Opinion

Pay close attention to the front page story in Wednesday’s New York Times about Paul Manafort’s lawyer cooperating with Trump’s lawyers. It may well prove to be very important news just a short way down the road.

In September, President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, joined the long list of Trump associates who’ve agreed to fully cooperate in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. Manafort had been convicted of eight criminal charges on August 22 (including tax fraud and bank fraud) and was facing a second trial on charges that ranged from money laundering to obstruction of justice, but he agreed to cooperate with Mueller in exchange for leniency—or so he said.

Back in 2003 or so, I put out word I was looking to hire a researcher who could find their way around the internet for a new documentary about the Iraq War, Uncovered. And into my office walked one of the tallest, skinniest, whitest – and smartest – people I had ever met.

An October 2018 report, Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape, indicated that poor national leadership and our political polarization were main concerns. Our recent midterm election offers little hope that the two problems will diminish. Thus, we ask ourselves, “What type of political leadership is now needed? Who might furnish it? Trump supporters might answer Trumpian and Trump. But most of us seek a better answer.

Except for a brief hiatus before the midterm election, President Trump has been obsessively tweeting about special counsel Robert Mueller for months. He's called him corrupt and conflicted and relentlessly complained that Mueller isn't investigating Trump's political rivals instead of Trump himself.

In what has become an ongoing saga, President Donald Trump gave an interview to the Washington Post published Tuesday that reinforced just how inept and unfit he is to be president.

Our president is a coward.

Fascist politics is once again on the rise in the United States, Europe and Latin America.

President Donald Trump drew widespread criticism after the New York Times reported, on November 20, that he encouraged the U.S. Justice Department to prosecute two of his political enemies: 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and former FBI Director James Comey. And attorney Neal Katyal, who served as acting solicitor general under President Barack Obama, is asserting that Trump’s actions are impeachable.

If it feels like the “War on Christmas” is getting really old, it is. Over ten years have passed since Bill O’Reilly first opened December with a segment called, “Christmas Under Siege”—ten long years in which his cadences and refrains and echoing chorus have become as familiar to most Americans as Handel’s Messiah. More familiar, in fact.

As progressive lawmakers and healthcare experts have frequently pointed out in recent months, few growing trends have laid bare the fundamental immorality and brokenness of America's healthcare system quite like the rise of GoFundMe and other crowdfunding platforms as methods of raising money for life-saving medical treatments that—due to insurance industry greed and dysfunction—are far too expensive for anyone but the very wealthiest to afford.

On December 7, 2018, Noam Chomsky turns 90 years old. In a 2013 Reader’s Digest poll of “The 100 Most Trusted People in America” (topped by Hollywood celebrities), Noam Chomsky, a self-described anarchist, ranked #20 (behind #19 Michelle Obama but in front of #24 Jimmy Carter). Given that anti-authoritarians throughout U.S. history have been routinely shunned, financially punished, psychopathologized, criminalized, and assassinated, Chomsky’s surviving and thriving are remarkable.

Events in Charlottesville in 2017 cascaded into domestic terrorism. Three dead and dozens wounded as neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other “alt-right” members descended upon the university that Thomas Jefferson built; their purpose, it is alleged, to defend a statue – a monument – to the Confederate Civil War soldier, General Robert E. Lee. These radical rightists arrived from all across the United States upon the college town of Charlottesville to protect, in their words, their “white” heritage. Among the many problems I have with so-called “white supremacists” is their purposeful mixing of “heritage” with “history,” rhetorically pining for a once proud “white” America.