Syndicated columns

At an Ohio rally this month, Donald Trump saluted the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, calling them “unbelievable patriots” and referring to those who’ve been locked up for their involvement on that terrible day as “hostages.”

In January, I had the odd experience of nodding along with Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who can usually be relied on to be wrong, as he berated supervillain Mark Zuckerberg, head of Facebook’s parent company, Meta, about the effect its products have on kids. “You have blood on your hands,” Graham said.

The artificial intelligence wave is here. Thanks to the arrival of “large language models” like ChatGPT and other generative AI tools almost a year and a half ago, AI is now hitting us like a truck – head on.

“I almost voted for him,” Felicia Lowe, a 55-year-old Black woman, told me Tuesday as she exited the polling place at the Metropolitan branch of the Fulton County Library in Atlanta.

Let’s make a few things crystal clear right up front. First and foremost, green beer has always been a bad choice and is without any saving grace. I also doubt that even St. Patrick in his prime could drive all the political snakes out of today’s Washington. The history of St. Patrick’s Day itself is not without major warts – particularly regarding who could and couldn’t participate.

On Monday, at a hip Arab coffee shop in Dearborn, Michigan, Nihad Awad, a co-founder and the national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, told me that as a Palestinian American Muslim who voted for Joe Biden in 2020, he feels “betrayed bitterly” over the administration’s position on the war in the Gaza Strip.

In April 2023, Betty Glover, a 91-year-old grocery store clerk in Oregon, was finally able to retire after a GoFundMe campaign raised $82,000 for her. After seven decades in the workforce, Glover couldn’t save enough to retire and cover basic expenses such as for food and medicine.

Back in 1998, Madeleine Albright, then the secretary of state, called the United States the “indispensable nation.” She meant that this country, armed with unmatchable force and influence, stood at the helm of a web of alliances and global organizations that guided world events. More than 50 years after the invention of nuclear weapons, the U.S. had presided over a Pax Americana that had kept the peace among the nuclear powers.

If you don’t think this country is sliding toward theocracy, you’re not paying attention.

Americans rehabilitate ex-presidents all the time.

“There’s no alliance more historic, nor more important, than the alliance between Black Americans and Jewish Americans.”

I am fascinated, and alarmed, by the swiftness with which periods of backlash take shape after surges of Black progress, and I believe that we have entered another such period.

If you held a conference for moderates – inviting federal politicians and citizens – it is unclear who would attend.