This Week In Commentary

Denny Hoskins wants to cut a library’s funding over two books he has not read. He Googled them, saw excerpts and looked at some pictures. For Missouri’s secretary of state, that was enough.

For a long time the premise of climate news was that humans are causing the planet to warm, and without emergency action, environmental disaster would result.

The feckless response of American elites to President Donald Trump’s authoritarian attempt the past decade has often been a failure of imagination: Oh, surely he’ll leave office after he loses. Oh, his immigration officers surely won’t roam our streets racially profiling people and killing our neighbors. 

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.