I doubt buckets of tears were shed at NPR when Uri Berliner resigned from his job as senior business editor last week. A 25-year veteran with the organization, Berliner had penned, the previous week for Bari Weiss’s The Free Press substack, a pained but rather savage critique of the NPR culture, focusing on the outlet’s loss of America’s “trust” and its failure to maintain “diversity of viewpoint.” It was, to put it bluntly, too “woke” and too liberal.   Berliner’s takedown, titled “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust,” was predictably not well received among ..read more

Twenty years ago today, Pat Tillman died in Afghanistan. Also 20 years ago today, the US military started lying about how he was killed. Tillman wasn’t the only American who never returned from Afghanistan. In fact, according to Brown University’s Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs, 2,298 members of the United States’ armed forces died, along with 3,814 military contractors and six civilians working for the Department of Defense (DOD). And that doesn’t factor in the soldiers who did return home but then killed themselves. But Tillman was not like any of them. First of all ..read more

— OPINION — A glimpse into Donald Trump’s mind (aka his posts on Truth Social) always reveals what is occupying the former president at any point in time, and today, that was apparently whether the Supreme Court would grant him immunity for all of the things he did as president.  Even though he appointed three of the judges, and conservative justices currently hold a decisive 6-3 edge, that seems unlikely because it would create a precedent that would, as various legal scholars have pointed out, allow presidents to commit any crime or authorize any unconstitutional act while in office.&nb ..read more

An ethics watchdog filed a criminal complaint against Donald Trump on Thursday that alleges the former president lied on his financial disclosure reports. At issue is whether Trump “knowingly and willfully” made false statements about a $50 million debt he owed to one of his businesses in Chicago. For years, he listed it as a liability on his disclosure forms. However, a court-appointed monitor in a civil fraud case said she was told this loan “never existed,” according to the complaint filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) with the FBI and the Department of Just ..read more

Saudi Arabia can breathe a bit easier Wednesday following the announcement of the death of former Florida senator and governor Bob Graham. While long out of politics, Graham had remained one of the highest-ranking critics of the Arab kingdom… especially pertaining to its role in the 9/11 terrorist attack.  And he was certainly in a position to know a bit about that.  Graham served as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee before and after 9/11 and co-chaired the joint congressional investigation into intelligence failures ahead of and following the attack.  As such, he ha ..read more

The US government is losing hundreds of billions of dollars to fraud each year, according to Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimates released on Tuesday.  While it is impossible to put an exact figure on how much fraud is costing taxpayers, the GAO, which is often referred to as the “congressional watchdog,” believes it was somewhere between $233 billion and $521 billion annually between 2018 through 2022. In other words, if the GAO is correct, somewhere between 3 percent to 7 percent of the total US budget is lost to fraud.  These figures are based on investigative data, th ..read more

Beginning today, a whole new era begins for Donald Trump: a period of accountability for alleged criminal behavior in a variety of cases. Up first is a trial in New York that will determine the former president’s culpability in a scheme to hide a hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels. In a way, it is a new area for everybody because never before has a former president been criminally prosecuted. Once Trump’s various delaying tactics have run their course, it is likely that he will face charges in a total of four cases… hopefully before the end of the year.  The sheer scale of the ..read more

— OPINION — The Gettysburg Address of Abraham Lincoln, the country’s first Republican president, is one of the most iconic speeches in US history, and every American has likely read it at some point. On Sunday, Donald Trump, who might just be the last GOP president if he keeps moving the party to the far right, went to Schnecksville, another small Pennsylvania town, to deliver his own address.  Like Lincoln’s speech, it was quite the thing to witness. Unlike Lincoln’s speech, however, this wasn’t a good thing.  In three minutes and 243 words, standing on the site of the battle that h ..read more

I so agree with Molly Jong-Fast that we can not allow the anti-democracy extremism of Donald Trump and his cultists to become normalized — by the media, or anyone else. Every day, as she points out, coverage of specific events or the overall framing of today’s politics normalizes far too much of it:  The media needs to call a lie a lie, and not worry if doing so appears partisan, while making clear that Trump’s authoritarian agenda would mark a radical break from America as we know it. This isn’t just another normal presidential race. But… I want to add a perspective someone shared with m ..read more

Since watching former CNN anchor Don Lemon’s interview with Elon Musk last week [March 18], I have been thinking about what it reveals about our contemporary moment. I have many inchoate thoughts, which I will share here in hopes of pushing through the ambiguous murk to reach that ever-elusive state of clarity. According to Vanity Fair, “the sit-down was just another maddening peek into the increasingly extremist and internet-rotted mind of one of the world’s richest and most powerful people.”   I am trying to locate an indigenous prophecy I read a while back that defines this time as one ..read more