Category: Civil_Notion_RSS

We’re re-designing the website. We decided it was time for a good cleaning and a fresh coat of paint.Check back in a few weeks to see the new and much improved Civil Notion site.In the…

    ” I did not anticipate that there would be such a stalwart effort to make sure that the most                      important thing was that President Biden didn’t get anything done.”           …

                                                                  Joe Manchin is a lying liar who lies.                                                                                                            – Jennifer Taub[i] I dislike making predictions in January about what to expect in October.  Although I have my suspicions about what’s lurking out there and getting ready to pounce, the value of year-ahead prognostication is mostly entertainment. Sadly, I’ve lost my sense of humor when […]

Introduction The Manchin saga continues. In Part 1 of this series, I discussed the aftermath of Manchin’s abrupt announcement on Fox Sunday News a week before Christmas that he would not be voting in favor of President Biden’s Build Back Better act (BBB)—or what was left of it. He’d already whacked away at the original […]

                                           “We were close,” Senator Tina Smith (D-MN) Introduction There’s a jolly old soul in West Virginia who’s laughing his a** off today. Who is this laugh-master? Why it’s Old King Coal, of course; and, he just got off the phone with Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV). On the call, West Virginia’s senior Senator told the […]

Photo: C-SPAN screengrab House Passes the Build Back Better Act (budget reconciliation). Democrats are on the left in this image, the Republicans to the left. Well, it finally happened. An infrastructure bill has found its way onto a president’s desk for signing. Affectionately called the BIF in the halls of Congress and along the K […]

                                   The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves.                                                                                                                           Cassius/Julius Cesaer For the first Earth Day in 1970, the famed illustrator Walt Kelly paraphrased Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry when his Pogo character looked across a field of debris and uttered the now iconic phrase. We have met the enemy, and he is us. Pogo’s […]

What’s being talked about on Capitol Hill is infrastructure and President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda. What’s currently being built, however, are ramparts in anticipation of the 2022 and 2024 federal election battles that I am confident will be “take no prisoners” affairs. The brewing battles will not just be cross-aisle affairs. The Democratic left […]

         Koan: a paradox to be meditated upon that is used to train Zen Buddhist monks to abandon            ultimate dependence on reason and force them to gain sudden intuitive enlightenment. Had someone asked me a year ago what leadership characteristics Donald Trump and Joe Biden would share as president, […]

                    We must not squander our Congressional Democratic Majorities and jeopardize                              the once-in-a-generation opportunity to create historic change….                                                             Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the US House of Representatives History is not on the […]