Op-Ed

By squealing “Frankly, we did win this election,” at 2:24 a.m., Nov. 4 and trying to stop counting all ballots cast, serial adulterer Donald Trump, who cheated on his wives Ivana, Marla and Melania, and is now cheating on America. The “unindicted co-conspirator” in the Stormy Daniels case – who illegally paid hush money to muzzle the porn star so her revelations about their July 2006 liaison wouldn’t affect the outcome of 2016’s election – and similarly connived payoffs for a Playboy model he started an affair with in June 2006 shortly after Melania gave birth to Barron, is now trying to commit adultery on America by bamboozling his way into a second term.

The Covid pandemic has given Pharma a temporary halo. Who cares about its prohibitively expensive drugs, the way it hides drug risks, the way that it "sells" diseases through TV ads and "symptom checkers" and the opioid epidemic it created? We need a vaccine and we need it now! Already Pharma has received $1 billion of our hard earned tax dollars to develop Covid vaccines.

But even if the majority of people agree to receive a vaccine and even if the virus doesn't mutate making a vaccine useless (neither scenario likely) there are burning vaccine questions that remain and the media continue to ignore.

* Why do drug makers receive government money for what they should be doing anyway? Isn't drug development their job? (They also got money to develop new antibiotics)

* If we, the taxpayers, funded the vaccines, why don't we own them? Why aren't they free?

The nation has less than two weeks left to live in its comfort zone of platitudes. This is by far the most ominous election buildup of my (fairly lengthy at this point) lifetime. What will happen on Nov. 3 and thereafter? Will all the votes be counted? Presuming Trump loses, will he leave office?

Are we approaching the end of our . . . uh, democracy?

A real democracy, of course, has always been a terrible inconvenience to those in power, which is why, in the nearly two hundred and fifty years of the nation’s existence, voting — as well as acknowledgment of certain people’s humanity — has been endlessly gamed, suppressed and denied; and a fragile, racist status quo has managed to maintain itself, wrapped in the lie of “liberty and justice for all.” Perhaps it’s this status quo that’s really up for grabs.

n ordinary times, Ted Glick would hardly be someone you’d expect to hear urging fellow progressives to vote for the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee.

During the first 18 years of this century, Glick was an active member of the Green Party. He ran for the U.S. Senate as the Green Party’s nominee in New Jersey and put in a long stint co-chairing a local branch of the party. In fact, he recalls, “I have been a member of organizations working to build a political alternative to the Democrats and Republicans since 1975.”

Now, Glick is more than two weeks into a water-and-vitamins-only fast that he plans to continue until voting ends on November 3. As a headline says over his daily postings, it’s all about “Fasting to Defeat Trump.”

Before the fake holiday known as Columbus Day completely disappears for another year, I want to grab hold of it for a moment and look at what it really has to offer us: a dizzying dose of historical realism.

We’re not who we think we are. The social order in which we find ourselves is far more the result of dominance and dehumanization than principled integrity — a reality that demands deep introspection, not celebratory lies and a silent shrug as the worst of who we are continues.

The scariest part about the legacy of Columbus, and Europe’s “Age of Discovery” — ah, the white men break out of their cage and find the rest of the world — is that it’s still alive. And while there’s a growing demand that we should dump Columbus Day as a national holiday and replace it with Indigenous Peoples’ Day, I think something else is necessary as well: We need to look deeply at the legacy of Columbus and begin to own it. No more whitewash!

What if we stopped separating the looming national chaos into separate categories —racism, climate change, war, vote suppression, election theft, pandemic, science denial, white supremacy, police brutality, etc. — and tried looking at it all at once?

This may be the legacy of Donald Trump, our first corkscrew-in-chief: He has popped the cork on who we are and reality, so it seems, is gushing uncontrollably like never before. Trump, with his defiance of political correctness and the norms of the status quo, not to mention his desire to be the American Mussolini — unchallenged in his leadership either by election results or medical consensus — has created much of the chaos on his own. But the bulk of the chaos is simply America the Terrible emerging from the shadows: our real history suddenly visible.

Ohio’s biggest-ever bribery case is rocking America’s reactor industry ... and the fall election.

Full details of the shocking arrest of Ohio’s powerful Speaker of the House are still unfolding.

But on Monday, the FBI charged Larry Householder and four associates with taking $60 million (that’s NOT a typo) in bribes from “Company A,” suspected to be the Akron-based nuke utility FirstEnergy. The company has not been formally named as the source of the bribe, but FE’s stock has since plummetted.

Householder is suspected of buying votes for the widely hated $1.5 billion bailout of two decrepit nuke reactors on Lake Erie. Donald Trump lobbied at least five legislators to support the cash giveaway. Ohio’s moderate Republican governor, Mike DeWine, has asked Householder to resign. 

Without the bailout, Perry and Davis-Besse would already be dead in the rising tsunami of US reactor shutdowns. 

The handout also supported two ancient coal burners (one in Indiana), and ten small solar plants. It killed a big, highly successful state-wide efficiency program and crippled further Ohio development of wind and solar. 

This isn’t free unsolicited advice on your new name, because (1) you’ve pretended to ask everyone for input, and (2) if you name your team the Washington Warriors next year, as I’m guessing you would have done by now if not for some legal dispute, I’ll be happy to sell you the URL washingtonwarriorssuck.com for a donation of .00001% of the U.S. military budget to the people of Yemen.

So, here’s my non-free and fully solicited advice: don’t be a moral imbecile. Name your team for something positive. Don’t name it something else cruel and offensive just because nobody’s objected yet.

Do you remember when they had to rename the Washington Bullets, not because they cared that bullets were being used to murder people all over the world, but because the city of Washington, D.C., had become famous for its high level of shootings?

Here’s a quietly unsettling moment from the current cries for change churning across the nation:

A teenage girl is at a grocery store in the small town of Marion, Virginia. Her brother, Travon Brown, age 17, had recently become both beloved and hated — the center of controversy — in the town, because he had organized a protest against racism in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. This was one of thousands of such protests across the country, but the majority-white town was nonetheless riled up over this affront, according to the Washington Post, which took a long, deep look at events there.

On June 12, 2020, Matt Taibbi published a rather confrontational article entitled “The American Press is Destroying Itself.” In it, he laments that “the American left has lost its mind. It’s become a cowardly mob of upper-class social media addicts, Twitter Robespierres, who move from discipline to discipline torching reputations and jobs with breathtaking casualness.” Taibbi cites a litany of recent “newsroom revolts,” which signal, in his mind, an editorial crisis of political correctness, where journalists have been beaten into submission by the new leftist brigade of groupthink.

To be sure, Taibbi’s concerns are not entirely misplaced. Anyone who’s spent a day on Twitter knows it poses a uniquely high reputational cost for publishing anything even mildly controversial. But Taibbi talks in existential terms. He presents a grand narrative in which the left is cannibalizing itself, supplanting “traditional liberal beliefs about tolerance” and “free inquiry” with “shaming, threats, and intimidation” of those who deviate from the accepted view.