Ward on Words

Donald Trump, a candidate for president of the United States, the other night promised his "beautiful Christian' supporters in attendance at a Turning Point Action event in Florida that if they voted for  him in 2024, " You won’t have to do it anymore, you know what? Four more years, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.” It is remarkable to see a candidate promise that "you're not going to have to vote" any more if he wins in November. Democracies are fragile things; voting is one of the few ways that citizens can engage in holding elected officials accountable. There has never been a president thus far who has "fixed things" in ways that people no longer need to vote. In fact, as noted by Brian Klass in The Atlantic , " He’s telegraphing his authoritarian intentions in plain sight." You would never know that, however, from the landing page of yesterday's New York Times that a preside

It has been an eventful summer in America, and the last month has been incredible to witness.  On June 27, Donald Trump and Joe Biden met in a debate; the performance of the 81-year-old president was disastrous and in the days and weeks since then, there has been a steady drip of news stories asking him to withdraw from the race. Nothing he did post-debate assured Americans that he had the energy and stamina to engage in a brutal presidential campaign and the news coverage of his age and infirmities never stopped. His opponent is just three years younger than him, but there has not been a similar avalanche of stories about his age and his infirmities. It is unclear why the age of one of the elderly men running for president is considered newsworthy, and the age of the other has been ignored for the most part.  Jennifer Schulze, a Chicago-based journalist, did an accounting of the age-related news stories that ran in just one outlet - the New York Times - after the debate up until July

There is a puzzling story in The Atlantic by Charlie Sykes this week – " How 'pro-life' lost all meaning. " It's quite a read if you are interested in exploring cognitive dissonance.  Charlie Sykes is a right-wing pundit. He has worked for nearly a half century to overturn Roe. And apparently, he is shocked – SHOCKED – at what's going on in red states two years after the end of Roe.  Here's Charlie's words about what happened in the Republican Party after the Dobbs ruling: Suddenly, Republicans were faced with a host of questions they never had to wrestle with before. Should abortion pills be banned? IVF? How should states handle miscarriages? (Earlier this month, the Supreme Court unanimously  rejected  a challenge to the use of the abortion and miscarriage-management drug mifepristone. But efforts continue to restrict the use of the drug, including a  proposal  from Project 2025, organized by the Heritage Foundation, to use the 19th-century Comstock

I always recommend reading Teri Kanefield's posts (you can find her blog here ) - she brings a knowledgeable and no-nonsense legal perspective to the issues we're seeing now with the various Trump trials. However, I disagree with her main point of argument she has made in her last two posts on the Ronna McDaniel/NBC News PR crisis ( The Ronna McDaniel Story and The Ronna McDaniel Fallout ), and I want to respond to that. In her second post on McDaniel , she says: "Last week I argued that the executives erred in hiring McDaniel to appear on MSNBC because, given who McDaniels is and how she talks, it was foolish to think she could appear on an MSNBC show." In her latest post on "S ex, Lies and Falsified Documents: Trump's First Criminal Trial ," she follows up with this thought on McDaniel: "I argued that McDaniel is hated and has no place on partisan talk shows because she hasn’t repented and will not deliver evocative performances of partisan ident

We are in the midst of a dedicated push on the part of some politicians to remove "critical race theory" (CRT) from our schools. My question to those politicians: where is CRT being taught in K-12 schools?  I was an American Studies major in college and CRT was never a part of the curriculum. It is not part of the curriculum my children have learned in their school. I am not sure why Republicans have decided that CRT is the bane of our existence and the reason for white people to feel bad about themselves, but that's where we are today and they are working hard to ban CRT from schools.  In my own state of North Carolina, the NCGOP is working to pass legislation that would ban affirmative action and prevent teachers from "'' indoctrinating' students with Critical Race Theory concepts." Just  who  is teaching children that " people solely due to their race or sex should feel guilt, anguish or discomfort" ? I don't know the answer to that