The Republican party

What is happening now in the Republican Party is a completely natural reaction to what the party has become. For many years Republican Party was run by a group of elected elites with little input from the people who supported them as candidates. Now the inmates have taken over the asylum, meaning that the rank-and-file members of the party have decided they want to run it their own way and nominate a person who actually represents their beliefs.

The people who actually cast the ballots that elect Republicans to office have finally come to understand that the people they are electing are not really people that share their beliefs. Now they’re looking for a real voice for the bigotry and hatred that they hold. In Donald Trump they have found that person. Since there are not a lot of Donald Trump’s out there to elect. It’s a little bit difficult to understand how this will translate into local and statewide elections but I’m sure that it will.

The Democratic Party faces a similar issue with Bernie Sanders playing the outsider role in speaking for the rank-and-file left-wing part of the party. In both cases, it seems like the party ought to split into two pieces or two different parties so that all of the different voices in the US political spectrum are well represented. In that way the elites of each party would be speaking only for themselves and would probably lose any election since the rank-and-file of the parties seems to be on the extremes.

The other thing going on is that you have a group of children of Cuban immigrants complaining about undocumented immigrants coming to the United States which, given the special status and immigration rights that Cubans have had in the United States for a long time, places them in a very complicated position in terms of bringing Hispanics into the Republican Party. Most people of Hispanic origin understands the special treatment that Cuban refugees have received and recognized that Cuban refugees are not in the same position as most other Hispanics trying to enter and stay in the United States.

Gay Marriage

I understand it is probable too late now to take the approach I would suggest but there was and may still be a much less controversial approach to the issue of Gay Marriage. I think the proper answer would be to get government out of the marriage business altogether and leave terms like marriage that have religious connotations out of the terms we use to describe governmental sanctioned services and statuses. While the gay community would not accept the idea of civil unions as a solution to the situation I wonder if that would have remained true if we had decided as part of that decision to have civil unions be the term applied to all government sanctioned status that allowed everyone to have the same governmental rights whether gay or straight. I think the real problem is that the terms marriage has other contexts than the governmental one that affects people’s rights.

If governments didn’t use the term marriage all to describe the relationships that they are create there would be no reason for anyone to complain about gays getting the same benefits from their relationships as straight people receive. It is really just the use of the term marriage that many people react negatively to rather than the notion of gays getting the same rights as straight people It seems to me. I do not think that we could apply to this kind of solution to relationships already established under the term marriage but I do think that it would be possible to have the same term applied to new relationships established for both straights and gays in the future.

blue-eyed soul

The term blue-eyed soul was initially used to refer to the Righteous Brothers.It means soul music in the Motown and Stax models played by white people. It is a musical format that basically had fallen off the edge of the music world since the 70s and 80s. And seems to be making a major resurgence now

Among the major purveyors of this sort of music were The Animals, the Bee Gees, Dion, Michael McDonald. The Rascals,Boz Scaggs, the Spencer Davis group, Tony Joe White and my favorite Mitch Ryder.

In the 80s and 90s there were a few major purveyors of this type of music but they were few and far between including Hall and Oates. There are a lot of great artists who do some of their work in this genre. These include Van Morrison, George Michael, Todd Rundgren, Robin Thicke, Justin Timberlake, Rod Stewart, Steve Winwood and Jason Mraz.

In recent years this kind of music has started to be to be adopted as part of the Americana music genre based on the work of bands like St. Paul and the Broken Bones, Anderson East and Nathan Ratelif and the Night Sweats. The work of these people is giving the genre new life. The current major star working in this genre today is Adelle. You could also place Amy Whitehouse in this category.

While some people including John Hall of Hall and Oates have suggested that the label blue-eyed soul is racist it still it remains the way this music is described in the music business today. follow me on spot a five to get a playlist I made up of my favorite blue-eyed soul artists.