Michael and Sarah Walker

Not a perfect environmental policy. Not a zero extraction economy. Just the honest acknowledgment that exploitation without limit is not capitalism. It is not freedom. It is not progress. It is greed. And more greed.

You can post a photo to your profile on those sites. And I keep finding more and more second and third cousins with really, really dark tans. Maybe that should be a requirement for the whole family reunion. Thanks, Dad, for the heads-up, all those years ago in Inglewood. He or she just may be distant family. And that stone, the one my grandfather threw, the one I nearly kept carrying, really belongs on the ground.

I was chasing. And it was predictable. I was getting to where I could do half a dozen cartoons a week before the events even happened, because I had figured out the pattern. Which led me to a certain conclusion about myself. I was a GOD. Well. Maybe it wasn’t me. Maybe it was just that he’s so damn predictable. Or Caffine?

The river doesn't have to change course overnight. You move the banks incrementally and the water follows. It has been done before in pieces — Medicare negotiating drug prices, the ACA expanding Medicaid eligibility, surprise billing protections that took decades of advocacy to produce.

So here's my real question, the one I don't have an answer to yet. With Trump gone and MAGA weakened, two groups of people have to make a move, and I genuinely don't know which way either one goes.

Meanwhile the home-born, the ones handed this country at birth, the ones who never had to sit for a test or prove they earned it — half of them can't tell you what happened 250 years ago, let alone what's happening right now. We just handed them a democracy nobody bothered to study for.

That truth is this. The closest thing to actual power most of us will ever hold is a vote and a voice. That's it. That's the whole arsenal. It isn't much, until enough people pick it up at the same time. But neither of those things work if we stop using them. And they stop working in a different way when we use them without thinking. When we vote the way we're told to vote, believe what we're told to believe, and accept what we're told to accept.

Maybe the French will show up, polish their statue and demonstrate how they solved their problem by slicing a good loaf of French Bread with their one slice at a time slicer. Now that would make the 4th Great Again.

What is missing is a federal civilian pathway to trade certification that carries the same social contract as the degree programs. We fund your training as an electrician, a welder, a medical technician, a licensed tradesperson of any kind. You serve your community with that skill for a defined period at a wage that reflects the investment.

The fight will be against Citizens United, the Federalist Society, the Superpacs, Acs American Constitution Society, Leonard Leo, Arabella Advisors and the list goes on. It’s the dark money, they want to control and control is easier when there are fewer choices.

It was so much easier when it was just the evil left against the evil right. Now it's the evil left against the evil right against the other evil right against the original evil right.

We are currently in a period of deliberate deregulation. Sold as freedom for business to grow. What it actually produces — when the major players are left to their own devices — is consolidation until competition disappears and the consumer pays whatever the monopoly decides they pay.

So there we are, folks. Three Horsemen accounted for. What??? There are FOUR Horsemen? You're right. There are four. So who are we missing? Who are we waiting for?

If the tools exist, and they clearly do — why aren't they being used here? And if it turns out the forgiveness itself was secured by deceiving a federal court — what happens then?

I can remember when the news was presented as news. Facts. This is what is happening. If an outlet wanted to offer opinion it was called an editorial and labeled as such. The separation was clear and it was honored because the public expected it and the license required it. That line has been erased. Rebuilding it requires more than nostalgia. It requires structural protection with enforceable consequences.

The Electoral College asks how states should be represented. Ranked-choice voting asks how voters should be represented. Maybe before we decide which system is best, we should decide whose voice we are trying to hear more clearly.

The Supreme Court needs its own enforcement mechanism. A Marshal's service with the specific authority to detain anyone — anyone — that the court by majority vote determines is willfully operating outside their constitutional limits and has become a national threat. No exceptions. No immunity. No rank that places a person beyond the reach of a court order.

But enough of beer bars and bedrooms. Off to where the real back-stabbing and dirty stuff happens — politics and government.

We didn't just lose the newspaper. We lost the commons it created. Oh, I would love a basket of Ol' English Fish and Chips with a bottle of malt vinegar right now.

Document and report any suspicious activity, like voter purges or intimidation, to the FBI or state attorneys general. Ultimately, the strongest defense is high participation and collective action—history shows that when voters mobilize, attempts to restrict access often fail. If things escalate, resources like the DOJ's Civil Rights Division can provide enforcement.

The obvious goal with this set of foundation blocks isn't to fix the broken system. It's to provide a structure with enough strength that it cannot be so easily broken and manipulated again. The strength comes from simplicity. Not complexity.

There would still be infighting. There will always be infighting. Human nature doesn't get reformed by better institutional design. But more handshakes and less backstabbing is not a naive hope. It is what happens when you change the incentive structure. Right now the incentive is loyalty to one person. Change the incentive to competence in service of a shared agenda and the culture follows the incentive.

Not reform it. Not balance it. Remove the institutional infrastructure that makes it the only viable option. No party designations on ballots. No party primaries with public funding. No party based committee assignments in Congress. Watch what happens to the PACs when there are no teams to back. Watch what happens to the dark money when the jersey colors disappear. Citizens United becomes considerably less useful when there is no party machinery to funnel the money into.

He will call it insurrection. We will call it Tuesday.

That's it. That's the foundation. Everything else — healthcare, infrastructure, justice, national security, the institutions we depend on daily without noticing — sits on top of that one simple principle. Remove it and nothing else holds. The walls crack. The roof comes down. The building that took two hundred and fifty years to construct becomes a very expensive pile of rubble with gold curtains.

That reality does not erase legitimate differences between left and right. It simply raises a different question: who benefits when citizens become so consumed by fighting one another that they stop paying attention to the people holding the matches?

Sorry Charlie, but you works for us, not the other way around.

Elect moderates. I don't care if they carry a D or an R. Get away from the extremes. Flush MAGA down the toilet. Dump the wokes in a landfill. Look for people who want a functional government — leaders who understand that America is a member of the world community, not its boss. We are powerful enough to guarantee mutual destruction. Why are we too weak to simply get along?

The only way independents and moderates get a checkbox is if we force it into existence. Not by waiting for permission. Not by hoping one of the two parties decides to represent us. By showing up, making noise, and refusing to be invisible any longer.

The President of the United States works for us. He has no reason to fear us — unless we are not on his agenda. Unless what he has been doing was never in the best interest of the Americans he swore to serve. Maybe some reporter should just ask him directly. Why are you so afraid of us? What did you do that makes you need four inches of glass and snipers on the roof between yourself and the people you work for?

"This legislation would guarantee that the trillions of dollars potentially generated by A.I. are used to improve the lives of all of us — not simply to make the richest people in the world even richer."

If the rule of law applies to ordinary citizens it applies to everyone. Or it applies to no one. Pick one.

The collar changes the problem. A dog that spent its life running wherever it wanted is not suddenly going to become obedient because it found itself at the end of a rope. It's going to pull. Snarl. Snap. Tear up everything within reach. Not because it has changed, but because it hasn't.

When all is said and done the only person who will actually believe his version of history is Trump himself. That's part of the illness.

This is about today. Right now. With a sick old man spending his remaining energy screaming at everything he doesn't like on his own little social media platform — there is not a chance in hell he is simultaneously running the most powerful government on earth. So who is? Inquiring minds want to know.

The Founders feared two things above almost everything else: a standing army loyal to one man, and an executive who could act without legal consequence. They built a system of separated powers precisely to prevent either. The immunity ruling does not merely strain that system. It carves a hole in it.

That's what this series has been. Not solutions. Not a platform. Not a party. Just someone who has been paying attention since 1964 sitting with the question honestly and refusing the checkboxes that don't fit. Harry Chapin understood it. His little man said it best. 'Cause I know I'm goin' nowhere. And anywhere's a better place to be.

We don't need a monument to remember this lesson. We don't need a reminder carved in stone. This one will be DNA. Let that be how we actually honor the ones who earned our respect.

That is not a rhetorical question. It is the most practical question anyone can ask right now. Seeds need ground. Ground needs memory. Memory needs honesty. We are running out of all three.

Same work scenario, same house, same need for caffeine, same TV and why is that big plane flying to those buildings. I didn't have a clue to what was unfolding, I just turned on, you guessed it, the television and watched the twin towers turn into rubble. September 11, 2001, 3000 died in that attack against our soil and out freedom.

The donkey and the elephant. I'm not sure either animal still exists in any form I recognize. What replaced them nobody has named yet.

From the Author of The Long View From 1964 The Second Amendment was never about Vinney the desperado riding into town looking for a fight. It was never about bravado or immunity or masks or the performance of toughness by people who have never actually been tested.

But we have already established in this country that fair elections and accepted elections are not always the same thing. I have a sinking feeling we will find ourselves watching Second String Donny screaming foul again. Not just about the midterms. About the $1.776 billion that was stolen from his patriots along with everything else.

So yes. You have to make mistakes to learn. You have to touch something hot to understand burns. You have to get things wrong before you understand what right costs. But the secret — the thing the scars actually teach you if you pay attention — is to get a small burn and learn your lesson. Not go down in the flames.

Yes, I was in the Army for six years. Yes, I was trained as a Pioneer Combat Engineer. Yes, I was taught to clear minefields with a bayonet, build bridges between our infantry and theirs, and duck when the bullets screamed by.

If you think seven years old is too young to remember something like that, you don't know a child whose memory is a video recorder without an erase feature. As I grew older I could never understand how the German people had allowed it to happen. How ordinary men and women watched it unfold and did nothing. How a civilization that produced Beethoven and Goethe looked away while the ovens ran.

Sheep don't storm castles. They stand in the field and wait to be shorn. Again and again and again. Occasionally complaining to each other about the cold. Occasionally sharing a strongly worded post about the shearer's technique. Then they get turned into shepherd's pie.

Back to Superman, because that's what this is all about. Truth, Justice and the American Way. Straight from the 1940's comic books So I ask you — by today's standards, what is the American Way?

You are in the room. You still have a choice that most of us don't have. We can vote, we can write, we can refuse the checkbox that no longer fits — and we will. But you can do something more immediate.