Earlier this year, we took our first big family vacation to Disney World. Our kids are at that wonderful age of earnestness. They get excited about every journey and really believe in the magic of special places. Walking into the park, they barely contained their excitement. There was screeching at every character sighting and hyperventilating […]

Read more "Finding Thankfulness and Gratitude Deep in the Hundred Acre Wood…"

Nothing about my baby brother was ever small. He was born big– literally. Mike wasn’t just a physically large man, his presence, his thoughts, and his feelings were larger than life too. That bigness defined his life and the things most here would cite as examples of what they loved about him. Michael’s immense size […]

Read more "A Big Eulogy"

I haven’t had much time to write lately. Some of that is due to how depressing I find most of my favorite topics to be right now. But mostly I have just been very busy. 2020 and 2021 have been hard on humanity. The social isolation, career disruption, stress, illness, and loss that our family […]

Read more "Life Update 2021"

Periods of political transition are often marked by cognitive dissonance in messaging. Old shibboleths are hard to drop. One of the most eyeroll inducing examples of this in our current discourse is watching GOP mouthpieces and standard bearers twist their defense of not taxing estates into something that makes sense in their larger “working class” […]

Read more "Estate Taxes and the Middle Class"

Bill Kristol whipped up a debate on NeverTrump Twitter this weekend by writing that the best immediate path forward for moderate conservatives is to help the Biden administration succeed and to bolster the centrist wing of the Democratic party. Adopting the term “Red Dog Democrats” that Tim Miller rolled out post-election on the Bulwark, Kristol […]

Read more "“Red Dog Democrats” and the Most Prudent Path Forward for Former Republicans"

While social media (predictably) was obsessed with partisan sniping over what is or is not an appropriate way to acknowledge the passing of a deeply divisive public figure with the death of Rush Limbaugh last week (that is when we were not all busy appropriately dunking on Ted Cruz for the most ill-advised vacation in […]

Read more "Dreampolitik and the Death Spiral of the Modern Conservative Movement"

One of the most common complaints people make about our politics is how detached politicians are from what “we the people” want. This couldn’t be further from the truth. American democracy is very market oriented– especially the in the House. Yesterday’s House Republican secret ballot votes on Liz Cheney and Majorie Taylor Greene was a […]

Read more "Voters are the Party"

There is only Trump. The first piece I explicitly wrote about Donald Trump was nearly five years ago (feels more like 20 years ago). It was titled “Creating a Monster.” I argued that the rise of Donald Trump to win the nomination of the GOP was the natural evolution of where the party had been […]

Read more "There is No Post-Trump GOP"