Opinion

When Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois announced on October 29 that he would not seek reelection to his House seat in 2022, Donald Trump proclaimed “two down eight to go!”

It was a reference to Kinzinger having become the second to announce retirement from Congress among the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump in January -- the first having been Rep. Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio. But the last guy’s braggadocio may have just been his latest con.

Now that Joe Manchin has sounded the death knell — at least for the moment — for Joe Biden's Build Back Better package, Democrats are doomed in the 2022 midterm elections.

This article first appeared in Salon.

For months now, Fox News has circulated fear-mongering reports about the possibility of President Joe Biden ruining Christmas. But now the conservative network's talking heads appear to still be grasping at straws as the predictions of doom failed to materialize — and they refuse to give the president credit.

The Recount shared a supercut of Fox News clips predicting Christmas delivery nightmares and blaming Biden:

It’s a bedrock principle of American law that average people can vindicate their legal and constitutional rights in courts of law and have those courts compel or prevent acts of other branches of government.

From preventing the taking of private property without compensation, to ordering necessary services for, say, people living with disabilities, or even an incarcerated person, such action can take several forms.

Thomas Massie and Lauren Boebert, two of the most blatantly fascistic Republican members of Congress, are dreaming of a White Christmas — with the emphasis on "White."

In the spirit of holiday cheer, Massie and Boebert recently shared family Christmas photos on social media — in which every family member is brandishing a gun. There's nothing unique about them. Such a "tradition" is fairly common among a particular subculture of American gun fetishists and "ammosexuals." This is but another symptom of America's unhealthy infatuation with gun violence.

The Democratic Party enters the 2022 midterm elections in far better position than conventional wisdom suggests for maintaining -- and even increasing -- their slim control of the U.S. Senate.

The reason is simple: Math may mean more than history in the upcoming cycle.

‘Tis the holiday season and the heroes of Fox News are valiantly arraying their forces in the War On Christmas, even as ICU beds are filling up and a new strain of COVID has arrived.

In the spirit of the season I am making a special plea to Rupert Murdoch to deliver a Christmas miracle: stop killing us.

Fascism is terrifying. So most people look away.

Fascism is disorienting: A basic understanding of truth and reality, of what is certain in the universe, is replaced by "malignant normality," a surreal environment. As a democracy slowly succumbs and then quickly collapses — which appears to be what America is experiencing right now — everything that was once familiar and comforting is replaced by a new order. Those who follow the fascist movement are subsumed in mass ecstasy. Others are disoriented as they variously decide to resist, to collaborate or simply to muddle through in their own day-to-day way.

The Founders of this nation, and the Framers who wrote our Constitution, created (as Ben Franklin famously said) a constitutional republic: a government “deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed” through citizens’ (then white men) right to vote.

They referred to this as “republicanism” because it was based on the Greek and Roman republics (then thousands of years in the past but still remembered and idealized), and when put into law they called it “a Republican Form of Government.”

"Whatcha reading for?"

It's the laugh line in a classic bit from Texas comedian Bill Hicks, recounting his encounter with a Waffle House waitress in Tennessee who did not understand why a man sitting by himself in a coffee house would read a book. The bit continues with a truck driver standing over Hicks and menacing him with, "We've got ourselves a reader."

One of the most notorious moments of the presidency of Donald J. Trump has to be that visit he made to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) on March 6th of 2020. COVID-19 hadn't even been named yet and the World Health Organization (WHO) hadn't yet designated it a pandemic but we all knew that something very bad was happening. Cases had shown up in Washington state and California. The whole country was riveted by the plight of a cruise ship sailing off the West Coast with sick people aboard and nowhere to moor. The president was reportedly angry about the whole thing and was resisting dealing with it but finally agreed to travel to the CDC's Atlanta headquarters for a photo-op to show his concern. It was one of the most astonishing presidential performances of all time:

But perhaps the most memorable of all was this:

A healthy democracy, in America or anywhere else, must be based upon shared assumptions about empirical reality, facts and truth. Today's Republican Party and other "conservatives" reject such basic principles, norms and values.

Fascism, which lies at the core of contemporary Republican politics, is the mind-killer: It is anti-intellectual, anti-rational and anti-human. Fascism also seeks to annihilate the world as it actually exists and replace it with a fantasy world created by the fascist movement and its leader.

The United States Supreme Court dominated headlines recently when it appeared ready to strike down Roe (or weaken it drastically). That drew our attention away from another case. I want to focus on it.

Carson v. Makin concerns a Maine law prohibiting the state from funding religious use at religious schools on the grounds that doing so would violate the First Amendment’s separation between church and state. Such restrictions do not apply to schools, public or private, that endeavor to uphold the difference between religion and education.