Ward on Words

2025 started off with a horrific domestic terrorism incident in New Orlean s – a US Army veteran from Texas plowed an Ford F150 into a crowd of New Year's Eve revelers who were celebrating at New Orleans' historic Bourbon Street, killing 14 people and injuring many more.  Later on January 1, 2025, a US Army soldier killed himself in his Tesla in front of the Las Vegas Trump Hotel . In a letter, he urged American insurgents to use his death as a "wake-up call " to address the country's ill.  After the New Orleans explosion, the president-elect went on record claiming that the incident was the result of Biden's "open borders" policy. His Truth Social post was retweeted nearly 14,000 times. His lie was widely disseminated. Factually, the US does not have an open border policy; the veteran who killed 14 on New Year's Eve in New Orleans was a Texan, not a migrant - but facts don't seem to matter to the president-elect. Fox News spent much of New Y...

John Roberts, a man who attained the most powerful legal post in the country because he aligned with the values of the Federalist Society, an extreme right-wing organization, has issued his annual diatribe against anyone who complains about the corrupt actions of his court . Once again, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States has used his bully pulpit to whinge about the public's anger at the corruption of the Roberts Court.   How corrupt is the Roberts Court? Let me count the ways... Mrs. John Roberts earned millions "consulting" law firms, many of whom had cases in front of her husband .  Clarence Thomas, in a class of judicial corruption all by himself, has accepted multiple excessive gifts from people with cases in front of the court and he did not disclose these gifts as required by law. On any other bench, he would have been removed long ago.  Sam Alito, also happy to accept massive gifts from "friends" with cases in front of the cour...

FULL DISCLOSURE: I am an ordinary citizen, raised in the Chicagoland metropolitan area now living in Appalachia. I am not a DC pundit or constitutional lawyer who regularly appears on cable news to tout my expertise. I am just a voter and a patriot and I write this post as a marker of this moment in our history. Donald Trump will become president on 1/20/25 and he promises authoritarian rule and expensive lawsuits against anyone who opposes any of his ideas .  The president-elect has been found liable by a jury for sexual abuse of a woman in a department store dressing room - he owes her millions in penalties for defaming her - he claimed he wouldn't ever assault a woman as ugly as she was but in a videotaped deposition , he thought a picture of E. Jean Carroll was a picture of his ex-wife, Marla Maples. He buried his first wife hastily on his golf course - h er grave is overgrown and ignored by the groundskeepers, apparently . (WTAF?!) Trump is legally prevented from being involv...

In one of the biggest news stories of the week, Brian Thomas, the CEO of United Healthcare (UHC), was gunned down and murdered early one morning on a Manhattan street. Bullets with the words "Deny," "Defend" and "Depose" were found at the scene of the crime. The suspect is still at large.  News of Thomas' murder sparked a huge response on social media – some saw the murderer as a " folk hero ;" many expressed no sympathy for the man gunned down on his way to an investor meeting ; some in news media took the opportunity to chastise anyone who did not express appropriate sympathy for the murdered man; many people shared on social media their perspectives on the murder - here are a few found on Threads and Twitter:  A big question prompted by this murder - who are we as a nation? Why are so many people expressing such enormous lack of sympathy for a father of two boys in high school? What has happened that so many are cackling and crowing over ...

It's been a couple of weeks since Trump won the election with less than 50% of the vote. It is the first time in three elections that he has won the popular vote. He also swept the swing states, given him an electoral college win as well.  The night of the election, as the returns came in, I was, as someone who had picked Harris to win, quite shocked at the outcome. Trump is an adjudicated rapist; he owed millions in penalties to Trump University students he swindled; he is forbidden from operating a charity in New York because of fraud; he incited violence at the Capitol on 1/6/21 with the intention of halting the certification of the election; he owes millions to the woman he defamed; he has appealed his business fraud case; he stole classified documents and refused to return them, claiming they belonged to him (and no need to store them in anything but a gilded Mar A Lago bathroom). But he was elected president and will take the oath of office on 1/6/21. He has made it clear tha...

Today is election day in the United States, the day we choose our elected leaders. In my own community, the North Carolina General Assembly (NCGA) passed a law last year prohibiting my county – and my county only – from voting for all county commissioners on ballot . Now thanks to the NCGOP super-majority in the state, we can only vote for the commissioner in our district. I think it's weird that the state legislature spends time on the business of one county, but this is North Carolina and I have yet to figure out the state's politics. That said, there is a national election to be decided today. Former President Donald Trump represents the Republican Party for president; Vice President Kamala Harris represents the Democratic Party. This election, according to polls, promises to be a nail-biter. Here are reasons why I think Kamala Harris will win a significant victory. 1) Abortion is on the ballot - and even in deep-red "pro-life" states, when abortion protections mak...