Where Be Immunity, There Goeth Guilt

There is no immunity without guilt. Jesus did not plead immunity for the flowers of the field. Nor do lawyers plead for immunity when their client is innocent. Only when their client has been caught red-handed might they take a crack at pleading immunity if there is budget enough to make the far-fetched plea. That is a fitting description of Donald J. Trump’s circumstances. Who would have thought SCOTUS would bow? Continue reading

The Ten What?

June 19, 2024, will go down in history as a red-letter day for the state of Louisiana, the United States of America, and perhaps planet Earth. On that day Governor Landry signed a law requiring The Ten Commandments to be displayed in every public classroom in the state. Just as true religion ought to do, it turned up the heat for instructors all over Louisiana. Continue reading

Antisemitism, American Style

An effective way to curry favor with an irascible benefactor is to scold its critics at a public event those critics don’t attend. Uncontested accusations tend to stick and the speaker gains a point with the benefactor. Joe Biden did this in his “antisemitic” speech delivered at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Days of Remembrance on May 7. The charge: antisemitism. The accused: the students holding pro-Palestinian demonstrations on college campuses across the country protesting Israel’s assault on Gaza since Hamas’s attack on Israel October 7, 2023. The question: who’s the benefactor? Continue reading

Forked Diplomacy

We little guys of democracy, the billion wiggling arms and legs, hands and feet, fingers and toes of today’s behemoth governments, must expose their treacherous double-talk as the deliberate attempt to deceive us that it is. If we do not, they will exploit our confusion to encroach further on our rights, fracture our societal bonds, and expropriate our collective wealth until the power, discretion, and orientation we once had to stop them has been stripped from us as well. Two examples suffice. Continue reading

Putin’s Torment

Aleksei Navalny’s choice to return to Russia had been sheer stupidity. He had climbed back into Putin’s ring. To have the man once again in his power so intensely delighted the Russian potentate that he did not trust himself to be near him, to pronounce his name, even to know who he was. Wisely, Vladimir Putin outsourced his cherished prisoner. Continue reading