It’s been little more than a year since the January insurrection where Senators and House members hid from an angry mob of Trump supporters, (And yes, Republicans, a majority of rational people know this. They’re just spending too much time on the bench to take action against what’s likely to come.) Now, with the surge of the Omicron, a variant...

A Christmas Carol in Prose Being a Ghost Story of Christmas first appeared in 1843, and for 180 years its message of redemption is more important than ever. Ebenezer Scrooge, a “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner,” is quick to criticize his nephew, his put-upon bookkeeper, and everyone about the utter wastefulness of a season that brings joy...

There’s a scene in the movie, The Princess Bride, where the undaunted hero—with all the kindness, smartness, and decency required of heroes—is doing what heroes do: saving his beloved Buttercup from kidnappers. At one point, he chases them to the Cliffs of Insanity, a rocky crag so high and so treacherous it makes Yosemite’s El Capitan look like a picnic....

In his weekly column in the Washington Post, Nicholas Kristof writes that despite Trump’s clear call for insurrection last week, “…a new poll finds that 75 percent of Republican voters continue to approve of Trump’s presidency. “As I was writing my column,” Kristof says, “I had a call with a childhood friend who told me about his ‘inside information’ that...

“… And you could use my words against me and you’d be absolutely right.” – Sen. Lindsey Graham, in remarks to Senate colleagues shortly after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. Here’s what the “principled” Senator repeated to The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, at the magazine’s sponsored conference just two years ago: “If an opening comes in the last year...

A recent story in Forbes magazine reports, “Some 56% of Republicans believe that QAnon, a far-right conspiracy theory, is mostly or partly true, according to a new Daily Kos/Civiqs poll released Wednesday…” Early in his campaign, Trump suggested that Ted Cruz’s father may be linked to the Kennedy assassination. How did he know? He read it in the “well respected”...

(With apologies to Stephen Vincent Benét) It’s a story they tell about a land that occupied the smallest place in a once powerful nation. Now, all that power was concentrated in one spot and one group whose fear of losing their authority was so great that they succumbed to the most corrupt individual between heaven and earth. So powerful, they...

Approximately 20 minutes into a one-on-one conversation with PBS NewsHour anchor Judy Woodruff last month, CBS 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl revealed something that Donald Trump told her in a pre-interview conversation. “At one point,” Stahl said, “he started to attack the press, and I said, ‘You know, that is getting tired. Why are you doing this? … You’ve won...

Apologies for the note of cynicism, but at the press conference held shortly after President Trump signed a piece of paper proclaiming, “a message of peace,” I couldn’t help but be reminded of another piece of paper and message. After meeting with Adolph Hitler, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain arrived back in England on September 30, 1938 and proclaimed: “This morning,...

Since June 2015, when he first announced his candidacy, Donald Trump has proven himself to be the most dismissive, divisive, defensive, histrionic, ill-tempered, sexist, Islamaphobic, bigoted, blame-laying, responsibility-evading, transparency-avoiding, media-needy, media-hating (except for stories about him that he likes), contradictory, federal judge-denouncing, Fake News-claiming, science-denying, historically illiterate, constitutionally ignorant, conspiracy-promoting, demagogic, fear-mongering, ally-alienating, NATO-naïve, authoritarian-leaning, Putin-praising, murderous-dictators-admiring (Korea’s Kim Jung...