Category Archives: Opinion

By James J. Devine The bar for releasing the Epstein files — those elusive records detailing how a convicted sex trafficker moved freely among the powerful for years — is apparently so high that the trump administration has not managed to clear it. The bar for launching military strikes, destabilizing entire regions, and spending hundredsContinue reading “It’s easier to start a war than to comply with a law enacted by Congress”

By James J. Devine Let us, for a moment, set aside the dusty niceties of the Sixth Amendment, the tedious presumption of innocence, and the general inconvenience of a months-long courtroom slog. The people have made up their minds. The scrolling headlines have declared it. Tyler Robinson, the young man accused of putting a bulletContinue reading “Instead of a boring televised trial, feed Tyler Robinson to a hungry lion”

Josh Gottheimer has spent years perfecting a single political trick: wrapping the slaughter of Palestinians in the blood-soaked flag of “fighting antisemitism,” then demanding applause. Last week, the New Jersey congressman—Donald Trump’s favorite Democrat, and a man so obsessively dedicated to defending Israel’s every atrocity that he makes AIPAC lobbyists look like peaceniks—rushed to TwitterContinue reading “Trump’s favorite Dem, Josh Gottheimer, has no problem with genocide but he’s against jokes”

By James J. Devine The guardrails are gone. Every single one. In the winter of 2020, a handful of federal officials still had the spine to tell the president no. They huddled in a windowless room deep inside the Justice Department. William Barr, then the attorney general, had summoned cybersecurity experts to answer one question:Continue reading “The unmaking of American democracy is happening right now”

By James J. Devine A thread runs through the events of this moment—thin, tensile, easy to miss if you glance too quickly. But pull on it, and a pattern emerges, binding together courtrooms in North Dakota, oil fields in Ecuador, social media platforms in California, and President Donald Trump’s unprovoked war in the Middle East.Continue reading “Corrupt power is rewriting the boundaries of dissent”

By James J. Devine The numbers arrive on the desks of world leaders every January, bound in leather and stamped with the seals of defense ministries. They list tanks, jets, ships, and warheads. They are presented as the price of safety. But there is another set of numbers, printed in thinner reports from humanitarian agencies,Continue reading “The $271 billion question: What if the world disarmed just one-tenth of its arsenal?”

By James J. Devine Rebecca Bennett spent 15 years flying Navy helicopters over the Persian Gulf, protecting the tanker routes that carry the world’s lifeblood. She fought in America’s oil wars. She watched friends deploy, bleed and die in conflicts that cost trillions and were, in blunt truth, fought to keep the fossil fuel flowing.Continue reading “She fought America’s oil wars, but now she’s cashing in on climate hypocrisy”

By James J. Devine Nobody asked you. That is, perhaps, the point. Somewhere in the unremarkable language of federal rulemaking — buried beneath the bureaucratic sediment of efficiency studies and data-sharing protocols — the United States government is constructing the architecture of a new military draft. Not with trumpets. Not with a congressional address. WithContinue reading “The quiet machinery of compulsion”

By James J. Devine There was a moment, brief and improbable, when the conscience of this nation actually stirred in response to the challenge of asking what can you do for your country. Not ‘conscience’ in the way politicians invoke it as an abstraction, a rhetorical garnish, but in the way that changes laws andContinue reading “The unfinished revolution requires a reckoning and Reaganomics reversal”

In a world grown numb to the spectacle of state power bearing down on the individual, two images flicker across the global conscience this week with a chilling symmetry. One is the body of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse, left bleeding on a Minnesota avenue after a barrage of federal gunfire. The other is theContinue reading “Echoes of injustice and state violence in a ‘free’ nation and in a tyrannical theocracy”

By James J. Devine The federal government has sprinted past the $1 trillion deficit mark just five months into the fiscal year, a staggering sum that nonetheless arrives with a confusing twist: red ink is flowing at a slightly slower pace than last year’s record-setting gush. New data from the Joint Economic Committee, released Friday,Continue reading “Trump tops $1 trillion deficit, trips on trade, and tumbles toward trouble”

By James J. Devine They talked about World War III for so long that it became a joke. A punchline. Something for doomsday preppers and novelists. Jokes have a way of dying when the first missiles fly, and on a Saturday in late February 2026, the joke died in Tehran. The operation had a name,Continue reading “Operation Epic Failure: Trump’s Iran gamble unleashed a war he promised would never come”

It was a little past dinnertime on the East Coast when the news came across the wire: the bombs were falling on Iran. The President of the United States, alongside the Prime Minister of Israel, had made his decision. And with that decision, a great and terrible machine of state was set in motion, aContinue reading “Trump has opened Pandora’s box, but there’s no hope inside.”

by Ismael Cid-Martinez and Valerie Wilson More than 60 years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other leaders of the Civil Rights Movement helped generate the moral impetus and political will for U.S. lawmakers to pass sweeping legislation to combat the oppressive legacies of slavery, Jim Crow laws, and the many expressions of racial discrimination in the United States.Continue reading “Six ways the Trump administration tried to erase MLK’s legacy in 2025”

By James J. Devine The veneer of invincibility shattered on Friday. For the better part of a year, President Donald Trump had operated as if the normal rules of American governance did not apply to him. He bulldozed through congressional prerogatives, dismissed judicial oversight as a nuisance, and treated the Constitution as a suggestion. TheContinue reading “Today’s judicial ruling it the beginning of the end of Donald Trump’s unfettered dictatorship”

By Benjamin Santer Whether the president and his supporters like it or not, the United States is part of a complex, interconnected world. Global supply chains, commerce, and economies are intricately intertwined. Countries are connected electronically via the internet, email, and social media. Humans are also linked through a shared global climate system, which influences—andContinue reading “By quitting 66 international organizations, Trump turns his back on science, facts, reason”

By James J Devine Let us dispense with the fiction-based political football concerning Bad Bunny. The annual paroxysms of outrage over the Super Bowl halftime show are not a defense of culture, but a tantrum thrown by those who believed the empire would only export, never import; who believed the projection of power came withoutContinue reading “The ugly Americans have spoken on the Super Bowl’s halftime show. What they said is wrong.”

The machinery of justice, designed to turn with the heavy, deliberate gears of impartial fact, has seized. At the center of the deadlock is the killing of a 37-year-old Minneapolis woman, Renee Nicole Good, shot in her SUV by a federal immigration officer on Jan. 7. Now, the Trump administration is employing every lever toContinue reading “Gears of justice commandeered as part of the latest White House criminal coverup”