Reading Time: 7 minutes Back in 2020, news was rife with a sexual misconduct allegation involving Joe Biden and a former employee named Tara Reade. Even then, the timing of the allegation was seen to be politically motivated given that Joe Biden was running for President later that year, and he appeared to have a much cleaner record of […]
Politics
Posted inWar and Peace
After Memorial Day: Where the US struggle goes from here
Reading Time: 6 minutes It was a complicated Memorial Day weekend in the US, and not just because of the nation’s now-quotidian gun violence, or because the current debt ceiling crisis threatens an already “degraded” US military with further hits to “readiness and morale”. Just prior to the weekend’s events, which honor and mourn people who died in the […]
Posted inEconomics
On debt ceilings and democracy: Another case of misguided US exceptionalism
Reading Time: 8 minutes In 2011, the US was still recovering from the 2008 recession. National debt as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) had shot up from 68 percent in 2008 (the year bank bailouts started, under George W. Bush) to 95 percent, in part after the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act under Barack Obama. In 2009, […]
Posted inLaw
Supreme Court: ‘a 7-2 conservative majority that would last a quarter century’
Reading Time: 3 minutes There is no doubting that Donald Trump was one of the most successful presidents in US history—which is saying something for a man who won only one term and lost the public vote twice. By a lot. The presidential vote is arguably a vote for Supreme Court nominations. When voting in US elections for either […]
Posted inPolitics
Trapped in the crossfire of a jarring political moment
Reading Time: 2 minutes Last year, I joined American Atheists as their State Policy Counsel, and the disastrous 2023 state legislative session has very much been a trial by fire. Most of my day-to-day includes tracking thousands of bills, managing our grassroots secular advocacy teams in various states, and working to advance positive legislation while simultaneously trying to stop […]
Posted inLGBTQ News
Florida’s latest Gish Gallop of legislative cruelty
Reading Time: 5 minutes May 17 was the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia. It was also the day when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed five new bills into law, under a so-called “Let Kids Be Kids” package that would better fit the title if certain childhood traumas, like lockdown drills, weren’t considered part of doing business in […]
Posted inPolitics
Lessons from Turkey: nationalist crises at home and abroad
Reading Time: 4 minutes It’s been another grim week for world watchers. In the past seven days: Thirty-three Palestinians, including six children and three Palestinian Islamic Jihad militants (PIJs), were killed amid air strikes, as the Iron Dome faced off against over 970 PIJ rockets, accidentally killing an Israeli and injuring five others in the process. Sudan’s civil war […]
Posted inHealth
Reminder: Reject anti-vax politicians
Reading Time: 4 minutes Anti-vax ideology isn’t a harmless quirk or a side issue. It reflects a worldview unmoored from empirical reality, and that’s an extremely bad sign for a candidate’s ability to make the right choices in a crisis.
Posted inWar and Peace
The bothsidesism of Trump’s CNN town hall
Reading Time: 6 minutes CNN hosted what has been seen by many as a disastrous television appearance of the Presidential nominee-to-be in an hour of lies and playing to a partisan crowd. And my, the crowd was partisan. The Guardian summed up many analysts’ exasperation in their piece “‘What was CNN thinking?’: our panel on Donald Trump’s town hall”: […]
Posted inClimate Crisis
New York makes the Green New Deal a reality
Reading Time: 4 minutes The Build Public Renewables Act takes New York State one big step toward a better future.