This Week In Commentary

I’m no political consultant, but I don’t think I would make “fraud” the theme of the Trump administration’s midterm election campaign push. 

In New Hampshire, as in the United States, about 1% of the population identifies as transgender. Data compiled by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law puts the total transgender population in the state at about 13,500, including 2,800 teenagers. Of those 2,800, about a third identify as trans girls, a third as trans boys, and a third as nonbinary, the data suggests. Of the 930 or so trans girls in New Hampshire, the Williams Institute estimates that about 40% play at least one sport. 

It might come as a surprise to many Wisconsinites to learn that more Wisconsin women are getting abortions today than were accessing abortion in the state four years ago, right before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

Nitrogen gas executions are cruel. That’s been clear since January 2024, when Corrections officials strapped a mask over Kenneth Eugene Smith and suffocated him to death. Smith convulsed and struggled for breath over the course of many minutes.

Melissa Hortman often told me things she probably shouldn’t have. 

Politically interested Tennesseans of a certain era often invoke the ghost of Howard Baker, longtime Republican U.S. senator, when they talk of statesmen and trends in the Tennessee GOP.

“It really blew up our world,” public schools advocate Heather DuBois Bourenane says of the failed school funding and tax-cut deal that Republican legislative leaders and Gov. Tony Evers trumpeted as a “blockbuster” before it fizzled in the state Senate, ending in finger-pointing and recriminations. 

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that Gov. Jeff Landry was the clear and logical choice for President Donald Trump to appoint as his special envoy to Greenland, that it just made perfect sense — like Planters, when Mr. Peanut applied for a job.

Oh, Tennessee. I love you, but you have broken my heart. 

It’s spring in Alabama. But it’s winter for democracy.

Think of the millions of Alabamians who lived, loved and died under an apartheid government, a regime that lasted nearly a century, presiding over lynchings and mass disenfranchisement.

That Memphis is named for an ancient Egyptian city seems more than a coincidence when one considers that the Biblical characters who survived the 10 plagues of Egypt endured little more than have Memphians in the last year.