The Pluto-in-Capricorn years are raking the body politic over the coals. All around us governing infrastructures are showing their cracks and fissures, only to crumble into littler and littler pieces as 2010 unfolds.It’s a good time to consider what we mean by politics. A lot of people say “I’m not interested in politics” in a way that makes you suspect…

The squeeze is on. The Saturn-Pluto square, which has been building for several months, has now hit the 90-degree point. With Saturn freshly arrived in Libra and clicking into formation with Pluto at the second degree of Capricorn, the defining aspect of the Cardinal Cross is now in place.

A window opened wide in a rank and fetid room. That’s what we’ll get from the next two years of Saturn in Libra, if we play our cards right. Air is the antidote to sentiment (excess water), lack of imagination (excess earth) and bloviating blowhards fired up by their own pseudo-convictions (Rush Limbaugh.)(I mean excess fire).

Today is the first day of Scorpio. Every year at this time I ask myself whether there’s been any change in the blasphemy that’s been made of Halloween. I have written elsewhere about the original meaning of this holiday, once a holy day in the truest sense of the word. Samhain, as it was known to the ancient Celts, is a…

As I type these words, Saturn is only three degrees away from Libra. This should provide a refreshing change. For two and a half years Saturn has been in Virgo, the sign of health and sickness. Although there were other transits that went into making health care reform the 500-pound gorilla that it has become, we can chalk up to Virgo…

Neither the right nor the left wants to talk about Afghanistan. The staunchest supporters of Obama’s military policies right now are Republicans, and they sure don’t want to come out in favor of this president at this moment. Meanwhile, three-fourths of Congressional Democrats oppose the war, and they’re trying just as adamantly to avoid coming out against him.

Friday’s New Moon (9/18) is no standard-issue New Moon. Up in the sky right now four planets are gathering together in opposition to Uranus. This grouping gooses up the ongoing Saturn-Uranus opposition, signature of America’s red-hot culture wars. The opposition reaches exactitude five times, and the hit today — Sept 15th — is the most critical of the five. The…

Things are starting to cook. Over the next few weeks we’ll have a series of short-range transits that will serve as triggers for the dramatic long-range ones that have been the subject of so much astrological buzz: the transits of 2010-15. These are the years singled out by many ancient traditions as the make-or-break threshold for humanity.

The healthcare reform brouhaha that now engulfs the USA is a cosmic in-joke. It is pointing our attention to the fact that the country itself is deathly ill. In Soul-Sick Nation I make the case that the USA is one sick puppy. If we’re seeking an understanding of why the national discourse is so surreally off-track right now, I propose that…

Astrologically, it wasn’t hard to see that health care was going to be the issue of the year. Consider the makeup of the Super Conjunction of 2009: Neptune (universality), Chiron (healing) and Jupiter (reform) in Aquarius (medicine). All the ingredients were there. This was the set-up long before this summer’s astonishing partisan antics enflamed the debate like a mad doctor setting…