Women's reproductive rights; pollution regulation and climate change; separation of church and state; Native American rights; gun safety - the alt-Right U.S. Supreme Court has dealt a series of severe blows to hopes for an enlightened society. In all those areas, the Court is taking the country back to where it was when I was …
Author: aronsbarron
SCOTUS decisions: rage and grief the order of the day
In the last 24 hours, the Supreme Court has made it easier to kill people as long as it's with a gun, but it has barred women from removing from their own bodies embryonic or fetal material not viable as human beings-- even if caused by rape or incest. SCOTUS has taken a wildly absolutist …
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50th anniversary of Watergate break-in
Op ed alert. Jim Barron, author of The Greek Connection: the life of Elias Demetracopoulos and the Untold Story of Watergate, is part of The Washington Post's 50th anniversary coverage of the infamous bungled burglary in today's edition of the newspaper that broke the story 50 years ago today. Check out his article on the …
Late spring reading, pt. 2 – fiction
Want to escape temporarily from news stories about the carnage in Ukraine, the originalist black hole of the Supreme Court, accelerating inflation and the toxic swill of MAGAism? Here are four novels with the potential to take you away from it all. The Rent Collector by Camron Wright is a gift for lovers of literature, …
Late spring reading, pt. 1 – non-fiction
Hiding out from the headlines? These non-fiction selections may not transport you above the gloom emanating from the news media, but they may illuminate contemporary themes in a deeply satisfying way. Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath by Bill Browder picks up from his previous book Red …
Can November be salvaged? Pt. 1
President Biden ran on the promise to bring out country together. Yet, as Tom Friedman recently pointed out in the NY Times, the President has been more effective at strengthening bonds among our allies abroad than in healing divisions at home. With a tiny majority in the House and a 50-50 Senate split, Democrats’ slimmest …
Gun violence has come to define America
Two weeks ago, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a California law that blocked anyone younger than 21 from buying a semiautomatic rifle. In a 2-to-1 decision, two Trump-appointed judges waxed poetic about the importance of allowing 18-year-olds to buy AR-15s. The current uber-right U.S. Supreme Court is highly likely to uphold this …
Controlling Rx drug prices
My dad was one of the first generation of type 1 diabetics to survive because insulin was available. We worried about him as over the years he developed one after another of the complications of this potentially deadly disease: blindness, amputations, heart disease and more. But we never worried about his not being able to …
Trump-packed Court poised to delete abortion rights
The handwriting has been on the wall. We shouldn't be surprised, but it's still enraging. A draft SCOTUS opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito and leaked to Politico, shows that the Supreme Court is poised to overturn the Roe v. Wade 1973 "egregiously wrong" decision and eliminate women's right to choose an abortion. Thank you, …
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Spring reading, pt. 2 – fiction
The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles (author of A Gentleman in Moscow) follows Emmett Watson, an 18-year-old just released from a juvenile work farm for accidentally causing the death of a fellow who had been bullying him. Having survived his mother’s abandonment, he returns to the family farm, where his father has just died, and …
Marjorie Arons-Barron 