Last Sunday, on the CBS News show 60 Minutes, I was shaken by a report by Scott Pelley in which the Trump administration cut funding to a key scientist researching the cause and cure for the coronavirus. His name is Peter Daszak, and his job involves working with Chinese research officials in Wuhan, China, the area of the first outbreak....

William Pelham Barr. Remember that name. History certainly will. There are three standards of justice. There’s “white justice,” where white people can benefit in the legal system because they are not part of a minority. Black or minority justice, is exemplified by a recent shooting where Gregory and Travis McMichael — who shot Ahmaud Arbery as he was jogging down...

Last week, an experimental drug, remdesivir, was found to shorten the recovery time for those infected with Covid-19. Now that a clinical trial has confirmed the positive effects, the FDA has given the go-ahead to use the drug on virus patients. It’s a small light at the end of a long tunnel. The number of reported cases has dropped as...

Those are the three words that come to mind when I think about military in the field. They’re also critical when they’re not in the field. The aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt carries 4,800 men and women, all sailors trained to perform specific jobs that ultimately ensure the safety of Americans at home and abroad. However, Captain Brett Crozier never expected...

At a February 28 political rally, President Trump said, “The Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus. … This is their new hoax.” In attempting to correct his meaning, Trump later said, “The ‘hoax’ was used with respect to Democrats and what they were saying. It was a ‘hoax,’ what they were saying.” No one is clear on what Trump was saying....

As the CDC and Trump Administration officials struggle to get on top of the Coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told the House Committee on Oversight and Reform yesterday that the impact of the virus “will get worse before it gets better.” “I can say we will see more cases,”...

Why can’t politicians just admit when their wrong? One answer is that such an admission is perceived as a sign of weakness that the other side will exploit. Growing up in Catholic schools on the east coast, the brothers were tough, but the nuns were tougher. If you even whispered the wrong thing, the penalty was immediate. It’s sad to...

Seventy former U.S. senators – Democrats and Republicans – wrote an open letter to their current colleagues in the Senate about the abdication of their Constitutional duties. Background – As reported by The Hill (Dec. 2019), “This is the pile of House-passed bills, 90% bipartisan, dead on [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell’s desk in the Senate #LegislativeGraveyard,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse...

Under a cloud of simmering fear, Senator Joseph McCarthy, absent any real evidence, announced to the American public that communists were working inside the federal government. During 1954’s Senate hearings investigating the Wisconsin Senator’s blatant character assassinations, one exchange was particularly noteworthy. Following McCarthy’s accusation that counsel for the committee, Joseph Welch, placed a member and communist from his own...

In his 1922 book, Public Opinion, journalist and political commentator Walter Lippmann “…argued that modern mass communication created ‘pseudo-environments’ that thwarted the ability of the average citizen to make political judgments based on facts.” To say Lippmann was ahead of his time is a master understatement, but even the keenly perceptive Lippmann could never have foreseen a tweetaholic in the...