GOP’s nightmare playing out in its Obamacare lawsuit

July 15, 2019

The 2020 election is shaping up to be yet another referendum on health care, thanks to a long-shot lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act that has somehow stayed alive in the courts. A three-judge panel of the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans took up the case of Texas vs. Azar on Tuesday, with two of the three jurists suggesting strongly that a now-neutered provision of the law — the mandate that adult Americans obtain insurance coverage — was unconstitutional. So much for the hope that a more senior appeals panel would summarily reject the bizarre lower-court ...

What true abuse looks like

July 15, 2019

A few years ago, I wrote a column about Malala Yousafzi, around the time that the young Pakistani activist was shot in the head by the Taliban. She was targeted for death simply because she wanted to help give girls the same educational opportunities as boys. Instead, Malala survived. She became a symbol of fierce and principled defiance in the face of a true patriarchy. That column garnered a lot of criticism, because my central point was that women in this country did not understand what true persecution looked like. It even got me a spot on The Atlantic’s list of 50 Worst Columns ...

Dangers of political tribalism

July 12, 2019

I have a tricky relationship with my in-laws. We get along just fine, but we disagree on politics. They are Republicans; I am a Democrat. They voted for Trump; I voted for Hillary. For much of the past two years, I have found it increasingly difficult to view my in-laws through anything other than the prism of partisanship. “How could such good, honest people support Trump?” I’ve often wondered. Sometimes it’s even made me angry. No matter that my in-laws are wonderful grandparents and regular volunteers for the less fortunate. Their politics trumped everything (pun ...

Democratic donors’ creep club: Epstein, Bean & Buck

July 11, 2019

Well, well, well. “Follow the facts,” Democratic strategist Christine Pelosi now advises fellow liberals in the wake of billionaire and high-flying political financier Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex trafficking indictment this week. Some of “our faves” could be implicated in the long-festering scandal, the Pelosi daughter warned, so it’s time to “let the chips fall where they may.” Too bad Pelosi’s mommy hasn’t adopted that same attitude of accountability. While serving as the highest-ranking elected woman in America for decades, San Fran Nan has chronically ...

No time to be normalizing the abnormal

July 10, 2019

The U.S. women’s soccer team won the World Cup final on Sunday with a splendid shutout against the Netherlands. President Trump said last week that he will fete the team in the White House, despite his annoyance with Megan Rapinoe, a star player who said in graphic and emphatic terms that she would not accept Trump’s invitation. I hope the whole team will decline, as well. This probably sounds like spite. But a congratulatory visit to the White House would merely reinforce the idea that everything in our republic is fine. It’s not. And every American citizen should ...

Fixing food system starts with the waste

July 10, 2019

Our food system is in crisis. In Maryland alone, one in every nine people is food insecure. In Baltimore, approximately a quarter of the population lives in food deserts, meaning they do not have easy access to healthy fruits and vegetables in grocery stores. When you expand this globally, billions of people are either hungry or eating too much of the least nutritious kinds of food. Yet, food waste is rampant. In the U.S., we waste between 30% to 40% of our food supply. That is equivalent to tossing out 133 billion pounds of food and pouring $161 billion down the drain annually. ...