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If We Can Reelect Donald Trump, We Can Be Honest About the Alamo
En route to visit family in South Texas for Thanksgiving, we stopped in San Antonio to enjoy the riverwalk and take our 9-year-old son to the Alamo. Most kids in America learn the story of the Alamo in history class at some point. If you're a student in Texas, the state is really particular about how that 1836 battle at the old Spanish Mission (...Read more
My Foreign Friends
When I was a high school kid in Missouri, around 1972 or so, there were people in our town who used the word "foreigner" to refer to anyone who spoke English with an accent or spoke no English at all. Some older people would say someone was "speaking foreign" if they spoke a language other than English.
Neither thing was necessarily meant as ...Read more
Incarceration Should Not Be a Death Sentence for Individuals Who Use Opioids
The opioid epidemic has gripped communities for more than 20 years. From 1999 to 2022, nearly 727,000 people died from an overdose involving prescription or illicit opioids.
Litigation has dramatically changed the substance-use disorder policy landscape, and today, more than $50 billion in opioid settlements from pharmaceutical companies, ...Read more

Democrats Have Work to Do to Reclaim the Mantle of Change
“Democrats are like the Yankees,” said one of the most memorable tweets to come across on X after Election Day. “Spent hundreds of millions of dollars to lose the big series and no one got fired or was held accountable.”
Too sad. But that’s politics.The disappointment behind that tweet was widely shared, but no one with...Read more
How Biden Can Act Now To Limit Trump's Mass Deportation Agenda
President-elect Donald Trump has made mass detention of immigrant communities a central part of his political platform. Trump's cabinet nominees are reportedly laying the groundwork to expand detention capacity in cities around the country. The Trump administration's proposed plans include making detention mandatory, which would trap ...Read more

Trump’s Kakistocracy Invites Possible Catastrophe
“Kakistocracy” is trending again.
The obscure term, coined as early as the seventeenth century and defined by Merriam-Webster as “government by the worst people,” has surged on Google Trends since the election.
What does government by the worst look like? To ...Read more
Biden Must Use Final Months in Office to Commute Federal Death Sentences
President-elect Donald Trump has chilling plans to use his second term to expand the federal death penalty. This expansion continues the killing spree he initiated in the final six months of his first presidency when Trump oversaw more executions than any president in the past 120 years. His plans for a second term include sentencing more ...Read more

How Democrats Let a Rising Generation of Supporters Slip Away
Far-right streamer Nick Fuentes, who usually welcomes publicity, received the type he probably didn’t want after Donald Trump’s election victory.
The 26-year old white supremacist and antisemite, who has been banned from multiple social media sites for violating hate speech policies, posted on X: “Your body, my choice. Forever.”
...Read more
We've Seen 105 Years and 19 Presidents. Trump's Gotta Get Past All of Us.
The results of the election are in: Donald Trump will be the 47th president of the United States.
Trump's win comes after a campaign in which he consistently targeted immigrants, transgender youth and other vulnerable communities with hateful rhetoric. He also threatened retribution against dissidents and political opponents.
I know that ...Read more

Will Democrats Learn From a Humiliating Loss?
In the aftermath of Vice President Kamala Harris' decisive electoral loss to former President Donald Trump, my mind has kept going back to a memorable and widely repeated gaffe by a man who was not on the ballot.
That man was Joe Biden, and the unfortunate utterance in question happened more than four years ago when he was a former vice ...Read more
Welcome to the World of MAGA Machismo, Where Muscles Trump Brains
Ladies and gentleman, here is your United States Senate, then and now:
Sen. Daniel Webster on March 7, 1850: “It is fortunate that there is a Senate of the United States (with) a just sense of its own dignity, and its own high responsibilities, and a body to which the country looks with confidence for wise, moderate, patriotic, and healing ...Read more
A totally fixable budget impasse involving a potential presidential candidate
For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, Pennsylvania’s three-week-old budget impasse is the ultimate, binge-worthy summer drama.
There are great storylines, with real-world implications with fascinating characters in leading roles. And, like any addictive warm-weather series, the chances are pretty good that politics-watchers ...Read more
Trump and his lawyers think he can get away with anything. It's outlandish.
WASHINGTON -- "The king can do no wrong." That is the ancient legal maxim used to explain why a sovereign should not be held to account for misdeeds. President Trump and his lawyers are now making arguments that make this legal doctrine look wimpy. Their vision boils down to: The king can do whatever wrong he damn pleases, and there's nothing ...Read more