Ward on Words

On Sept. 15, 2025, Trump filed a $ 15 billion defamation lawsuit against the New York Times and other parties. The pleading runs 84 pages. On Sept. 19, 2025, Judge Steven D. Merryday, appointed by President George H.W. Bush, issued a four-page ruling ripping Trump's pleading to shreds . (It's short, to the point, and definitely worth the read.)  The ruling allows Trump's team to refile within 28 days and requires that the new pleading cannot exceed 40 pages. In his spare, four-page ruling, Judge Merryday provides multiple lessons in writing that all of us could benefit from following, lessons that I would like to share here: Lesson 1) Cogently present the issue: "In this action, a prominent American citizen (perhaps the most prominent American citizen) alleges defamation by a prominent American newspaper publisher American newspaper publisher (perhaps the most prominent American newspaper publisher) and by several other  corporate and natural persons.   ..." Les...

Trump and Vance have taken to social media in the last 24 hours to showcase their utter disdain for the rule of law, due process and the Constitution. Their actions are impeachable offenses but unfortunately for US patriots and constitutionalists, their party is 100 percent on board with authoritarianism. I don't know how you can look at the events of this week and come to any other conclusion.  First, JD Vance used social media to let everyone know that extrajudicial murders conducted by US military are fine by him. His statement was in response to the Trump administration's boast that the US military blew up a boat in international waters, killing all 11 people on board. Trump and his team claimed without evidence that the people on the boat were smuggling drugs  to the US from Venezuela and thus, the US government acted as judge, jury and executioner, no evidence or trial needed to prove any guilt before execution.  In response to this act of violence, JD Vance did wha...

Washington Post has an exclusive story about how Trump's Pentagon "plans military deployment in Chicago as Trump eyes crackdown."  The story, as per usual from national news media these days, adopts the Trump frame, amplifying Trump's false claim that Chicago is a desperately violent city in need of a military "crackdown." Here is the lead of the story by Dan Lamothe. "The Pentagon has for weeks been planning a military deployment to Chicago as President Donald Trump says he wants to crack down on crime, homelessness and undocumented immigration, in a model that could later be used in other major cities, officials familiar with the matter said.   "The planning, which has not been previously disclosed, involves several options, including mobilizing at least a few thousand members of the National Guard as soon as September to what is the third most populous city in the United States." It is absolutely terrifying and unprecedented - this news th...

Jeffrey Epstein is back in the news, years after he died of suicide in 2019 in a federal jail, imprisoned while waiting trial for charges that he sex trafficked minors and conspired to sex traffic minors. He was, for years, a long-time friend of Trump's until they had a falling out over a real estate deal (I guess the sex trafficking of minors and the "Lolita Express" stuff were not deal breakers.)  Epstein has been in the news for a while, at least since Trump brought him up on the campaign trail back in 2024 , promising to release information about Epstein and his clients. From ABC News: "'Would you declassify the Epstein files?' Fox News' Rachel Campos-Duffy asked. Trump responded, 'Yeah, yeah, I would.'" In January 2024, a year prior to the election, Pam Bondi, future USAG, went on Fox News  with Sean Hannity to ensure that the focus remained on the Epstein files after some files were released by the Biden DOJ, claiming: "... Ghisl...

I watched "The Manchurian Candidate" (the 1962 version with Laurence Harvey, Angela Lansbury and Frank Sinatra) this week. It's an excellent film and I highly recommend it. But I was surprised to see the theme of a Russian takeover of the US presidency so prominently displayed during the Kennedy era. Of course, that was during the height of the Cold War, when we were so fearful of a global communist takeover that we went to wars in Korea and Vietnam in order to prevent such a disaster. The wars themselves were disasters. Communists were the enemies we fought and in "The Manchurian Candidate," the Russian communists very nearly gain the presidency.  But now it is a quarter century into the 21st century; Russia is no longer a communist nation, but until recently, it remained our enemy. Trump, of course, has had a long relationship with Putin; he frequently expresses admiration for the man who is a dictator. In 2018, he took the side of Russia instead of the FBI, a...

I am reading "The Snow Leopard" by Peter Matthiessen, who is a highly acclaimed, award-winning travel author, and I'm having a very hard time with it because the author's wife died the year before this trip and Matthiessen left behind his 8-year-old motherless boy to go on this adventure. From early in the book: "Later I dreamed about my beautiful eight-year-old boy, whose mother died of cancer just last year. In the dream, I paid a visit to a dark cagelike shelter, where he was being kept with other children...." Sounds like a tormented nightmare of a man who knew what he did was terrible, if you ask me. When I was a girl, my mother died of cancer and I cannot imagine what it would be like if my father had left myself and my sisters for nearly a year right after that. It would have been very bad for all three of us. But this is what men can do, abandon their motherless children for the sake of their own personal quest and ambition. In the introduction to th...

Trump has been in office for less than 100 days and it is an unmitigated disaster. He's plunged the world into chaos and hired a federal contractor, Elon Musk, whose companies rake in billions in federal contracts, to shed jobs and contracts and leases from the federal government, all of which were funded in budgets passed by Congress. Many of Musk's decisions are being challenged in court. Federal lawyers refuse to say who heads up DOGE (the poorly named Department of Governmental Efficiency, named to honor Musk's favorite cybercurrency .) It's not a new department - it's not even a department, which, as I understand it, needs to be created by an act of Congress. Trump via executive order has temporarily renamed the United States Digital Service as DOGE. Oddly enough, the USDS website is still up and running . None of it makes any sense.  The actions of DOGE have included firing thousands and thousands of federal employees, most involved in social services or huma...

The last day of February in 2025 was a milestone in the destruction of the United States of America. Trump and Vance invited Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to the White House for a discussion on ending the war in Ukraine. The meeting devolved into a yell-fest from the two Americans. It was extraordinary to witness this exchange and to realize that America has fully sided with Vladimir Putin and authoritarianism.  Vance – a Midwesterner who came to fame claiming "hillbilly values" ruined his western Ohio steel town, located on the banks of a river, elevation 700 ft., not in the mountains of Appalachia – said in this meeting , "... the path to prosperity is maybe engaging in diplomacy. We tried the pathway of Joe Biden, of thumping his chest and pretending that the president of the United States' words mattered more than the president of the United States' action." There was no diplomacy coming from the American president and his trusty "attack dog...