Opinion

"God grant it was not an apparition of the devil," Hans Luther reportedly responded to his son Martin's claim that a voice from heaven had called Martin to be a monk. Luther's father proposed an alternative scenario: Satan, not God, was responsible for Martin's (poor) decision.

That story sprang to mind when I read that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene had argued in a recent interview, and then clumsily tried to explain away in an official statement, that "Satan's controlling the church." The evidence she gave for such satanic control? Christian groups who provide aid to undocumented immigrants.

Though it took more than a century as well as countless lives lost to white supremacy, the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act is now US law.

It has been widely hailed as an important piece of symbolism.

Florida Senator Rick Scott, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, has released a plan which says, honestly and clearly, exactly what Republicans want to do to the poor.

It’s this plan that Joe Biden highlighted Tuesday in setting up a contrast between the Democratic agenda and the Republicans’.

So much depends on the opinions of respectable white people. As long as they tolerate fascism while ambivalent toward liberal democracy, the Republicans will always have the advantage above and beyond the structural advantages they already enjoy. What is it going to take?

What is it going to take for respectable white people to understand that the Republicans, their paramilitaries and their justices on the Supreme Court are ensnaring whole classes of people in expanding rings of social control? It began with immigrants. It’s going to end with – I don’t know. But when states enact laws regulating marital sex, respectable white people will ask: “How the f*ck did this happen?”

In 1972, not long before the decision in Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court was asked to determine whether the death penalty violated the Eighth Amendment ban against cruel and unusual punishment.

The death penalty had been around for more than three centuries in North America by the time the court was asked to review it. However, there hadn’t been an execution in the United States for five years preceding 1972.

Trump unleashed what has become a million US Covid deaths, a war in Ukraine, and an attempted coup against the United States, all while coarsening our politics and ratcheting up hate. And now racist, rightwing politicians who disdain democracy are imitating him all across the nation.

What is the impact of all this on America and Americans, and when will he be held to account?

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., a member of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, recently tweeted: "We now have evidence to support the story of the worst presidential political offense against the Union in American history."

OK, good. Bring it. Please.

The beginning of May before midterm elections signals the official start of primary season and the kickoff of fall campaigns. Because midterms are usually referendums on a president’s performance, the conventional view now is that Democrats are in deep trouble because Biden’s approval ratings are in the cellar.

But the conventional view doesn’t account for the Trump factor, which gives Democrats a fighting chance of keeping one or both chambers.

Who are the elite of America? If you watch Fox, or spend time in rightwing media bubbles, you’ll probably think of celebrities, musicians, actors and athletes – all those fashionable bicoastal entertainers who look down on hard-working middle

A recent ProPublica report based on IRS tax files from 2013 to 2018 shows this vision of America’s upper-crust is thoroughly misleading.

Turns out there was more than one leak of the draft opinion promising to strike down Roe. Three, according to SCOTUSBlog. The last two were in Politico. The first appeared in a Wall Street Journal editorial.

“While not formally presented as relying on a leak, the editorial transparently does,” wrote Tom Goldstein. “The most obvious example is that it predicts that Alito is drafting a majority opinion to overrule Roe, but gives no explanation for that prediction and none is apparent.”

For almost five decades, Roe v. Wade has been established American law, guaranteeing the constitutional right of choice to all Americans. Even those Supreme Court justices now ready to toss that precedent aside have previously testified under oath during their Senate confirmation hearings that they believed Roe is established law that ought to be respected.

They lied.

Despite the fact that forced childbirth has been a major goal and central organizing strategy of the GOP for approximately four decades, Republican political strategists don't exactly seem stoked about a leaked draft opinion indicating that the GOP-controlled Supreme Court plans to overturn Roe v. Wade outright. Turns out that abortion rights are very popular, likely due to people's well-documented enthusiasm for fornication without procreation. With the midterms just a few months away and Democrats signaling that they intend to make this a major issue, Republicans are scrambling for a political strategy to make their mandatory childbirth policy seem not as bad of an idea as it obviously is.

On Tuesday, Axios leaked a three-page talking points memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC). The strategy that the Republican campaign strategy group suggests is to lie. A lot. Lie every chance you get. Lie about everything, all the time. Lie so often that the media stops bothering to fact-check you and your opponents grow exhausted trying to disprove your lies. It's a tried-and-true trick for the GOP.