Opinion

The US military completed its pullout from Afghanistan in August 2021. It was a disaster. I won’t recount details. They are well known. Point is the news was huge. Many in the press corps asked how the president would survive the “political fallout.” Some in the pundit corps wrote his obituary. The Republicans yelled and yelled.

Then nothing.

Throughout my life, I have questioned my Christian faith. On two occasions in my life, however, I have seriously considered the possibility that the God who has directed every aspect of my life is just a very nuanced invisible friend. The first time when I was 19 years old and took a college course on faith. The second time is right now.

This article first appeared in Salon.

“On January 30, 1968, 21 [Black] workers were sent home without pay because of the rain. When the rain let up an hour later, white employees were still on the clock and worked all day for pay. This caused a furor among the men and T. O. Jones [a former sanitation worker and president of the AFSCME Local] took up the issue with the new Directory of Public Works, Charles Blackburn.”

“…Two days later, the first day of February, two sanitation employees - Echol Cole, 35, and Robert Walker, 29 - were crushed to death by a malfunctioning garbage truck. They were inside the truck trying to escape a driving rain long enough to eat their lunch. Work rules in the Sanitation Department called for workers to clock out when it rained. Meanwhile the predominantly white supervisory and administrative staff were allowed to continue working for pay. Both of the dead men were relatively new to the job. Neither man had a life insurance policy."

When I moved to San Francisco in 2013, the state of California was in a drought. As a transplant from the Midwest, I discovered that this manifested itself often at restaurants. Accustomed to water being excessively offered at a restaurant table, I remember waiters telling me that, because of the drought, they were only serving water upon request and in very small quantities. At that moment, I began to understand why Californians bring their own water bottles everywhere.

This article first appeared in Salon.

During the George W. Bush years, as the nation waged the "global war on terror," there was massive concern among civil libertarians about the government's indifference, if not hostility, to human rights and civil liberties. While the "Bush Doctrine" held that "either you're with us or you're with the terrorists" and professed a commitment to spreading democracy (at the point of a gun) around the globe to defeat them, Vice President Dick Cheney articulated an even darker vision in a "Meet the Press" interview five days after the 9/11 attacks:

We have to work the dark side, if you will. Spend time in the shadows of the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion.

It wasn't long before it became clear what he meant. Eventually, the press and other investigators uncovered evidence that the government had gone very dark indeed. It had unleashed the FBI on innocent American Muslims, while military units and the CIA were kidnapping and torturing supposed terrorism suspects in secret "black sites" all over the world. There were secret no-fly lists and warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens, nearly all of this occurring in total secrecy without oversight by the courts or the Congress.

Ron DeSantis likes to say Florida is where “woke” goes to die. If by “woke” he means tolerance, science, inquiry, free expression, and knowledge, yes, Florida is where “woke” goes to die.

Florida is where public education goes to die; Ron DeSantis is poisoning it.

The trend in world history since the Second World War has been toward secularism and away from religious control politically, socially and culturally. With Iran as a notable exception, most nations throughout the world have shifted to some extent toward Thomas Jefferson’s axiom of “separation of church and state.”

However two highly-developed nations have recently bucked the secular trend. Israel and the United States have elected leaders, namely Trump and Netanyahu, who attempted to reinvigorate religion in their respective societies in terms of law, culture and political policies. What is it about the political systems and culture of these countries that enabled religious constituencies to gain ascendancy with a promise of fundamentalist revival? What is it about these two men, Netanyahu and Trump that enabled their rise along with this revival?

Question: How many legs does a dog have if you count the tail as a leg? Answer: Four — calling the tail a leg doesn't make it one.

Likewise, calling a small group of partisan lawyers a "supreme" court doesn't make it one. There's nothing supreme about the six-pack of far-right-wing political activists who are presently soiling our people's ideals of justice by proclaiming their own antidemocratic biases to be the law of the land. On issues of economic fairness, women's rights, racial justice, corporate supremacy, environmental protection, theocratic rule and other fundamentals, these unelected, black-robed extremists are imposing an illegitimate elitist agenda on America that the people do not want and ultimately will not tolerate.

After last week's protracted and frankly hilarious intra-GOP battle over the speakership, Republicans got straight to work passing their first big messaging bill: Allowing rich tax cheats to evade legal consequences for defrauding the government. The bill would rescind an $8 billion-a-year expansion of the IRS budget that was signed into law by President Biden last year. That money is meant to address numerous issues, such as improving customer service (which everyone ought to want), but Republicans haven't tried to hide what truly offends them her: Money earmarked for pursuing criminal prosecutions of wealthy tax evaders.

In their usual dishonest fashion, Republicans have been demagoguing this issue for months, falsely implying that the Biden administration wants to go after middle-class people who fudged a little in estimating the value of their donations to Goodwill. In reality, as many experts have pointed out, this funding is meant to make it less likely the IRS will go after ordinary people. More resources means prioritizing the wealthy tax cheats who have consistently been able to outspend the IRS on legal fees, and often avoid serious consequences. If this GOP bill were to pass, it would result in more than $100 billion in lost government revenue, much of that staying in the pockets of the yacht-owning class.

You can’t understand the J6 insurrection without understanding the conspiracy theory that Donald Trump’s victory was stolen by massive invisible voter fraud.

These conspiracy theories are so ubiquitous and so implausible that it’s tempting to tune them out. But understanding the deception is critical to understanding why ordinary citizens tried to end democracy in America.

Those who value Montana’s Constitution are concerned—terrified, actually—of what the Legislature’s supermajority (and its new Freedom Caucus) are going to try to do to it this session.

Here’s how it can happen: Article XIV of our Constitution sets forth how it can be revised: