test, was issued a week after he took office. It was quickly blocked by courts around the nation. A second version, issued in March, met a similar fate, though the Supreme Court allowed part of it go into effect in June when it agreed to hear the Trump administration's appeals in two cases. In October, the high court dismissed those appeals after the second ban expired.
We'll learn more when the court is expected to issue its next decision in June.