Featured

The `agony’ of Lisa Murkowski
July 2, 2025 By Guest Blogger Leave a Comment
On July 1, by a vote of 51 – 50, the U.S. Senate passed the mammoth budget and policy bill that now sits in the House of Representatives. Here’s how the story’s told: “The Senate voted 51 to 50 to pass the Republicans’ major tax and domestic policy bill, which President Trump wants on his desk by Friday, with Vice President JD Vance casting the tiebreaking vote.” While officially JD Vance cast the tiebreaking vote, the real story, as you already know, the real “tiebreaker”, who broke so very many ties with her vote, was Senator Lisa Murkowski, so-called moderate Republican Senator from Alaska. When asked to describe the process by which she arrived at this momentous, if not cataclysmic, decision, Senator Murkowski answered with one word, “Agonizing”.
Agonizing. The good Senator was “in agony”. Here’s how else she described her thinking on the subject: “Do I like this bill? No …. I know that in many parts of the country, there are Americans that are not going to be advantaged by this bill.” Americans are “not going be advantaged”? Here’s just a little of what “not being advantaged” looks like: “a proposed Medicaid work requirement, which would cut off coverage for millions of enrollees who do not meet new employment or reporting standards”. According to nonpartisan estimates and experts, at least 17 million Americans will lose their health coverage. This slow-moving death sentence is what passes for “not being advantaged.”
Finally, Senator Murkowski explained, “I struggled mightily with the impact on the most vulnerable in this country when you look to the Medicaid and the SNAP provisions.”
Agonizing. What is agony, exactly? Agony has many roots, all of which gesture towards its importance and extremity: “mental struggle or anguish of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane (Vetus Latina, Vulgate), anguish, distress (4th cent.), death-agony.” The list, from the O.E.D., goes on, but you get the picture. Being divided is not agony; being conflicted is not agony. Frankly, it’s not even struggling mightily, but that’s another story. The earliest widely used version of agony was the Agony of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus enters the Garden and realizes and ultimately embraces the betrayal and subsequent torture he will be made to endure. “Not being advantaged”
Knowing what was to occur, Jesus prayed: “And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.” This is what agony looks like, the transformation of sweat into something like blood. Senator Murkowski voted to send millions of people into various forms of excruciating suffering. They will be in agony. They will struggle mightily, as many have done for all of their lives. What the Senator did was vote for the bill. As Jesus concluded, in the night of the Agony of the Garden of Gethsemane, “Get up, let us be going. See, my betrayer is at hand.”
Agonizing.
(by Dan Moshenberg)
(Image Credit: William Blake, “The Agony in the Garden” / Tate)

Chronicle of a death foretold: Eviction’s `adverse impact’ on parenting college students
June 27, 2025 By Guest Blogger Leave a Comment
New America, in collaboration with Princeton’s Eviction Lab, released a brief this week, “Ousted from Opportunity: Eviction’s Adverse Impact on Parenting College Students”. While the report is dire and grim and much of the findings are tragically predictable, it’s still worth consideration, especially this, the last of the major seven findings: “Parenting Students Threatened with […]

This will kill trans children, as I believe it is intended to
June 19, 2025 By Guest Blogger Leave a Comment
The Tennessee law the Supreme Court just upheld did not ban some special kind of transgender medicine. Rather, it denied transgender children access to the same life-saving medicines that doctors will continue to prescribe to cisgender children, who also sometimes need interventions in the development of secondary sex characteristics. The law is about denying basic […]

She simply glowed (Olorato Mongale did)
June 1, 2025 By Guest Blogger Leave a Comment
She simply glowed (Olorato Mongale did) she simply glowed Olorato Mongale did past tense she a child of the community embraced and cared for by many passionate about journalism and the fight against Gender Based Violence Olorato Mongale was she did she was past tense when will all our war and our wars be past […]

Welcome to the age of the tolerated Intolerable
May 21, 2025 By Guest Blogger Leave a Comment
“To regard the lives of those your country is subjugating as being equal to your own would make even one death intolerable.” Owen Jones, 2014 In the past twenty-four hours, the word “intolerable” has figured prominently, a kind of keyword marking this moment. Perhaps what set this off is the joint statement by Canada, France […]

Landmark case: In Australia, Raya Meredith leads class action case against strip-searches
May 14, 2025 By Guest Blogger Leave a Comment
In 2018, at the Splendour in the Grass music festival in Byron Bay, New South Wales, Australia, Raya Meredith was strip-searched. Not that it matters, but nothing illegal was found. In 2022, then-27-year-old Raya Meredith filed a class action suit against the police of New South Wales, arguing that the strip-searches conducted at music festivals […]

We will run out (of gas by 2026)
May 13, 2025 By Guest Blogger Leave a Comment
We will run out (of gas by 2026) sufficient wind and solar power is what we have declared a minister years ago wind air in motion there is lots amongst the tribe of politrickians politrickians hot air gaseous exchange smoke and mirrors flatulence clouding the way (forward) politrickians of all shades of shadiness however […]

Michigan’s special hell for women, the Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility, belongs to everyone
May 8, 2025 By Guest Blogger Leave a Comment
I had said I wasn’t gonna write no more poems like this Gil Scott-Heron Michigan has one women’s prison, the Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility in Ypsilanti, and it is a piece of work. On Monday, attorneys representing 20 women filed a $500 million lawsuit, claiming that recorded and recording strip searches constitutes invasion of […]

The cruelty is the pointlessness
May 6, 2025 By Guest Blogger Leave a Comment
To sacrifice God for nothingness—this paradoxical mystery of the ultimate cruelty has been reserved for the rising generation; we all know something thereof already. Friederich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil In a recent interview, a person who recently voted for Trump reflected on the pain and suffering imposed by the current reign of detention […]

In England and Wales, where are the women? Still in prison, still awaiting trial, still under attack
April 30, 2025 By Guest Blogger Leave a Comment
In the United Kingdom, the Prison Reform Trust recently released its report, Resetting the approach to women’s imprisonment, which it describes as follows: “This briefing sets out the latest facts about women in contact with the criminal justice system in England and Wales. It contains statistics on the number of women imprisoned, the characteristics of […]

100 Days of Gomorrah: For Donald Trump and Project 2025
April 25, 2025 By Guest Blogger Leave a Comment
100 Days of Gomorrah: For Donald Trump and Project 2025 The Audacity of NOPE! 100 Days of Gomorrah. With apologies to the Marquis De Sade and 1785 because; The cruelty is the point in America 2025. The first 100 days; Rub tiny hands together to see what you can steal. Negotiationbation. Annexationbation. Regressive Taxationbation. Devastationbation. […]