Tag Archives: political-commentary

Watching focus groups isn’t a good way to make yourself feel better about America, especially when their participants assert inconvenient truths. I know this first hand because for the last four years, I have acted as Senior Adviser to the Research Collaborative, which has done 25 focus groups and frequent …

Sometimes the law is complex and esoteric; other times it’s incredibly intuitive. The principles that govern sentencing are the latter. They are a distillation of commonly shared values in personal morality and public policy. As a former prosecutor and current defense attorney who has argued hundreds of sentencings, I have …

The small town where I live, along the spine of the Green Mountains of Vermont, was a water world last summer. Endless days of rain, the most in our history, washed out the roads east and west out of town. We lost one house to a landslide, but we were …

Ticketmaster and its parent company, Live Nation, are having a moment — a bad moment. Years of bullying both artists and venues, while price-gouging customers, has caught up with this corporate giant. The Justice Department has filed a long-overdue antitrust lawsuit for its predatory practices — and cheers can be …

Over the past two decades, the Supreme Court has been captured by dark-money interests, and justices are reshaping our laws and society according to their reactionary, far-right vision. It’s a problem that would only be compounded with a second Donald Trump administration pursuing an extreme, right-wing policy agenda. Trump’s judicial …

For the first time in history, a former president and current presidential candidate has been convicted of a felony. But will he still win the election? How very 2024: Donald Trump shatters all precedents, breaks all boundaries for what a president can do or say, and yet here we are …

Americans don’t want abortion to be banned. In fact, they barely want it legislated at all: A 2024 poll found that 81 percent of voters don’t want abortion issues to be regulated by the government. Instead, they want the decision to be between a patient and their doctor. That overwhelming …

Picture two protests involving the American flag. In one of them, a star NFL quarterback kneels during the singing of the national anthem. The reason? To call attention to the true, real plight of Black Americans whose lives seem not to matter as much as white ones — part of …

A federal judge sentenced Charles Littlejohn, an IRS contractor, to five years in prison — the statutory maximum — for making unauthorized disclosures of income tax records. In her sentencing comments, that judge compared Littlejohn to rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as part of a …

Seeds of Peace is a long-running nonprofit that brings together youth from conflict zones to engage in dialogue and learn leadership skills. Eva Armour is its Chief Impact Officer, and Vishnu Swaminathan is its Chief Operating Officer. In this timeofintense polarization, so manyofus are seeking but struggling to find healthy …