Long game strategies, when employed with simplicity, specificity and devout dedication, are the most effective way to cause change lasting for decades. When the Labor Movement and others seeking to safeguard the rank-and-file worker and common citizen from economic calamity gained a friend in the White House, many of their ideas and demands found their…
Continue Reading
The spring of the grassroots
We are well into May of a midterm election year and in spite of an unseasonably cool spring, primary election campaigns are off and running. Regardless of what may be happening in the larger national and global picture, the focus on local state legislative politics is heating up. Given that all politics is local, that…
Continue Reading
A citizen’s testimony of a failed state government
Like many other evolving stories which illuminate and illustrate our life and times along this, the most conservative stretch of Old Route 66, I have had to stop myself more than once from writing this piece before the subject matter was ripe enough to rate appropriate commentary. Since January 2011, the Oklahoma State Senate, House…
Continue Reading
A look back on a leader in crisis
As I have often mused while waxing nostalgic, the more things change the more they stay the same. As a child, I remember asking certain of my elders what they thought of what we were seeing on the evening news only to be dismissed by categorical proclamations that the World and the nation were “Going…
Continue Reading
Witness to a movement: Marching for their lives
Power concedes nothing without demand. Those in government who currently wield the power of crafting legislation and have done nothing in the face of the crisis generated by mass school shootings were served notice on Saturday. A genuine grassroots movement is on the rise and their collective voices demanding action to reign in gun violence…
Continue Reading
The bottom line question for all voters in 2018
As most regular readers have noticed, there is a stock in trade of what gets published on this blog. For the most part, the stock in trade of Reason Rest Stop is information. There may be an occasional humorous story or a run down of an entertainment event or a book or movie review, but…
Continue Reading
A rising Democratic tsunami
Oklahoma’s own Will Rogers once pointed out as only a political pundit of his stature could: “Conditions win elections and not speeches.” As anyone with a thorough knowledge and understanding of the history of American politics will tell you, there has always been an element of contentious polarization from the beginning of the Republic to…
Continue Reading
Ending the safeguarded impunity of one industry
Some regular readers may recall more than a couple of instances when I have rhetorically alluded to “stacking up the bodies” in reference to government deregulating industry with reckless abandon. Even as you read this the stack of bodies from American mass shootings continues to grow. To remain positive while writing this I really have…
Continue Reading
The heartbreak of failed leadership
Having served in the Navy as long as I did, I learned a few things about leadership. I remember receiving an intense hands-on tutorial on the subject in my early enlisted days. I have the direct authority of front line superiors to thank for those valuable lessons. Some of those mid grade and senior NCOs…
Continue Reading
The horror of normalizing chaos government
We are nearly four and a half months away from being a mere three years removed from the emergence of the ultimate political chaos candidate announcing his intent to seek the nation’s highest office. As a political novice who had previously never been elected to anything, he managed to turn convention on its head by…
Continue Reading