Opinion

Suspected white supremacist Kyle Rittenhouse is on trial, facing two counts of homicide and one count of attempted homicide.

While the fate of Rittenhouse is yet to be determined, his trial, much like the trial of the killers of Ahmaud Arbery, is about much more than one individual. About more than Kyle Rittenhouse.

The Trump advisor who wrote the infamous pseudo-legal justification for overturning the 2020 election also helped to create a blueprint for what Donald Trump could do to hang onto power by force.

John Eastman joined a couple dozen right-wing operatives in simulating the aftermath of a closely contested election. The report was published in mid-October 2020 and co-sponsored by the Claremont Institute, the think tank where Eastman works.

More Hollywood celebrities with no political pedigrees are floating their names as potential state and federal candidates, with former President Donald Trump having single-handedly obliterated what was once an expectation for candidates to have political experience before running for higher office.

On Wednesday, radio icon Howard Stern, known for hosting Sirius XM's "The Howard Stern Show," suggested in a broadcast that it was his "civic duty" to run for president in 2024 if Trump does.

My grandmother was the wisest person I have ever known. She had a fifth-grade education. She lived under and survived the terror regime of Jim and Jane Crow in the South. She and my grandfather owned a small farm — they were not sharecroppers or tenant farmers. They raised many children related to them by blood or marriage: nieces and nephews, younger cousins and so on. They also took in the children of neighbors and other people who, for whatever reason, needed help. No one was turned away if they needed food or a place to stay. Many of the children my grandparents cared for went on to become doctors, bankers, teachers, lawyers and morticians.

My grandmother also offered prophecies and interpreted dreams. What she foretold and interpreted almost always came to pass. I wish I had listened to her more than I did. Sometimes prophecies and predictions must be forced into being; outcomes are never preordained. That is the riddle and paradox of such things.

Location, location, location. For good or evil, history often is made in the confines of a hotel room or suite: whether the first meeting of the post-revolution Soviet government at Moscow's Hotel National in 1918, or the drafting in 1922 of Ireland's constitution at the lovely Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin.

So to anyone who has even a little knowledge of Washington, DC, history, it should come as no surprise that the grand Willard Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, just a couple of blocks from the White House, was a hotbed of conspiracy in the post-election days leading up to the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol.

Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar shared an altered video Monday of himself killing New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and threatening to kill the president. It was a joke, Gosar's press office said, so everyone just relax. Some jokes aren't meant to be funny.

The incident sparked condemnation and calls for banning Gosar from social media. This isn't the first time. Gosar has been one of the former president's most vocal seditionaries. He is connected to organizing the January 6 sacking and looting of the United States Capitol. Earlier this year, he joined an event organized by an avowed white supremacist.

For better or worse, the nine unelected elite lawyers who hold lifetime tenure as Justices of the United States Supreme Court have the last word on the interpretation of the Constitution. They and they alone get to pass final judgment on fundamental issues that touch all of our lives.

It is critically important, therefore, that the methodologies the Justices use to decide constitutional questions meet certain standards, and that their rulings are not only consistent with the text and history of the Constitution, but also responsive to the evolving needs and values of ordinary Americans.

COVID-19 is increasingly a red-state phenomenon. Among the many statistical analyses that demonstrate the remarkable effectiveness of the vaccines, perhaps the starkest are those that reveal a dramatic divergence in pandemic severity between red and blue states. As David Leonhardt of the New York Times pointed out on Monday, before we had vaccines, there "simply was not a strong partisan pattern" to the spread of disease. But after vaccines became widely available — and especially as Republican voters refused to vaccinate in large numbers — "a gap in Covid's death toll quickly emerged." Now that difference "between red and blue America has grown faster over the past month," Leonhardt wrote, to the point where counties where a large majority voted for Donald Trump have a death rate "more than three times higher than the rate in heavily Biden counties."

Leonhardt tweeted out these statistics in chart form, as well.

Members of the Washington press corps like to tell a story about the heroes of the Washington press corps "holding power to account." This seems noble, and it can be, but more often than not, it's not noble.

In practice what "holding power to account" means is countering the dominance over the national discourse of the party in power with the values and views of the party out of power. When Donald Trump was president, the press corps elevated liberal voices, especially in the wake of George Floyd's murder. Now that Joe Biden is president, the press corps is elevating conservative voices. So far, not so bad. Things get more complicated, though. The Democrats more or less stick to an appreciable and verifiable standard of truth and falsehood. The Republicans do no such thing. When the press corps elevated liberal voices during the Trump administration, it was elevating facts and reason, more or less. (I'm trying to avoid making Democrats and liberals seem pure of heart.) During the Biden administration, however, the press corps is elevating distortions, misrepresentations and outright lies. That might be "balance," but it's a warped balance.

Because right-wingers are nothing if not unoriginal, Josh Hawley, the Republican senator from Missouri, is centering his likely doomed 2024 presidential bid on the played "feminists are man-haters" schtick. It's a bit that was long in the tooth even when Hawley, 41, was running off potential prom dates by sneering at their Lilith Fair tickets. In the era of #MeToo and the Texas abortion bounty hunter law, this "men are the real victims" nonsense is particularly laughable. Still, Hawley is digging in. And, to illustrate why he's going to get trounced in the GOP primary by Donald Trump, he's doing so by attacking two very popular American pastimes: porn and video games.

On "Axios on HBO" Sunday night, Hawley defended a speech he made at a gathering of conservatives last week, in which he insisted that liberals are trying to create "a world beyond men" because liberals hate "traditional masculine virtues" like "courage and independence and assertiveness." In response, the supposedly braver, more independent, and more assertive gender, according to Hawley, is "withdrawing into the enclave of idleness and pornography and video games." True men of courage, it's well-known, react to even the slightest criticism by pouting in their mancaves like toddlers throwing a tantrum.

When President Biden first unveiled the Build Back Better agenda, it appeared that this country was on the path to a new war on poverty. In April, he told Congress that "trickle-down economics have never worked" and that it was time to build the economy "from the bottom-up." This came after the first reconciliation bill of the pandemic included the child tax credit that — combined with an expanded Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and unemployment benefits, stimulus checks, and other emergency programs — reduced the poverty rate from 13.9% in 2018 to 7.7% in 2021. (Without such actions, it was estimated that the poverty rate might have risen to 23.1%.) All eyes are now on the future of this Build Back Better plan, whether it will pass and whether it will include paid sick leave, reduced prescription drug prices, expanded child tax credits, expanded earned income tax credits for those without children, universal pre-K, climate resilience and green jobs, and other important domestic policy investments.

For months, the nation has witnessed a debate taking place in Congress over how much to invest in this plan. What hasn't been discussed, however, is the cost of not investing (or not investing sufficiently) in health-care expansion, early childhood education, the care economy, paid sick leave, living-wage jobs, and the like. Similarly missing have been the voices of those affected, especially the 140 million poor and low-income people who have the most to lose if a bold bill is not passed. By now, the originally proposed 10-year, $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, which a majority of Americans support, has been slowly chiseled down to half that size. For that you can largely thank two Democratic senators, West Virginia's Joe Manchin and Arizona's Kyrsten Sinema, unanimously backed by Donald Trump's Republican Party, which would, of course, cut everything.

Bill Maher is mad at me.

And I've never even met the man.

American democracy is on fire. But Merrick Garland and the Justice Department appear to think it's a false alarm.

It's been two weeks since Steve Bannon was referred to the Justice Department by the House, voting to proceed with criminal contempt of Congress, at the urging of the select committee investigating the January 6th insurrection.