My religious values guide my voting decisions. More specifically, my Christian values guide my voting decisions. That is likely true of you too. Why do I say that? Because Gallup polling shows that, in the Southeast, 74% of those polled…
Confederate Memorial Day, 2026
Monday, April 27, was Confederate Memorial Day in Mississippi. Mississippi is not alone in observing this state holiday. Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and (Texas, kind of) also honor the Confederacy with a state holiday. Mississippi’s Ordinance of Secession…
Backfilling history
Look around. What do you see? Often, it’s what you expect to see, not what’s really there. All of us share this tendency. Language, too, affects what I see. If I don’t have a word for it, I probably won’t…
Let’s move beyond Pee-wee Herman politics
James Talarico has figured prominently in the news and on social media lately, especially so after he defeated Democratic U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett in the Texas Democratic primary. In the November general election, he will face either incumbent Republican U.S….
No kindness, no democracy
Seventy-four years ago, on April 8, 1952, President Harry Truman went on national radio and television to announce he had issued Executive Order 10340, authorizing the United States government to seize the nation’s steel mills. Eighteen months earlier, China had…
No justice, no peace
The NAACP Legal Defense Fund was founded in 1940 by Thurgood Marshall. It was America’s premier legal organization fighting for racial justice. “Justice” is a legal term as well as a moral term — legal as seen in the statues…
Connecting the dots from the unitary executive president
You, along with millions of other American citizens, may be wondering where those tense confrontations in Minneapolis came from. What brought those 3,000 ICE agents to the Twin Cities and the angry citizens into the streets? Many different streams of…
A surprising elevator music Christmas prayer for peace
Not to rush the season or anything — the box stores, television ads and social media feeds have done that — but I want to call attention to a Christmas song you’ve probably already heard this year. It’s part of…
Learning from Trump’s unnatural impatience
Maybe Donald Trump is just a rich guy who is impatient and wants to get richer. He figured out that to get really rich, Musk-rich, you need to have political power, the more the better. Specifically, he must have reasoned,…
The arthritic giraffe
It always troubles me when I hear people say, “I don’t even keep up with the news anymore.” They might be referring to cancelling their hometown newspaper subscription. Newspapers have been hurting for decades, most of their advertising (car dealerships…
Why Trump has a National Police Force
In a previous column, I reported how President Donald Trump is under water on public approval ratings, showing the lowest first July approval rating of any president in the modern era. Today, six weeks later, he’s still under water. Donald…
Language and politics
This year, 2025, is the 100th anniversary of T. S. Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men, first published in 1925. World War I had ended seven years earlier, in 1918. The next year, the Treaty of Versailles was signed, and in…