A handful of mountain bikers have partnered with a notoriously anti-Wilderness senator to introduce legislation in the U.S. Senate that would gut the 1964 Wilderness Act during this, the 60th anniversary of that landmark law.
Representative Kevin Crutchfield, a Republican from North Carolina’s 83rd District, strode to the back of the state legislature building, where four House pages — high school students who help out at the state legislature — were seated.
This November, voters will choose between two radically different paths of immigration policy. Should Donald Trump be re-elected president, the nation will embark on a path of deportation, or the attempted deportation, of millions of people living in the U.S. Should Joe Biden or another Democrat occupy the White House next year, the country will likely continue its present course of political compromise: continued restrictions at the border, along with continued or new accommodations for immigrants living here without green cards or citizenship.
Reports from the Middle East these days have two things in common: All the parties wish to avoid a war, yet all the movement is toward one, centered in Lebanon.
In my college days I was a Goldwater Republican. My roommate and I saw eye-to-eye. Today he is a conservative Republican, and I am a progressive Democrat. We remain close friends, but this divide troubled me. I asked him to help me understand why the right harbors so much animosity towards the left. He responded with a link to a lecture given in 2020, by Tom Klingenstein of the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank. I now understand the anger. If Klingenstein’s arguments were honest and factual, I would be angry too.
We live in a global family of more than 190 countries. Disputes and squabbles inevitably arise in all families; what matters is how we settle them. Just as immature families might see bullying and violence, at the global level we see countries threatening and waging war, paying dearly in unnecessary death and suffering. By contrast, a mature family resolves its disputes peacefully, often with the help of a dispassionate third party. Providing the world family such a dispassionate dispute settler was the driving purpose for creating the International Court of Justice (colloquially known as the World Court) in the aftermath of World War II. Unfortunately, the Court suffers from fundamental flaws that have hindered its ability to preserve peace and avoid violent conflict between countries.
We will not evolve into the future with closed minds.
Back in the ‘90s, when writer Hunter S. Thompson held court at the Woody Creek Tavern just outside of Aspen, Colorado, he’d often rail against the “greedheads.”
Although Donald Trump, as president, proclaimed in his 2020 State of the Union address that he had produced a “blue-collar boom” in workers’ wages, the reality was quite different. Using his control of the executive branch of the U.S. government, Trump repeatedly undermined the wages of American workers by blocking raises and imposing wage reductions.
Peaceful protest, violent response – that says it all.
