Stephen Tuttle | Author

Defame the Victims

Feb. 21, 2026

Politicians and their followers have always played loosely with the facts, puffing up any successes and blaming failures on others. It’s been that way for a long time.

Sixty years ago we were lied to about the Vietnam War, ignoring our futility and growing losses and wildly in… Read More >>

Take the Extra Steps

Feb. 14, 2026

Celebrities like to make political statements at award ceremonies, and they’ve been doing it for a long time, usually to the displeasure of many.

Those less than thrilled frequently suggest the “stars” stick to what they know best, stay in their lane, and leave the… Read More >>

Immigration enforcement should be a win for Donald Trump. He promised he would secure the border, and he has certainly tightened it. He also claimed his administration would go after the worst of the worst illegal immigrants, those who committed terrible acts of violence before or after the… Read More >>

Affordable Housing Fantasies

Jan. 31, 2026

We are told, ad nauseam, there is a housing crisis or a housing shortage or a housing affordability crisis or something. It’s true enough that housing, especially locally, has become expensive well beyond normal increases and well beyond inflation.

Inflation ended 2025 at 2.7 … Read More >>

Heading Backward

Jan. 24, 2026

No, snow in Florida does not mean climate change was just a hoax all along. We were told, and told and told, that extreme weather events would become the norm—you know, like snow in Florida.

Meanwhile, the Phoenix area is having no winter at all, with temperatures still around… Read More >>

Economic Delusions

Jan. 17, 2026

According to our president, the United States was “dead” and the rest of the world “had no respect for us” and we had “no leadership.” That was sort of the tip of a Trumpian iceberg of relentless negativity regarding the country and our last president.Read More >>

Stops and Starts

Jan. 10, 2026

Maybe 2026 will bring some changes, things we need to stop doing and things we should start doing.

Let’s start with a message for our MAGA friends: Do yourselves a favor and let go of your 2020 delusions. You’ve had five full years to expose the “widespread fraud&r… Read More >>

Assault on the First Amendment

Jan. 3, 2026

Back in the 1950s, it was Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy and his supporters who decided the First Amendment could simply be ignored. He—and his attorney and eventual Donald Trump mentor Roy Cohn—found communists in every part of the government, including the military, and lur… Read More >>

Christmas Survives Another Year

Dec. 20, 2025

It’s about that time when a certain president will declare he has once again saved Christmas. Actually, Christmas hasn’t needed saving since the mid-1600s when the Puritans banned it in Boston because it was not mentioned in the Bible. Since then, Christmas has been on a pretty … Read More >>

Of Airports and Gravel

Dec. 13, 2025

No doubt the entire Grand Traverse region is popular with visitors and prospective new residents. Additionally, people already here travel more, and some now telework from home but have to zoom off to meetings someplace other than their home office. The result is our little airport just kee… Read More >>

Pardon Me

Dec. 6, 2025

A president’s constitutional power to offer clemency to prisoners, or soon-to-be prisoners, by way of pardon or commutation for federal crimes is absolute with the exception of impeachment. A pardon totally erases a conviction and immediately ends penalties associated with it and clea… Read More >>

Not Quite Peacemaking

Nov. 29, 2025

Our president continues to insist he is deserving of some sort of peace prize and claims he’s stopped eight wars in his 11 months in office. Now might be a good time to check up on all of that as we enter the season celebrating the actual Prince of Peace.

Let’s start wit… Read More >>

Thankful for Much

Nov. 22, 2025

For many of us, Thanksgiving is the best of holidays. No gifts are required, there is good food and good company available in abundance, and distant relatives, long-forgotten friends, and stragglers with no other place to go can all find a welcoming place at the table. Lively conversation w… Read More >>

Warmer, Wetter and Windier

Nov. 15, 2025

Bill Gates has almost given up on the idea that we can slow down, much less stop, climate change. He thinks we should pivot our thinking to how best we can deal with the inevitable climate and weather changes headed our way.

He isn’t alone in his pessimism, as homeowners in se… Read More >>

Distracting Us

Nov. 8, 2025

This is not how you win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Having apparently grown tired of unnecessarily deploying federal troops into American cities like Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Portland and threatening others, Donald Trump seems to have paused that nonsense. He seems done with Gaza, … Read More >>

Shutdown Collateral Damage

Nov. 1, 2025

On and on it drags, a shutdown of the government because we no longer have a functioning government. Congress needed to pass a budget extension no later than October 1, but they did not. Instead, we have a seemingly intractable argument over federally funded healthcare.

In the backg… Read More >>

Halftime Halfwits

Oct. 25, 2025

Some of you might remember when there were two competing professional football leagues, the National Football League (NFL), which had been around since its founding in Canton, Ohio, in 1920, and the upstart American Football League (AFL) which started playing in 1960. The leagues technicall… Read More >>

Antifa Doesn't Exist

Oct. 18, 2025

On September 22, in one of the 209 Executive Orders he’s issued just this year, Donald Trump declared “Antifa” (his capitalization) a “domestic terrorist organization” and ordered that they be investigated, disrupted, and dismantled. We'll discuss how comically… Read More >>

Incompetence in a Losing Game

Oct. 11, 2025

We don’t care who’s to blame for the government shutdown. That politicians think we do is just more evidence of their remarkable incompetence.

The federal government has shut down 10 times since 1980, and each time it was because one party or the other believed punishing… Read More >>

Around Town in October

Oct. 4, 2025

Let’s check in and see what’s happening locally, given how depressing national and international news has become.

In Traverse City, we’re not quite done fiddling with State Street. It was two-way, then for a long time it functioned quite nicely as a west-to-east on… Read More >>