Op-Ed

The Department of Justice and Attorney General Merrick Garland must do their sworn duty to uphold the Constitution and charge Donald Trump with the extremely serious crimes the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol has documented and alleges that the ex-president committed in order to subvert democracy. The DOJ, AG Garland and Biden administration must not make the same mistake that Pres. Gerald Ford did when he granted a full and unconditional pardon to Richard Nixon on Sept. 8, 1974, shortly after Tricky Dick resigned the presidency. Not prosecuting Trump for the heinous crimes he purportedly perpetrated will, in effect, be the same as Ford’s Proclamation 4311, which let Nixon get off Scot free for the crimes he committed as part of the Watergate Scandal and set a deplorable precedent of unaccountability.

The rich, powerful and famous must be held to account, the same as the rest of us. They must pay the consequences for their actions, just like ordinary people are expected to. There must not be a double standard for the high and mighty; NOBODY is above the law, not even a president or ex-president.

“They were at places that seemed safe — but few spaces in America are guaranteed safe anymore.”

This is CNN, doing its best to stay atop America’s mass shootings and keep the survivors (by which I mean us) informed. Yeah, 13 gun massacres this past weekend, at strip malls, nightclubs, graduation parties — with 16 people dying, many more injured — and the total number of such shootings so far in 2022 is 246.

“The country is on pace to match or surpass last year's total, which is the worst on record . . .”

And another sex scandal pops into the news. This time it’s the Southern Baptist Convention, the country’s largest Protestant denomination, cringing in shame upon the recent release of a “bombshell” report detailing two decades of sexual abuse by pastors and other church officials, along with ongoing official coverup of the crimes and denigration of any victims who had the courage to speak up.

“Crisis is too small a word. It is an apocalypse,” one former church official said.

New outcries for gun control have followed the horrible tragedies of mass shootings in Uvalde and Buffalo. “Evil came to that elementary school classroom in Texas, to that grocery store in New York, to far too many places where innocents have died,” President Biden declared over the weekend during a university commencement address. As he has said, a badly needed step is gun control -- which, it’s clear from evidence in many countries, would sharply reduce gun-related deaths.

But what about “gun control” at the Pentagon?

The next explosion at an atomic reactor will dwarf the latest school shooting 

There’s a clear GOP stamp on this week’s mass slaughter of our beautiful school children and their teachers—-AND on the next. 

Likewise the next nuke irradiation of countless downwind humans already has its horde of unrepentant enablers

To put it in the plainest possible terms:  those now advocating continued operation of our increasingly dangerous, decrepit atomic fleet are personally responsible for upcoming explosion(s) at the individual reactors they refuse to evaluate. 

And we can be sure that the blame dodging we’re now seeing in Texas will pale before the crocodile tears that will come with the next avoidable apocalypse. 

So let’s be clear:  

here’s no plausible way to dispute that Fox News host Tucker Carlson is spreading racist conspiracy theories, but Glenn Greenwald has been trying anyway. 

Since Greenwald—a former Salon columnist, and after that a Pulitzer-winning reporter for the Guardian — departed from The Intercept in September 2020, he’s become a stalwart defender of Fox, and Carlson in particular. As Carlson has gained in viewership and impact—he’s the most widely watched cable news host in the US—his commentary and political positions have come under increased scrutiny. With that attention has come intense criticism. But he has Greenwald in his corner, who has let forth a flood of pro-Carlson arguments, primarily delivered on Twitter, his medium of choice.

Another terrorist slips into the classroom, into the news.

Does anyone understand this? Even if guns are easily, readily available, why, why, why? I find it impossible even to be angry — it’s hard to be angry under incomprehensible circumstances.

Instead, I find myself imagining George W. Bush giving a speech in which he condemns the latest horrific murders at . . . but instead of saying Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, he blurts out “Iraq.”

They’re coming for me!

Sounds like a horror movie on permanent rewind through the brain, through the soul. Catch your breath, buy a gun. What other choice do you have? It’s called, among other things, “white replacement theory” — but my sense is that the fear itself (fear of God-knows-what) comes first. When it finds a name, what a sense of relief that must be: knowing who the enemy is, where the enemy lives. Now you can go to war.

Killing ten people at a grocery store — killing fifty people at two mosques—isn’t murder. It’s healing.

I take a deep breath. Violence is situation normal, not just in the United States but across much of the planet. Often the violence is simply an abstraction, a.k.a., war, which is always, always necessary when we’re the ones who wage it, and the people we kill, including the children, are simply collateral damage. But war always comes home, where the victims are fully human . . . if they actually make the news.

Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, Senate approval of President Biden’s FDA Commissioner nominee Robert Califf, MD, was barely covered by news media.

But everyone who cares about conflicts of interest at the FDA will find the choice disheartening.

According to disclosures in a November 20, 2013 Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) opinion piece that Califf cowrote: