Tag archive: Sisyphus

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The Man Who Would Be Speaker: The Kevin McCarthy Debacle

Well, that was fun!  The 118th Congress kicked off with a bang on January 3rd, and an impressive showing of just how incapable of governing the House GOP majority truly is.  Far from running the country, they couldn’t even pick a Speaker!  Pardon me while I indulge in a bit of schadenfreude, a marvelously descriptive turn of phrase which in German means “shameful joy,” taking pleasure in the misfortune of another.  I really should be mourning the tragic state of politics in America, and I do, truly.  But somehow, I can’t help smiling at Kevin McCarthy’s discomfiture.

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DC in the Spotlight

Well, the cosmos has done it again!  With unerring precision, the celestial sphere has once again placed its astrologic finger on the nub of current events.  It’s Hell Week in Washington, with Democrats in disarray, struggling to pass the signature legislation of the Biden administration, keep the government from closing its doors, and facing some of the most momentous votes in recent years.  Given all the Capitol Hill drama, how can this fail to register on the cosmic etch-a-sketch?  Short answer – it doesn’t!

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The California Recall Election

For the second time in twenty years, California is holding a recall election for its governor.  Like Gray Davis in 2003, the at-risk chief executive is a Democrat, Gavin Newsom, less than two years into his first term, former mayor of San Francisco.  Unlike the successful challenge mounted by Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2003, there is no high-profile Republican candidate running to unseat Newsom in 2021.  Rather, upwards of 40 little-known candidates have ponied-up to the electoral bar, from across the political spectrum, but Newsom is not among them, as the current governor is not allowed to run to replace himself.

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A Tale of Two Andrews

Two famous Andrews came to crisis moments in their biographies within a day of each other, in mid-August 2021.  On the 9th, a lawsuit was filed against HRH Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, Queen Elizabeth II’s second son, alleging sexual abuse of a minor; and on the 10th, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo resigned under a firestorm of condemnation after a probe into allegations of sexual misconduct revealed a pattern of abuse of female staffers.

Two Andrews, in two days, both charged with sex crimes?  What’s going on here, celestially speaking? 

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Capitol Fireworks: the 1/6 Select Committee

Independence Day may be over, but the fireworks in DC are just beginning.  Hard to imagine this could be a controversial topic, but in the post-Trump age even an investigation into an insurrectionist attack on the US Capitol itself can become a bone of contention between the two Parties.  Some of the very lawmakers whose lives were threatened by the fury unleashed by Donald Trump’s supporters, now stand by and opine that the attack was just high spirits or a typical congressional tour group.

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Trump & Sisyphus: Futility in Motion

Asteroid Sisyphus is named for that worthy denizen of Hades, doomed to forever roll a rock uphill, only to have it roll down again, thus necessitating endless repetition of the action.  As such, astrologically, Sisyphus represents futile action without purpose or accomplishment – repetitive, pointless effort which achieves nothing lasting. 

In light of President Trump’s repeated, one might say endless, refusal to accept the clear results of the 2020 election, where Americans handed him his hat and showed him the Oval Office door, it occurred to me to take a closer look at asteroid Sisyphus, to see what role it might be playing in the election and its aftermath.  It’s not just Trump who’s beating this dead horse:  90% of elected Republicans in Washington refuse to publicly acknowledge his loss, and his “legal team” has been rejected in all but one of the nearly 50 court cases filed to overturn the results in key battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin.   

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