A Political Benefit, Or A Disqualifier? Our justice system has finally acted in a first step – and we’re unsure what will happen as a result besides certain chaos and acts of revenge. We’re dealing with a certain societal incredulity that criminal charges have been leveled against a former president, even Donald Trump, for whom there has been a very long, slow race to see which of several possible crimes would find its way to a courtroom. In New York, District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg popped months’ worth of speculation and talk about possible actions and announced that Trump will…
Author: Terry Schwadron
Terry H. Schwadron
Terry H. Schwadron retired as a senior editor at The New York Times, Deputy Managing Editor at The Los Angeles Times and leadership jobs at The Providence (RI) Journal-Bulletin. He was part of a Pulitzer Gold Medal team in Los Angeles, and his team part of several Pulitzers in New York. As an editor, Terry created new approaches in newsrooms, built technological tools and digital media. He pursued efforts to recruit and train minority journalists and in scholarship programs. A resident of Harlem, he volunteers in community storytelling, arts in education programs, tutoring and is an active freelance trombone player.
The Right Blames Mental Health, Yet Has Little Interest In Funding It Amid the mourning for targets of yet another multiple-death school shooting, we’ve found ourselves with the same, tired, repetitious mouthing of excuses for why we can’t keep our students safe from gunshots. From the pro-life political right, we hear that anything – substantial or not – affecting keeping the flood of private guns, including semi-automatic weapons, from proliferating further is unacceptable as causal and unconstitutional. From the left, we hear that political divides keeps us even from trying to adopt popularly acceptable changes for even gun safety or…
It’s a Movement To Ensure That We Indoctrinate the Next Generation With an Imprint of Our Own Adult Values Apparently, we’re hoping that hiding all the spinning wheels in the kingdom will keep our youth from pricking themselves. Of course, that’s not how Sleeping Beauty turned out, as my partner reminds me, and neither is it likely that trying to put everything shiny about gender and identity questions, art, music and cultural experimentation or the lure of social media will prove more effective. Yet, that is exactly what is at the core of our deepening politics led by right-leaning powers…
Once Again An Obvious Call for Violence and Crimes That Come With It All the speculating, unfounded predictions, and pre-trial political fallout involving the first of what appear to be a series of indictments that Donald Trump may face are pointing toward social illness of their own that promises to outlive pending grand jury action. The impatience on all sides won’t allow us to wait a few days and let the events happen as they will. Instead, we feel obliged to game it all out, as if it is a sports championship match, or worse – in the case of…
It’s Clear Xi Is Propping Up A Weakened Putin, But Their Partnership Is Creating Problems for the U.S. and Its Allies From all that we’re hearing, the world turned another notch more dangerous this week as Chinese leader Xi Jinping was embraced in Moscow by Vladimir Putin – a visual celebration of two huge autocracies finding common ground. Though this summit did not result in any decision for China to help Russia’s continuing invasion of Ukraine with specific lethal military aid, there is nothing good about seeing the prospects of rosier economic and diplomatic linkage between America’s two biggest global…
The Voice of Doom Is No Joke Another, increasingly dour United Nations report this week underscores that international delaying and dallying are failing to put off the increasing certainty that we’re headed for climate troubles a lot faster than we had feared. Indeed, the report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the world is now likely to surpass its aspirations of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures — in less than 10 years. It is another scientific plea for immediate transition away from fossil fuels and bad environmental practices that will fall to…
Is There A National Security Concern? Will There Be A Forced Sale? If the current Washington debate about banning or controlling TikTok to assure national safety from Chinese manipulation appeared on the app, I suppose that there would be a lot of bouncing heads and irreverently humorous poking at the main characters as beset teens in the White House, Congress, and Beijing. Joe Biden has now aligned himself with congressional voices in both parties, Donald Trump, and the FBI to put all on notice that Chinese Big Tech and its state sponsors need to sell the burgeoning parody app or…
Inciting Violence Yet Again Should Remind Us All of Who This Man Is It’s difficult to pick out the most irresponsible part of Donald Trump’s own, premature announcement of his likely arrest next week on New York charges related to payments to entertainer Stormy Daniels and any fraud in accounting for them. In place of humility, there was the usual partisan and self-centered Trump braggadocio in his poorly stated and misspelled Trump Social posting. There was his own announcement of an arrest on Tuesday on an indictment that has not yet been voted by the grand jury hearing his case,…
We Now Have a Major Candidate Who Was Against Russian Aggression Until He Wasn’t The pending Republican primary elections seem an awfully poor venue for deciding whether this country is going to walk away from the defense of Ukraine from an invading Russia. For one thing, the primaries are notoriously rife with attempts to lean towards party line extremes, and, as we saw last November, may not jibe with the ability to win in a general election. And so, the talk of primaries is about anger and other emotions, not a reflection of thoughtful consideration of a phalanx of international…
It Is All More Than a Little Over the Edge of Reason Even as we await more court rulings to restrict medical abortions nationally, private lawsuits in Texas show how the legal twists and turns are taking on a disproportionate sense of vengeance, medical urgency apart from abortion and a kind of madness about it all. By coincidence, there have been private lawsuits in the news lately. In one, five women who say they were denied abortions even when their conditions showed “substantial” risk of medical harm by doctors in the state who feared state prosecution for second-guessing their judgments.…