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I couldn’t stomach Jimmy Carter–until my view of him turned around 180 degrees just four years ago.  

Like most Democrats who supported Ted Kennedy’s run against him, I tagged Carter as just some grinning anti-New Deal Bible-thumping goober. And his post-Presidential “peacemaking” was often dangerously naïve, as I saw in Liberia where Carter had boosted the presidential candidacy of war-criminal Charles Taylor for president because Taylor, a murderous monster, proclaimed he’d been born again in Jesus.

I nick-named Carter, “The Dangerous Christian.”

But then, while staking out the current Governor, the vote-suppressing racist Brian Kemp, I did a little re-con outside Kemp’s office. I had my face to the wall, pretending to study the official portraits of the State's governors.  I was struck that only one, James Earl Carter, refused to have his photo taken with his own state flag fully visible because it included the Confederate flag's Stars and Bars. In Georgia, at that time, 1971, that took immeasurable courage.  That took integrity.  

Alav ha-Shalom, President Carter.

On the last day of 2024, the deputy general counsel for the House of Representatives formally accepted delivery of a civil summons for two congressmembers from Northern California. More than 600 constituents of Jared Huffman and Mike Thompson have signed on as plaintiffs in a class action accusing them of helping to arm the Israeli military in violation of “international and federal law that prohibits complicity in genocide.”

The latest news from the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) so-called "Protecting the Homeland" operation in the Jenin refugee camp paints a grim picture. Nine Palestinian lives have been claimed in this ongoing crackdown which began on December 5, including a young journalist, Shaza Al-Sabbagh.

It’s been three days since Luigi Mangione’s manifesto was discovered in his backpack explaining why he assassinated the CEO of United HealthCare.

In Mangione’s manifesto, he said that he was not the “most qualified person to lay out the full argument” against our for-profit healthcare industry. Apparently, to Mangione, one of those qualified people — is me. In his manifesto, he references how I’ve “illuminated the corruption and greed,” implying folks should go to my work to understand the complexity — and the power-hungry abuse — within our current system.

It’s not often that my work gets a killer five-star review from an actual killer. And thus, my phone has been ringing off the hook which is bad news because my phone doesn’t have a hook. Emails are pouring in. Text messages. Requests from many in the media. The messages all sound something like this: 

“Luigi mentioned you in his manifesto. That people should listen to you. Will you come on our show, or talk to our reporter and tell them that you condemn murder!?”

I welcome in the new year with a sense of abstract helplessness, as the headlines continue to bring us dead children, bombed hospitals, torture, rape and, of course, ever more “self-defense” (sometimes known as genocide).

From my safe, secure office space I absorb the daily news – from Gaza, from all across the planet – with a whiplash of guilt and naivete. What the hell do I know what it feels like to have my house, or my tent, bombed, to see my children die, to have no access to water, let alone healthcare? Is it enough to comfortably empathize with the collateral damage of this world at war?

No, no, no, it’s not.

But I empathize nonetheless, and shake to my depths with an incredulity that never goes away: “As if the relentless bombing and the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza were not enough, the one sanctuary where Palestinians should have felt safe in fact became a death trap.”

Pleading ignorance of the new evidence demonstrates 'lone gunman' theory is defunct

Case closed?