Opinion

Republicans have a new line of attack against Democrats and President Joe Biden, but it is unlikely to last until the 2022 midterms.

"In recent days, Republicans have tried to project confidence that they've found a killer attack line on President Biden: They can use the increasing anger of parents over the failure of schools to reopen to win back the suburban voters they've lost," Greg Sargent wrote for The Washington Post. "But both Democrats and Republicans (ones who are less beholden to the party, anyway) alike have spied a problem with this line of attack: Its shelf life might not last all that long."

Unitarian Universalists like me try to remember every day, and put into practice every day, a set of seven principles. I'm telling you this, because the first principle has been on my mind since hearing news of the death of Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing broadcaster. Perhaps no one in the United States, not even Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox News, is more responsible for poisoning of the public mind, for the revival of fascist collectivism, the tolerance of cruelty and violence, the appetite for meanness, and the near-impossibility of solving social problems everyone faces in this country.

This article was originally published at The Editorial Board

On Thursday, CNN reported that the Supreme Court is defying ordinary precedent by sitting on lower court decisions about former President Donald Trump's tax returns without acting on them.

"For nearly four months, the court has refused to act on emergency filings related to a Manhattan grand jury's subpoena of Trump tax returns, effectively thwarting part of the investigation," reported Joan Biskupic. "The Supreme Court's inaction marks an extraordinary departure from its usual practice of timely responses when the justices are asked to block a lower court decision on an emergency basis and has spurred questions about what is happening behind the scenes."

A functioning democracy needs political parties to connect problems with solutions. In the current state of affairs, American democracy has only one effective democratic party. The other one has been drifting toward illiberalism in a trend that started long before Donald Trump became its leader. The violent insurrection of January 6 confirms its abdication of the values and principles for which it supposedly stands.

A society as diverse as the United States needs all-encompassing representation from its political parties. Yet the former conservative party has become so homogeneous that, today, the white non-college educated population makes up 57 percent of its voters, with 25 percent of white college-educated and 17 percent of non-white voters identifying as Republicans or Republican-leaning.

I keep hearing that Joe Biden has to govern from the "center." He has no choice, they say, because he has razor-thin majorities in Congress and the Republican Party has moved to the right.

Rubbish. First, there is no "center" between the reality-based world and the conspiracy-fueled, hate-filled world of today's Republican Party. Second, the problems the country is facing cannot be solved with milquetoast, centrist solutions – they demand immediate, bold action.

While watching Saturday's events in the U.S. Senate and the gamut of public reaction to them, I thought about the disconnect that takes place between the reality of events and the way they're perceived from the outside looking in, especially by the media.

Back in the fall of 2007, I was elected president of the Writers Guild of America, East, and within days was on a plane to Los Angeles where contract negotiations were ongoing between the Writers Guilds East and West and the studios and networks. The talks broke down. Thrown into the deep end of the pool, I was suddenly one of the leaders of an ultimately successful 100-day strike that made headlines around the world. It ended in February 2008, exactly thirteen years ago this week.

Like a bolt from the blue, the news has appeared belatedly that the US special envoy to Iran Rob Malley initiated a call with Chinese vice minister Ma Zhaoxu on February 10. Interestingly, the disclosure has come from the Chinese Foreign Ministry, which said, "the two sides had an in-depth exchange of views on the Iranian nuclear issue."

The Biden administration has not yet spoken publicly about the call. But it goes without saying that a seasoned diplomat like Malley would have taken such an initiative involving Beijing only with the approval at the highest level, although he has a mandate to renew multilateral diplomatic efforts to stop Iran's nuclear program.

Much of the United States is currently engulfed in a deadly winter storm on top of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, but the negative public health effects of this convergence may be most severe in Texas, where millions of people are endangered by a lack of heat amid record low temperatures and thousands of vaccine doses nearly expired in thawing freezers after the Lone Star state's isolated and underregulated electric grid was hit with widespread power outages.

As journalist Emily Atkin explained Tuesday, the jet stream "bringing frigid and dangerous Artic weather to millions of Americans" is, like other forms of extreme weather, related to global warming. That's because, as Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, told Atkin several years ago, "all weather events are affected by climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be."

Published nearly 170 years ago, Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe had a profound impact on American slavery. But Uncle Tom is not a relic from the 19th century: this complex figure still has a hold over Black politics. In fact, the Uncle Tom stereotype is quite possibly the most resilient figure in American history. He has survived pandemics, lived through 33 presidents (including President Joe Biden), and remains the most recognizable Black character in history.

While most people know that Uncle Tom is the titular character of Uncle Tom's Cabin, few people know how and why this literary character has transformed since his initial appearance. Why is Uncle Tom still alive in the 21st century?

In his 1874 paper "The Ethics of Belief," Cambridge philosopher and mathematician William K. Clifford tells the story of a shipowner who worried about the seaworthiness of a vessel about to carry a group of emigrants to their new lives across the ocean: "He knew that she was old, and not overwell built at the first; that she had seen many seas and climes, and often had needed repairs." However, he was able to dismiss these concerns from his mind and "put his trust in Providence" and watched the departure of the ship "with a light heart." In the end, "he got his insurance money when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales." Clifford concludes that our fictional shipowner should be judged guilty of the deaths of these people: "It is admitted that he did sincerely believe in the soundness of his ship; but the sincerity of his conviction can in nowise help him, because he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him. He had acquired his belief not by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts."

While devout believers of missionizing religions do typically consider the personal belief of others a matter of ethical concern (is it ethical to let people go to hell?), most of us on the more pluralistic end of the spectrum tend to be accommodating of the diversity of worldviews out there, even the intolerant ones, given the inherent rights we ascribe to individuals. But many personal beliefs today do endanger us collectively. During the COVID-19 pandemic, people exhibiting a range of beliefs have resisted even the slightest public health efforts to control the spread of the disease—or have torn down 5G towers they believe to be causing the pandemic. Anti-vaxxers believe without evidence that vaccines, by their very nature, cause health problems. As a result, the nation has recently undergone several outbreaks of measles, and millions of Americans are likely to refuse any vaccine for COVID-19. The cry of "religious freedom" now serves to rally those who would deny public accommodations to non-heterosexual people, just as in decades past the cry of "religious freedom" served to rally those who wanted to keep their schools segregated, and in both cases these proponents of "religious freedom" believed without evidence that the nation would experience divine calamity for extending basic rights to gays and non-whites, respectively. Veritable reigns of terror, personal and political, have been fashioned from deeply held beliefs unsupported by the slightest whisper of evidence, as the parents of Sandy Hook victims can well attest. And now, Donald Trump and his followers, on a basis of a belief (one not supported by any evidence) that he actually won a landslide election, are willing to tear this nation apart and murder Americans en masse.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has never been accused of idealism in his political career. But with his party engulfed in civil war, he has officially dropped any pretense of caring about anything other than regaining power in the next election cycle.

In a Wall Street Journal interview, McConnell made clear that his only priority was winning back control of the Senate for the Republican Party -- and by extension for himself -- and that the end would justify the means.

Former President Donald Trump responded to Sen. Mitch McConnell's (R-KY) column attacking him with a screed of his own.

Among the allegations Trump makes against McConnell is that he is "a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack" along with a list of other insults of the long-time Republican leader.