Opinion

Republican pollster and Kevin McCarthy friend-slash-roommate Frank Luntz isn't afraid of boasting about his personal achievements. "Dr. Frank I. Luntz is one of the most honored communication professionals in America today," reads a biography on his website. But some of his former employees tell a remarkably different story.

Chris Ingram, a former senior vice president at the Luntz Research Company who worked at the company from 1997 through the early 2000s, told Salon that Luntz's claim to deliver objective data is a "total shtick and a scam."

The "COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act" signed into law Thursday by President Joe Biden has been hailed as a rare breakthrough in the partisan gridlock that poisons American politics.

That's a fair assessment, given that the law was passed by whopping margins of 94-1 in the Senate and 364-62 in the House of Representatives. The big story was the bipartisan goodwill -- however fleeting -- that accompanied a measure that will, among other things, provide long-overdue greater protections to members of the AAPI community.

I first met Angela Godfrey-Goldstein, the Israeli peace and anti-apartheid activist, on a sunny spring Sunday in Jerusalem almost exactly seventeen years ago, in 2004. It was at the end of the second Intifada, and a few of us clambered into a van so that she and a colleague could give us a tour of what it was like to be a Palestinian living in the Occupied Territories. It was revelatory. We've remained friends ever since.

Angela's the director of Jahalin Solidarity, a non-profit dedicated to ending the forcible displacement of Palestinians and defending their rights, including self-determination and an end to the Israeli occupation of their land.

Lately I've been reading about space and time and quarks and protons and neutrons — all things I never learned about in physics, because I never took that course in high school or college. I was a biology major for a couple of years, vaguely pre-med, until I saw physics and organic chemistry looming ahead and changed my major to journalism. While studying the hard sciences, I had also fallen hard for theater, so the shift away from the study of science was partly due to the time-suck of memorizing lines and rehearsals. The gravitational pull exerted by one excellent lecture course on Shakespeare and some superb theater professors set me on a new course.

I never lost interest in the things I walked away from then. I have numerous science books around the house that I thumb through and still hope to read. On my desk right now are two stacks of books which contain (along with novels and poetry and a book about running) "The Mathematics Devotional" and "30-Second Biology." For some years I had a cool retro "Calculus for the Practical Man" that I kept thinking I might be able to comprehend.

They've been after the right to abortion for decades. The next thing they did was go after the Voting Rights Act. And just watch: They'll go after Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act next.

Nothing is sacred to Republicans anymore. Not the right to vote. Not the right to be free of search and seizure in your own home. Not the right to be free of religion if you so choose. Not the right to be free of discrimination on the basis of race, sex, creed or national origin. The only "right" they respect in this day and age is the right to follow Donald Trump, and they are in the process of turning that right, at least within their own Republican Party, into an obligation. To have rights, such as those enumerated in the Bill of Rights, is a founding principle of democracy. To impose obligations, as in the obligation to adhere unquestioningly to a leader, is a principle of authoritarianism.

You may recall that in the wake of Former FBI Director James Comey's firing in May of 2017, we got the first real reporting that clearly illustrated Donald Trump's authoritarian impulses as president. It was revealed that Trump went way beyond simply asking the then FBI director to go easy on his buddy Michael Flynn, which was bad enough. In Comey's meticulously detailed memorialization of that famous meeting alone with the new president, he claimed Trump told him he wanted him to jail reporters for publishing classified information. Considering the context for that meeting, it's pretty clear that Trump was referring to journalists who had published the information about Flynn conversing with the Russian Ambassador to the U.S. during the transition and lying about it to the FBI. Turns out that was hardly the last time Trump instructed his henchmen to go after journalists and their source.

This article was originally published at Salon

America's national mythology is a story of inexorable progress. This narrative of progress is also a tale of hope, constructed on the belief that the American people are inherently good. In addition, America's national mythology is a story of perpetual reinvention, intentional forgetting and rewriting of the past, where democracy is taken to be a given, a special bequest to the American people from God. And of course, the American people and the country itself are somehow "exceptional" among the nations and peoples of the world.

These claims wither away under any serious empirical investigation or historical inquiry — that's why they are myths. It is not facts which give myths the force of meaning but rather the way people internalize them and make them true for themselves and the larger community.

Let's get one thing out of the way first: The main reason to prosecute Donald Trump is that he's a shameless criminal. If the former president doesn't start tasting real consequences for it soon, he will only become more emboldened. No doubt one of the main reasons he tried so hard to steal the 2020 election was that he really enjoyed how he used "executive privilege" as a license for non-stop criming. If he manages to cheat or even win his way into the White House again, the amount of criminal activity we can expect will make his first term — which featured obstruction of justice, using taxpayer resources to blackmail a foreign leader, campaign finance violations, likely bribery schemes, and inciting an insurrection to overthrow an election — look like small time corruption.

Trump's criminality is central to who he is — as much as his callous disregard for others, his vanity, and his racism. So it was a very welcome sight this morning — or last night, for night owls and west coast denizens — to see New York Attorney General Letitia James announcing that her office is joining with Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance in a criminal investigation into the Trump Organization. James has been behind the so-far remarkably successful legal war on the NRA for financial misconduct and fraud, and so Trump and the grifters in his employ should be very scared right about now. Especially since, as reporting from the New York Times over the years has shown, what looks very much like tax fraud is rampant in the Trump family and its company.

Since the 2020 presidential election, the phrase "The Big Lie" has been deployed to describe the former president's undermining of American democracy. This phrase has its roots in authoritarian propaganda, most notably in Adolf Hitler's assertion that if you tell a lie often enough, it will become truth in the minds of your audience.

Trump's own "Big Lie" began with a refusal to concede electoral defeat. This deceit was then formalized in frivolous lawsuits and it ultimately inspired an insurrection on January 6, 2021. Since then, members of the GOP have either explicitly endorsed Trump's "The Big Lie" or tacitly allowed it to flourish in the consciousness of their voters, such that 60 percent of Republicans now believe the 2020 election was stolen.

Picture a member of congress and what do you see? He's a guy (those in question are usually still men, despite Marjorie Taylor Greene) with an ego the size of the Capitol dome itself, but a strangely fragile and insecure one. He'd run down his grandmother to get his mug on camera and tell the world his profound thoughts, but in private he can be strangely hollow and ignorant when the occasion doesn't call for prefabricated talking points. Imagine Ted Knight without the lovable charm.

That is a caricature, to be sure, but one that in many cases has become uncomfortably close to reality. The cause is not hard to find. For decades, large swathes of the American public have chosen to regard politics as a dirty business, and those who engage in it as scoundrels or buffoons. In so doing, they devalue the institutions that shape the civil society in which they live.

Imagine if, after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the Republicans in the United States House of Representatives said let's move on. The United States Congress need not investigate. Other agencies are already doing that work. There's no sense in duplicating efforts. There's no sense in being counterproductive. Anyway, an inquiry can't do much good unless it examines all forms of political violence. Sure, 3,000 people are dead, but a proposed bipartisan commission would just be too political.

This article was originally published at The Editorial Board

Republicans sure do have a lot of excuses for why the January 6 commission needs to be stalled! And, of course, Politico is here to present those excuses as if they were a series of sincere concerns, as opposed to transparent bad faith from people clearly engaged in a cover-up.

This article was originally published at Salon

The Republican Party and the right-wing movement are expert and prodigious liars. This causes great frustration and anger for Democrats, progressives and others who believe in real "we the people" American democracy. The American people have become massively confused and disoriented by the Republicans' torrent of lies.

This article was originally published at Salon