Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
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In her speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris offered a withering indictment of her opponent. Donald J. Trump, she rightly observed, is in many ways “an unserious man,” but the consequences of returning him to the White House “are extremely serious.” She asked her audience to “consider the power he will have, especially after the U.S. Supreme Court just ruled that he would be immune from criminal prosecution. Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails …” She introduced herself to vo...
It’s the year before a presidential election, which means it’s once again time for a group to call for a unity ticket of a Democratic and a Republican for president and vice president or for an independent candidate to avoid the dysfunction of the parties entirely. The current effort by the No Labels group to get a presidential ballot line in all 50 states for 2024 is being treated as something of a novelty, but we’ve seen something like this in most modern presidential elections. Just four years ago Unite America was proposing a bipar...
More than a year after the shocking fatal shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the New Mexico set of the movie “Rust,” prosecutors announced Thursday they will file criminal charges of involuntary manslaughter against Alec Baldwin, the star of the movie who allegedly discharged the replica of a vintage Colt .45. They will file the same charges against the film’s armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, whose job it was to check the guns to make sure they were safe to handle. The gunshot also wounded director Joel Souza, who survived, but n...
The most conspicuous victims of Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine are the people who will lose their lives in defending their country against a brutal (and nuclear-armed) neighbor. But Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch a many-pronged attack — an audacious operation the United States predicted but was unable to prevent — is also a devastating assault on international norms and potentially a harbinger of a wider war in Europe. Last week’s attack fully justifies the significant sanctions the U.S. and its allies are moving to impose on...
Ahmaud Arbery’s killing in February 2020 sounded at first like a horrific flashback to an earlier era in which white men killed Black men for appearing in places they were neither expected nor welcome, and then were coddled instead of arrested and prosecuted by the local police. It brought to mind the distant memory of Emmett Till and more recent one of Trayvon Martin. It seemed a bit more modern when finally, more than two months later, amid mounting public outrage and state pressure, Gregory McMichael, Travis McMichael and William ...
Sometimes the Supreme Court protects constitutional rights best when it doesn’t establish what lawyers call a bright-line rule applicable to every possible future situation. That was the case last Wednesday when the court ruled in favor of a high school cheerleader who had been disciplined for a vulgar outburst on social media. In Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L., the justices ruled 8-1 that a Pennsylvania school district violated the free speech rights of Brandi Levy when it suspended her from her school’s junior varsity cheerleading tea...
It long has been clear that Capitol Police were woefully unprepared for the Jan. 6 assault on Congress by rampaging supporters of then-President Donald Trump, who were bent on overturning the results of the 2020 election. But a new report by the agency's inspector general documents in depressing detail lapses in training, readiness and intelligence assessment. Inspector General Michael Bolton also reported that the police were ordered not to employ “heavier, less-lethal weapons” that might have dispersed the rioters. And he noted that an operat...
Failure to wear masks can do more than spread COVID-19, as some of the intruders who stormed the U.S. Capitol last week are finding. It also reveals faces to security cameras, government investigators and online private eyes, who’ve used those bare visages and other telling clues to identify many of the miscreants. As a result, not only have many of them been hit with criminal charges, but several were summarily fired from their jobs. As a group, the mob inside the Capitol certainly was breaking the law in the most serious of ways, a...
Dozens of pro-democracy politicians and activists in Hong Kong were rounded up around dawn last Wednesday as the U.S. Congress was preparing for a contentious fight over the Electoral College vote — a fight that would soon prompt a mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters to storm the United States Capitol. The timing of the arrests was not coincidental. While our nation has been mired in political gridlock and dysfunction, authoritarians around the world have gleefully exploited the absence of American leadership as an opportunity to run rou...
More than 5,000 years ago, the warriors of Babylonia painted their fingernails with kohl to go to battle. More recently, A-list actor Brad Pitt wore nail polish, apparently just for the heck of it. Yet for some reason, it’s a showstopper when a 17-year-old male in Texas wears nail polish to school? Granted, women have been practically the only ones decorating their nails for the last few centuries. But custom and convention are no reason for nail polish to be an exclusively female style — witness how earrings have become commonplace for men...
The prescription opioid crisis that has taken well over 100,000 American lives and ruined hundreds of thousands more wasn’t just an accident of time or the byproduct of a dysfunctional society. It was in good part the deliberate result of unethical and occasionally illegal machinations by the pharmaceutical industry, particularly by Purdue Pharma, which paid kickbacks and willfully misled physicians and the public to boost sales of its addictive signature drug, OxyContin. The company has agreed to plead guilty to criminal charges in a f...
For years the Supreme Court has resisted calls to let the public outside the courtroom listen in on its oral arguments. But live audio streams finally became a reality in May when the coronavirus pandemic forced the justices to hold two weeks’ worth of arguments in telephone conference calls. The justices’ decision to livestream those arguments was a dramatic departure from their usual practice of posting the recordings on the court’s website at the end of the week, when public interest and news coverage have ebbed. The experiment was a succe...
Let’s get out of here. Who hasn’t thought that at some point in the past four months, as we hunkered down in our homes, brooding and restless but with no place to go? The pandemic shuttered our offices and made the idea of venturing anywhere more ambitious than a grocery store seem like a perilous journey. Any trip that required a flight or a stroll among the masses — even masked — seemed an unreasonable risk. So is it any wonder, in our longing to get away from this virus-riddled existence, that we have found an escape in space? We have hi...
A surveillance program that allows the U.S. government to comb through hundreds of millions of Americans’ telephone records in search of connections to terrorism could soon be a thing of the past. That would be good news for personal privacy and responsible intelligence-gathering. Reports in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal suggest that the National Security Agency has lost its enthusiasm for a program that is the successor to the massive “bulk collection” of telephone records revealed six years ago by Edward Snowden. Luke Murry...
The timing, of course, was part of the intent. A gunman with a semiautomatic rifle walked into the Chabad of Poway synagogue during services Saturday morning and opened fire. It was the last day of Passover. At least one person was killed and three were wounded, while uncounted others have again been seared with mortal fear, all in the name of hate. This is the second deadly synagogue attack in the United States in six months, following the shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in October. That was the deadliest anti-Semitic...
President Donald Trump and his defenders are understandably exulting now that the Justice Department has released a summary of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s principal conclusions about his investigation of Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election. But, all too characteristically, the president is portraying Mueller’s findings as a “total exoneration.” It’s no such thing. The summary of Mueller’s conclusions came in a letter Attorney General William Barr sent to Congress on Sunday. According to Barr, Mueller did not est...
The biannual shifting of the clocks took place Sunday morning, and you may be a little discombobulated. The transition to daylight saving time each March means losing the extra hour of night we enjoyed when the clocks shifted back four months earlier, and it can take a while for sleep schedules to adjust. If the twice-a-year clock-resetting leaves you grumpy, you’re not alone; there’s a growing global movement to end this pointless and, frankly, weird 20th century tradition that has persisted despite having no real practical benefit. The Europe...
The Supreme Court last week struck a blow against one of the most insidious practices of the American criminal justice system: the unfair confiscation of property from people convicted — or even merely suspected — of committing a crime. So-called civil asset forfeiture has been a cash cow for police departments even as it has disproportionately impoverished poor people and people of color. The court unanimously held that seizures by state governments of property used in the commission of a crime are covered by the Eighth Amendment’s ban on “e...