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Jan 23, 2025 | 
irishtimes.com | David SMith |David Smith
Donald Trump described attacks on police officers at the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021 as “very minor incidents” as he sought to defend his decision to pardon the insurrectionists. The US president hinted that those who put him through “four years of hell” via criminal prosecutions should themselves be investigated, adding ominously that his predecessor as US president Joe Biden made a mistake by not pardoning himself.
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Dec 23, 2024 | 
irishtimes.com | David SMith |David Smith
US president Joe Biden has commuted the sentences of 37 out of 40 federal death row inmates, changing their punishment to life imprisonment without parole. The decision follows month of pressure from campaigners who warned that president-elect Donald Trump backs the death penalty and restarted federal executions during his first term after a pause of nearly two decades.
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Dec 20, 2024 | 
irishtimes.com | David SMith |David Smith
US president-elect Donald Trump suffered a humiliating setback on Thursday when Republicans in Congress failed to pass a pared-down spending Bill – just one day before a potential government shutdown that could disrupt Christmas travel. By a vote of 174-235, the House of Representatives rejected the Trump-backed package, hastily assembled by Republican leaders after the president-elect and his billionaire ally Elon Musk scuttled a prior bipartisan deal.
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Dec 3, 2024 | 
portside.org | Carl Gibson |David SMith |David Smith |Wendy Fry |Amber A’Lee Frost
Dispatches From the Culture Wars – December 3, 2024 Published December 3, 2024 GOP: MAGA Control is IrreversibleResistance 2.0Preparing For the Great PurgeThe Youth VoteChristian Nationalism Wants to Repeal Women's VoteQueering Trump’s DealBook Bans and Authors of Color‘Wicked’ PoliticsReproductive WrongsDiet in the Culture WarsMAGA Control of the GOP is IrreversibleBy Carl GibsonAlternetFormer Rep.
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Oct 3, 2024 | 
batimes.com.ar | David SMith |David Smith
The other day, passing through Madrid on my way back home to Argentina, I read a story about a young man who was tortured and then imprisoned in the Spanish capital just a few streets away from where I was living, almost half a century ago.
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Oct 2, 2024 | 
theguardian.com | David SMith |David Smith
Scott Bakula has just finished a noon student matinee. The audience included fidgety fourth graders (aged nine or 10).“They can be very challenging and this piece I wouldn’t say is necessarily kid friendly,” he says by phone. “But they did pretty well.”Then he reflects: “You always know that in the midst of that group of kids, regardless of how some are not great at behaving and sitting – and I don’t blame them necessarily – a show strikes a chord in some children. That’s all you need.
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Aug 17, 2024 | 
batimes.com.ar | David SMith |David Smith
The past few weeks have been illuminating if, like me, you despair at how the wider world looks at, or so often ignores, Latin America.
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Jul 29, 2024 | 
theconversation.com | David SMith |David Smith
Last week, Donald Trump promised a Christian audience that if they voted for him in 2024, they wouldn’t have to vote again in four years. Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. … You got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote. Democrats pounced on this as evidence of Trump’s dictatorial ambitions. But not all conservative Christians were thrilled about it, either.
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Jul 24, 2024 | 
pressherald.com | David SMith |David Smith
What is that that explains the power of former President Donald Trump’s rhetoric to galvanize a movement that now threatens the foundations of American democracy? And how can the Democrats hope to combat it? Sigmund Freud’s theory of illusion can help us answer both of these questions. Freud defined illusions as beliefs that we hold because we want them to be true. “The life imposed on us is too hard to bear,” he wrote, “it brings too much pain, too many disappointments, to many insoluble problems.
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Jul 16, 2024 | 
theconversation.com | David SMith |David Smith
The shooting of former president Donald Trump and three attendees at his rally was just one of nearly 300 mass shootings in the US so far this year. Amid all the shocking news from that day, there was one depressingly familiar detail. The shooter used an AR-15 style rifle, the kind of semiautomatic weapon that has featured in dozens of mass shootings since the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre of 2012. Despite the devastation it has brought, the AR-15 has a fierce grip on American politics.
