Search Results

By Line search: By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. Back in the years prior to 2015, there used to be two major political parties in America committed to democracy. The parties disagreed vehemently about policy and the Republicans relied on voter suppression and...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. Any time the U.S. Supreme Court issues a decision now, I admit I shudder. Very occasionally they can surprise, like they did in the Alabama voting rights case, Allen v Milligan, this last week but typically decisions...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. June is the end of the term for the U.S. Supreme Court and it is when the big decisions usually issue. We have already had one major environmental decision in Sackett v Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In that...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. One extremely disturbing trend going on now is the popularity of far-right ideas, including those of Neo-Nazis and white supremacists. In considering why there has been a resurgence in Neo-Nazi ideas, one...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. The New Hampshire state decision to take down the Elizabeth Gurley Flynn historical marker two weeks after it was unveiled was both wrong-headed and ignorant. Flynn had a long, flamboyant and illustrious life. The...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. Up until recently, child labor was not a subject you would see discussed in any media. There has been a perception that child labor was a thing of the past. It was outlawed roughly 100 years ago. It was something...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. Not even a month ago, I wrote a My Turn column that pointed out the ongoing corruption issues with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. He had failed to report lavish vacations and expensive gifts he had received...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. Few subjects are written about more poorly than immigration. Fox News and the MAGA fascists have long controlled the immigration narrative and they talk about immigrants as two-dimensional villains, not as fully...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. To my generation of 1960s progressives, I’d say, without hesitation, that the Vietnam War was a central event in our collective lives. Opposition to that war was defining for many of us. It was our education about...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. When former President Donald Trump was indicted in New York, it seemed like a milestone. The media treated it as a big deal, like some kind of taboo was broken. Sen. Joe Manchin (D.-WV) and Gov. Kim Reynolds...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. Older readers may remember the relatively brief Supreme Court tenure of Justice Abe Fortas. Fortas was on the Court from 1965 to 1969. He had been a law professor at Yale and gained prominence because he was counsel...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. I don’t usually pay attention to Donald Trump’s social media postings. However, I did notice that in his foaming-at-the-mouth about Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, the DA who is prosecuting him, he called...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. No American artist has a story like Winfred Rembert. What artists have survived a near-lynching or grew up picking cotton at age 5 with other family members? Or worked on a chain gang while serving seven years in...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. This March marks the twentieth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. It’s amazing how little public reflection there has been about the American role in that endeavor. The Iraq War was not an error or a tragic...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. In Greenwood Mississippi, there’s a statue of Emmett Till that pays homage to the 14-year-old who was murdered in the summer of 1955. Till’s murder fueled the burgeoning civil rights movement. There’s now a movie,...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. New England has a reputation as a historic, progressive, and culturally rich region. Probably no area in the country can match our colleges and universities. In the 19th century, New England played a prominent role...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. Before going south on a civil rights trip organized by the Nation Magazine, I had never been to Little Rock, Arkansas. I was only vaguely familiar with the struggle to integrate schools there in the 1950s. There was...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. We have all heard the expression “living history.” When I was in college, I had several professors who could make learning come alive but as an adult, it seems rare to have that “on fire” type experience. So I feel...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. Domestic violence often disappears from the headlines. Usually, only stories like an intimate partner homicide or another mass shooting break through public inattention.Court decisions about domestic violence mostly...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. We have reached a point where conspiracy theories have proliferated so much that they have lost the ability to surprise. The entire right-wing ecosphere has been polluted. False information that’s intended to mislead...