Author: Carma Henry

     Unions are once again playing a significant role in a presidential election. Joe Biden joins striking auto workers on a picket line in Michigan; Donald Trump meets with Teamsters leaders at Mar-a-Lago and Washington D.C. Vying for working-class votes, the candidates show how choices made by both union and non-union workers are seen as pivotal to election victory.

     Putin demonstrated in his “interview” with Tucker Carlson the delusional version of Russian history that rationalizes his brutality. Hamas and Netanyahu continue to demonstrate Auden’s classic line: “Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.” It often seems as if vast swaths of the Middle East operate under the collective delusion that the various parties, state or non-state, can kill their way out of insecurity and injustice.

     NATO promised at that point–at least the US rep James Baker promised in 1990–that NATO wasn’t looking to expand, but presumably rather to sit quietly to see if peace is really possible without its oppositional military alliance, dominated by the Soviet Union.

    For some time, it’s been apparent that the world’s nations are not meeting the growing challenges to human survival.

     Aleksei Navalny, to all effects murdered by Putin, represented by contrast about as absolute a standard of what might constitute a morally honest life as humanly possible. He was not perfect; nobody is. In his early political life he dallied with racist forms of nationalism, which he outgrew.

     In 1969, dissatisfied with the popular idea of peace as a “negative,” the mere absence of war, Galtung redefined peace as the opposite of violence. He characterized the latter as “avoidable insults to life.” The art of peace became the skilled avoidance of such insults. In this way, he enriched our vocabulary of peace by embracing the notion of “positive peace,” also known as the presence of justice.

      Meanwhile, it’s no secret that workplace romances are somewhat widespread.

     Nothing makes this more clear than Vice President Kamala Harris’s courageous decision to champion reproductive freedom in the midst of a full-on assault on the right to choose.

     But ever since Richard Nixon had to flee from a richly deserved impeachment resolution, the solemn process of removing important federal officers has become a partisan get-even device. The current Republican-run House has made it something like a political 911 call.

     The Senate Agriculture, Environment and General Government Appropriations Committee on Tuesday approved a revised bill (SB 1624) that sponsor Jay Collins, R-Tampa, said is now in line with a measure (HB 1645) ready to go to the full House.