Ward on Words

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...

Just a few days before the 2024 general election, the Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, was interviewed by Tucker Carlson on the RSBN network (full disclosure: Tucker Carlson alas, graduated from the same college as me - different years) and mentioned (about an hour into the interview) that Liz Cheney, former US Representative and daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney is a problem he'd like to address: "Let's put her there with a rifle, nine barrels shooting at her. Let's see how she feels about it when the guns are trained on her face."  (Tucker Carlson chimed in with: "that'd be Dick Cheney's repulsive little daughter" in  that same interview .)  Donald Trump is a candidate for president of the United States, who during a televised interview, expressed the desire to shoot a political opponent - who happens to be a member of the same party as Trump, though she has been "purged" from any leadership roles in the p...

For year now, the New York Times, the "paper of record," has employed as its senior political editor someone who loves using the Trump frame for her stories about Trump. Maggie Haberman has worked long and hard to maintain her "access" status within the Trump campaign and the only way to keep that status is to present insider gossip as if it is factual news. She has a story in the paper today (Sunday, Oct. 27, 2024), co-written with Matt Flegenheimer (I rarely see her name as a solo byline) that uses Trump's rally at Madison Square Garden (MSG) as a "show of force." In the NY Times story, Haberman and Flegenheimer decide to pretend that only Democrats are noting the similarities between Trump MSG rally and the Nazi rally that took place in 1939.  But that's not true. Anne Applebaum, noted scholar of fascism, posted a picture on Threads that links Trump's MSG event with the 1939 Nazi Party event at that venue. Here's a link to the documen...

On June 27, 2024, the two presumptive presidential candidates engaged in a debate televised on CNN. Moderators Dana Bash and Jake Tapper asked questions and the candidates answered. Moderators provided no pushback on lies made by either candidate.  It was painfully obvious that Joe Biden was having a very bad night. For me, having watched his high-energy SOTU address, seeing his extemporaneous reactions to the GOP heckling, it was shocking to see Biden's performance at the debate. He had one big task with the debate - to prove he was not "too old" for the job of four more years, and his halting performance and slow response to questions unleashed a tsunami of articles about his age and fitness for the office.  And nearly a month after the debate, the focus of national news media remained on Biden's fitness for the job and who should replace him and also to replace Kamala Harris – apparently because being VP for four years isn't considered the right prep for the jo...

There is a curious story in the New York Times about "the complicated legacy of Betty Ford's breast cancer story."  As someone considered high risk for breast cancer due to family history of the disease, I have some thoughts on Betty Ford's legacy.  Betty Ford was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1974 and was one of the  first women to openly talk about her diagnosis and subsequent mastectomy. At that time, her role  as First Lady gave her an enormous platform to raise awareness about the disease.  I was curious about this New York Times essay because of the impact breast cancer has had on my family. In 1970, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. She was 37 years old, a mother with three young daughters. When this happened, she was sedated for a biopsy and knew that if the cancer was found, they'd perform a mastectomy before she woke up. She woke up without a breast.  I n later years, when I thought about the brutality of this medical approach, I thou...