When the will of the voters meets a political power grab

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Some people just won’t take no for an answer.

Put in that category the Republican candidate for a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court. Jefferson Griffin lost that race to incumbent Democratic Justice Allison Riggs by just 734 votes out of more than 5.5 million cast, which has to hurt. Ask Democrat Cheri Beasley, who in 2020 lost her North Carolina chief justice race to Republican Paul Newby by about 400 votes from almost 5.4 million ballots cast.

Since two recounts have confirmed the Riggs win, you might think Griffin would have conceded by now, as Beasley did after two recounts.

You would be wrong.

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Jan162025 TAGS: , , , , , , , ,

Jimmy Carter’s version of being a man should still mean something

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It sounds like the plot of an adventure film — an elite, trained military unit is sent on a mission that’s intricate, critical and dangerous. But the story was real.

Long before he was president of the United States, Jimmy Carter was one of the heroes of this particular operation, one that called for smarts, bravery and a kind of manhood, one far different from the puffed-up, MMA, “your body, my choice” version so much on display these days.

Masculinity of a certain type does seem to be all the rage, with an emphasis on the rage.

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Jan032025 TAGS: , , ,

Lying in politics is a danger to democracy. Can it be fixed?

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The “L-word.” It took some time for journalists to call a lie a lie when politicians uttered provable falsehoods. After all, don’t all politicians stretch the truth when it comes to policies, opponents or their own accomplishments?

Bill Adair, an award-winning journalist and educator, shares his thoughts and experiences in his book “Beyond the Big Lie: The Epidemic of Political Lying, Why Republicans Do It More, and How It Could Burn Down Our Democracy.” The creator of PolitiFact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking site, and co-founder of the International Fact-Checking Network has ideas about the problem — and possible remedies. Adair is a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University and a leader in the effort to combat misinformation. And, at the end of a year chock-full of election rhetoric to analyze, he is my guest and guide on Equal Time.

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Dec232024 TAGS: , ,

A holiday season of personal and political reflection

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If my mother were alive, she would be disappointed at what her Republican Party has become. But not surprised. She had witnessed the GOP inching its way toward scapegoating some Americans to score political points with others in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, and thought the tactic, while canny and often effective, betrayed longtime African American Lincoln Republicans like herself.

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Dec122024 TAGS: , , , , , ,

Looking at climate futures with imagination and resolve

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With a recently concluded global climate summit with challenging takeaways, an incoming president who vows to again remove the U.S. from international climate agreements, and increasing weather disasters that defy what went before, a look at what is being called an existential crisis could be grim. But that’s not the kind of book Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson has written. “What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures” is a provocative mix of essays, interviews, data, poetry and art, as Johnson guides the reader through solutions and possibilities at the nexus of science, policy, culture and justice. She is a marine biologist, policy expert, co-founder of the nonprofit think tank Urban Ocean Lab and a guest on Equal Time.

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Dec102024 TAGS: , ,

Democrats’ competing postmortems leave out history — and the obvious

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When the primary for the 2020 presidential contest was just beginning, an acquaintance — an intelligent, wealthy, white Democrat — shared her sure-fire prediction as we shared dinner. “It’s going to be Michael Bloomberg,” she said. “He’s the logical choice” to be the party’s nominee for president. She seemed shocked when I told her, “It will never happen.”

My explanation was a simple one, and it had not crossed her mind because, I realized, it had never affected that particular New Yorker nor any member of her family. The most loyal base of the Democratic Party had for some time been Black voters, and for many of them, the former New York City mayor would always be associated with three words: “Stop and frisk.” Stopping mostly Black and brown young men as a means to reduce crime was, after all, his signature.

When the tactic was questioned, when data showed minorities frisked by police were no more likely to possess guns, Bloomberg did not budge, and said: “I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little.” He vetoed city council bills that curbed the practice and railed against a federal judge who ruled it unconstitutional.

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Dec052024 TAGS: , , , , , ,

The consequences of climate and environmental policy unleashed

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Remember the movie “Elysium”? Though the dystopian, science-fiction vision of a future Earth didn’t cause much of a stir when it was released in 2013, its premise deserves another look in 2024, when climate and environmental crises are disrupting countries across the globe. Even the average person can’t help but notice unseasonable fall weather, with T-shirts replacing puffy jackets, and deduce something is a little off.

The film’s “Elysium” was a space station floating outside the Earth’s atmosphere, a privileged habitat for the rich and powerful escaping a polluted and overpopulated world, where the poor toiled throughout shortened and diseased lifetimes unless they devised a way out and into that promised land in the sky.

Not exactly upbeat, but too close to reality in an America where residents in the majority-Black city of Flint, Mich., remain devastated from the effects of a water supply poisoned a decade ago by leaders who were supposed to be looking out for them. While officials assure them the water now meets federal standards, lead pipes still need to be replaced, and children who consumed and bathed in that water continue to suffer seizures and developmental setbacks.

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Nov162024 TAGS: , , , ,

Closing with ‘values,’ Trump and Harris stand in contrast

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The candidates for president of the United States and their surrogates are talking a lot about values, and demonstrating their very different interpretations of what exactly that word means.

It was a setting that recalled a horror many Americans have tried to forget, the place where former president Donald Trump incited a crowd that morphed into a mob to march to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. In her closing argument in Washington on Tuesday night, Vice President Kamala Harris, flanked by the Stars and Stripes, instead ended her speech talking about the values instilled in her by “family by blood and family by love,” the values of “community, compassion and faith.”

The Democratic nominee repeated her belief that “the vast majority of us have so much more in common than what separates us.”

Looking at the gulf that is the partisan divide in America, that may indeed take a leap of faith. However, it is a lot sunnier than the vision Trump, the Republican nominee, conjured up at his weekend Madison Square Garden rally in New York City.

When Trump said early in his first campaign for the presidency that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” it turns out he was right. It was appropriate those remarks were made at Dordt College in Sioux Center, Iowa, a Christian college, since Trump’s most loyal constituency has been white evangelicals, who’ve stuck with him since then, no matter what.

“Compassionate conservatism” is so George W. Bush, a former president effectively banished from Trump’s GOP and replaced with a new brand of retribution and revenge.

It’s just proof that having religion does not necessarily equate to caring about your fellow man.

The nightmarish lineup at Trump’s New York rally offered insults toward Puerto Ricans, Jews, Musli

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Oct302024 TAGS: , , , , , ,

How a battle for locker-room access was about so much more

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Sports and politics don’t mix. In truth, that has never been the case. Sports, in fact, reflect every issue, every conflict in society from civil rights to equal justice.

Melissa Ludtke knows this from experience. In the 1970s, when she was trying to cover Major League Baseball for Sports Illustrated, her path to doing the job — which required equal access to the players — was blocked by a powerful and inflexible commissioner. The battle mirrored America’s burgeoning women’s movement, and ultimately ended up in federal court, presided over by a judge with her own civil rights experience. Ludtke tells the story in “Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside,” and on this episode of Equal Time.

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Oct282024 TAGS: , , ,

An election that’s bigger than one country

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During trips to Europe when Barack Obama was president of the United States, I felt like a rock star because, well, he was one, and some of that sheen couldn’t help but rub off on any random American. It was a point his Republican antagonists used to attack him, as though possessing celebrity-style charisma was a bad thing. (If only members of the GOP could have predicted the future, when their own candidate was best known for listing the TV show “The Apprentice” on his thin political resume.)

I fondly remember those trips, when I got a few free drinks and lots of conversation. Those Europeans admired that America, a country with a history of racial segregation and racist violence, could progress enough to elect an African American as its president. Of course, it didn’t hurt that Obama was a man with extraordinary political and personal gifts, and had a picture-perfect family to match.

While neither I nor any Black American I knew bought into the fantasy of a post-racial America — our own experiences and U.S. history taught us better — I felt very protective and proud of my country. I knew their own countries could not claim a parallel achievement and didn’t hesitate to tell them so, even

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Oct162024 TAGS: , , , ,
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