May 18, 2026

This Wednesday, May 20, 2026, at 5 PM Pacific, we welcome Ruth Ben-Ghiat who will be in conversation with Patt Morrison on the topic: “THE ROLE OF FEAR IN THE DECLINE OF DEMOCRACY: THE POWER, POLITICS AND IMPACT OF FEAR AS A TOOL OF POLITICAL PERSUASION” (Register Here)

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is Professor of History at New York University, specializing in authoritarianism, propaganda, and resistance to tyranny, and a Senior Fellow at the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. She is the author of, among others, the New York Times bestseller “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.”

Patt Morrison has a share of two Pulitzer Prizes as a longtime Los Angeles Times writer and columnist. As a public television and radio broadcaster, she has won six Emmys and a dozen Golden Mike awards.

Foreign Affairs

Henrietta Levin

May 13, 2026

America Has Lost Its Leverage Over China

How Trump and Xi Could Cement Beijing’s Advantage for Years to Come

The past year of U.S.-Chinese relations has been extraordinary and head-spinning. In the spring of 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump imposed a de facto trade embargo on China, a measure swiftly reciprocated by Beijing. Months later, he was touting a “G-2” partnership between the two countries. In recent weeks, Trump has both invited Chinese warships to the Strait of Hormuz and threatened to strike China-bound oil tankers passing through it.

But the world’s most important bilateral relationship has also changed in more consequential and persistent ways. China has quietly established authority over whether and how the United States will implement national security measures such as export controls. Stylistic changes in how the United States conducts diplomacy with China have allowed Beijing to gain the upper hand in pushing for high-stakes policy concessions. And Washington has separated its diplomacy with Beijing from efforts to compete for influence globally, resulting in a deprioritization of critical strategic issues and enabling China to weaponize the appearance of U.S.-Chinese rapprochement. These subtle changes in U.S.-Chinese relations may constrain decision-making in Washington for years to come.

When Trump meets with Xi in Beijing this week, the two leaders are unlikely to achieve major policy breakthroughs. But they will reinforce a new set of implicit rules and assumptions for managing relations that ultimately favor China, which may embolden Beijing to test American resolve on Taiwan, the protection of cutting-edge technology, and other vital interests. This, in turn, will complicate Washington’s ability to preserve the bilateral stability it has gone to great lengths to secure.

(To continue reading click here)

Washington Post/Opinion

By Kathleen Parker

May 15, 2026

Trump’s redistricting war forces a surrender in South Carolina

Cynical congressional map dilutes Black voting power to target a kingmaker.

In an almost heroic moment, outgoing Republican South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster said he wouldn’t call for a special session to pass a new congressional redistricting plan, thus defying his benefactor, President Donald Trump.

It felt good for a minute. Trump’s redistricting war to create more Republican congressional seats ahead of the midterms has produced ugly collateral damage nationally, and it looked as though McMaster wouldn’t be a part of it. Among other offenses, earlier redistricting in the secessionist state has meant redistributing Black voters to reduce their voting power. The proposed congressional map targets the venerable Democratic Rep. James E. Clyburn, who is Black, and his 6th Congressional District, whose voters first elected him in 1992.

“Almost” being the operative word, McMaster suddenly pivoted Wednesday and said he would call for a special session. The South Carolina Senate on Tuesday refused to extend the regular session, which ended Thursday, to consider the redistricting measure. The extension required a two-thirds majority, but it fell two votes short when five Republicans joined Democrats to quash the measure. But on Thursday, McMaster signed an order calling for a special session to redraw the map.

(To continue reading click here)

May 13, 2026

If you missed today’s program featuring Juliette Kayyem in conversation with Warren Olney, you can watch the program at THIS PAST EVENTS LINK. The program will post a few hours after it ends. Starting Thursday morning, you can listen AT THIS PODCAST LINK

On Wednesday, May 20, 2026, at 5 PM Pacific, we welcome Ruth Ben-Ghiat who will be in conversation with Patt Morrison on the topic: “THE ROLE OF FEAR IN THE DECLINE OF DEMOCRACY: THE POWER, POLITICS AND IMPACT OF FEAR AS A TOOL OF POLITICAL PERSUASION” (Register Here)

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is Professor of History at New York University, specializing in authoritarianism, propaganda, and resistance to tyranny, and a Senior Fellow at the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present” and several books on Italian Fascism, and the publisher of the Substack newsletter Lucid on threats to democracy.

Patt Morrison has a share of two Pulitzer Prizes as a longtime Los Angeles Times writer and columnist. As a public television and radio broadcaster, she has won six Emmys and a dozen Golden Mike awards.

New York Times/Opinion

By Thomas L. Friedman

May 12, 2026

NATO, Please Help. Trump Has No Strategy for Iran.

Dear NATO Members: I get it. You despise President Trump for all the right reasons. He has walked away from Ukraine. He has threatened to seize Greenland and annex Canada. He has coddled Vladimir Putin. He is eroding America’s democratic institutions and norms. He insulted each of you so much that the German chancellor recently barked back that Trump’s America was being “humiliated” by Iran. I get it.

Now get over it

Get all your navies together and proceed to the Persian Gulf immediately to join the American armada to make clear that Iran will never, ever be allowed to decide who shall pass and who shall not through the Strait of Hormuz. And, if it insists on trying to do so, it won’t just be taking on the United States and Israel, it will be taking on the entire Western alliance.

For you to sit on the sidelines and let Iran’s malign regime, with its poisonous ideology, take hostage the Strait of Hormuz — as well as the modernizing Arab Gulf states lining it — would keep the world’s most critical oil lifeline in a state of permanent instability. This is not a small matter for Europe, which is highly dependent on gas from the Gulf to heat and power its economies, unless it wants to return to dependency on Russia.

I know this is a big ask, and it would be a lot easier if either Trump or the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, would ever summon the integrity to apologize for launching this war without NATO consultation, without any strategy for the morning after if things did not go as planned and without even a fig’s leaf of international legitimation from the United Nations.

Alas, these two reckless egomaniacs, who are nowhere near as smart as they think they are, have now boxed themselves in. Unfortunately, we are all in the box with them.

(To continue reading click here)

New York Times/Opinion

Bret Stephens

May 12, 2026

China Is Much Weaker Than It Seems. That’s the Problem.

When President Trump visits Beijing this week, he should have the satisfaction of knowing that time, in the long run, is on America’s side. Unfortunately, that’s also the problem.

That’s the opposite of a conventional wisdom that holds that the United States is a fumbling status quo power, akin to Britain in the waning years of its empire, squandering its strength in sideshow wars (South Africa then; Iran now) while failing to grapple with its principal strategic and economic competitor (Germany then; China now). It’s this same conventional wisdom that has been telling us that, any year now, China will overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy.

But China’s economy most likely will never overtake America’s, just as past would-be contenders — whether they were the Soviet Union, Japan or the European Union — all fell short. Why? Because history shows that the most productive national assets are political freedom and open markets — the freer, more open and more competitive, the better.

That’s a point that often gets lost with those who think that good economics means a wise industrial policy, one that steers government revenues into technologies of “the future.” Hence China’s supreme leader, Xi Jinping, has ordered heavy investment in robotics, electric cars, lithium-ion batteries and military kit, just as Germany’s leaders at the beginning of this century made a titanic push into renewable energy — only to see it founder long before Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine exposed Berlin’s backdoor dependence on cheap Russian gas.

Outside of emergencies, particularly war, such an approach rarely works out well. Technologies of the future often turn out to be anything but. (Remember ethanol-fueled cars as environmental godsends?) Taxpayer funds steered toward so-called national champion industries frequently lead to sloppy practices as corporate leaders become more attuned to political demands — like keeping money-losing factories open — than to tough-minded management. And corruption tends to become endemic whenever the lines between business and government become hopelessly blurred.

(To continue reading click here)

May 11, 2026

This Wednesday, May 13, 2026, at 5 PM Pacific, we welcome Juliette Kayyem who will be in conversation with Warren Olney on the topic: “SECURITY IN AN ERA OF DOMESTIC INSTABILITY“ (Register Here)

Juliette Kayyem, former Assistant Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, is a national leader in homeland security, crisis management, and disaster resilience. She serves as the Robert and Renée Belfer Senior Lecturer in International Security at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where she also chairs major projects on homeland security and global health security. She is a senior national security analyst for CNN and a contributing writer to The Atlantic, a critically acclaimed author, and is widely recognized for her commentary on terrorism, climate risk, public safety, and democratic governance.

Warren Olney was the host and executive producer of the nationally syndicated weekday afternoon program “To the Point,” which originated at KCRW in Los Angeles. Olney and his programs have been honored with nearly 40 national, regional and local awards for broadcast excellence. He is the only two-time winner of the Los Angeles Society of Professional Journalists Distinguished Journalist award.

New York Times/Opinion

By Josh Gottheimer

May 10, 2026

I’m a Democrat.  My Party Has a Double Standard on Antisemitism.

In 2017, Democratic leaders denounced the white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us.” In 2022, Democrats took Donald Trump to task for having dinner with Nick Fuentes, an antisemite and a white supremacist. Across the Democratic Party’s ideological spectrum, right-wing hate is consistently condemned.

But today, too many Democrats are noticeably and shamefully silent when antisemitism comes from the far left — at a moment when the Anti-Defamation League is reporting a surge of antisemitic incidents in the past three years.

It’s a glaring double standard.

Consider the response to — really, the embrace of — Hasan Piker, a prominent left-wing commentator with millions of online followers. He referred to Orthodox Jews as “inbred” and said, “America deserved 9/11,” both statements he halfheartedly walked back. He said that Hamas — a designated terrorist organization that has killed Americans and taken Americans hostage — is “a thousand times better” than Israel, America’s ally, which he called a “fascist settler colonial apartheid state” — a statement he stands by. None of this should be waved away as mere edgy commentary. Mr. Piker traffics in antisemitic and anti-American extremism that has been met by silence from many on the Democratic left.

Sadly, we’ve seen several prominent Democrats appear on his show and even campaign with him, granting his views legitimacy.

(To continue reading click here)

Washington Post/Opinion

By Fareed Zakaria

May 8, 2026

Iran is no match for America. Why hasn’t Washington defeated it?

Why is the most powerful country on the planet unable to get its way with a much smaller, weaker country that has been ravaged by economic sanctions and military strikes? At one level, the simplest way to understand America’s problem in the Iran war is to use game theory. President Donald Trump decided to play a game of “chicken” with Iran — think of two drivers racing straight at each other. In these situations, if the stakes for one side are existential and for the other much lower, the side with the higher stakes usually prevails. For the Iranian regime, if it loses, there is a good chance it ends up toppled and slaughtered. For Trump, it would be a bad weekend at Mar-a-Lago. It’s easy to see why the Iranians would be more willing to lock their steering wheel in that game of chicken.

But there is a broader reason the United States has found it so difficult to handle Iran, one that is not just about Trump and this latest ill-conceived war. Ever since the Islamic regime took power in Iran, America has been of two minds about it. On the one hand, the U.S. has had certain issues it wanted resolved — from the return of the hostages to nuclear limits. On the other hand, it wants to topple the regime, not just negotiate with it. There is a tension in these two attitudes that has run through U.S. foreign policy for almost half a century. Does Washington want to change certain policies of Iran or does it want to change Iran?

If Washington negotiates with Tehran, inevitably there is a give-and-take, there are concessions on both sides, there is some relaxation of hostilities. Above all, in engaging with it, the U.S. government is conferring a certain degree of legitimacy on the Islamic Republic, treating it as a serious negotiating partner, accepting that it represents Iran on the world stage. But that acceptance sits uneasily with some American elites, who feel that the Islamic Republic is illegitimate, that it should not exist and that Washington’s only policy toward it should be to overthrow it. And yet, there are things Washington wants that only Iran can deliver. That is why even President Ronald Reagan found himself secretly negotiating with the Iranian mullahs while publicly denouncing them.

(To continue reading click here)

May 6, 2026

If you missed today’s program featuring Tim Naftali in conversation with Madeleine Brand, you can watch the program at THIS PAST EVENTS LINK. The program will post a few hours after it ends. Starting Thursday morning, you can listen AT THIS PODCAST LINK

On Wednesday, May 13, 2026, at 5 PM Pacific, we welcome Juliette Kayyem who will be in conversation with Warren Olney on the topic: “SECURITY IN AN ERA OF DOMESTIC INSTABILITY“ (Register Here)

Juliette Kayyem, former Assistant Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, is a national leader in homeland security, crisis management, and disaster resilience. She serves as the Robert and Renée Belfer Senior Lecturer in International Security at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where she also chairs major projects on homeland security and global health security. She is a senior national security analyst for CNN and a contributing writer to The Atlantic, a critically acclaimed author, and is widely recognized for her commentary on terrorism, climate risk, public safety, and democratic governance.

Warren Olney was the host and executive producer of the nationally syndicated weekday afternoon program “To the Point,” which originated at KCRW in Los Angeles. Olney and his programs have been honored with nearly 40 national, regional and local awards for broadcast excellence. He is the only two-time winner of the Los Angeles Society of Professional Journalists Distinguished Journalist award.

New York Times/Opinion

By Thomas L. Friedman

May 5, 2026

The U.S. and China Have a Common Foe. Hint: It’s Not the U.S.S.R.

The summit between President Trump and President Xi Jinping in Beijing next week could be the most significant encounter between American and Chinese leaders since Richard Nixon met Mao Zedong in Beijing in 1972.

That summit eased decades of Sino-American animosity and forged a tacit alliance between the United States and China against the Soviet Union. This summit comes at a similar transformational moment in world affairs, when there is a new shared threat to both China and America. It is a metastasizing disorder that could destabilize the world and harm both countries unless they figure out a way to simultaneously compete and collaborate against a growing list of challenges. These challenges can be successfully confronted only by their collective action — starting with the United States and China together creating guardrails against the malign uses of A.I., now that the latest models have demonstrated staggeringly powerful cyberattack capabilities.

Two paradigm shifts have changed the world since the Nixon-Mao summit. The first — still not widely appreciated, although the alarm bells are now ringing off the wall — is the emergence of these new, asymmetric artificial intelligence tools that could superempower small, malign actors, be they terrorists, anarchists, criminals, political groups or small nation-states.

Two guys in a cave with a laptop, access to the latest A.I. models and a Starlink terminal could attack the critical infrastructure of any society.

The second has to do with globalization. …

(To continue reading click here)

New York Times/Opinion

By Jamelle Bouie

May 6, 2026

John Roberts Believes in an America That Doesn’t Exist

“Today is a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that has ever been won on any battlefield,” President Lyndon Johnson declared as he signed the Voting Rights Act on Aug. 6, 1965. “This act flows from a clear and simple wrong,” he continued. “Millions of Americans are denied the right to vote because of their color. This law will ensure them the right to vote.”

And so it did.

The Voting Rights Act put the final nail in the coffin of American apartheid and opened the door to something that looked worthy of the name democracy. It brought a flowering of political participation, not just in the states of the former Confederacy but also throughout the country, as disadvantaged and disenfranchised Americans took advantage of new rules and protections to fight for and win political power. Latinos, Native Americans and other ethnic and linguistic minorities all won greater access and influence under the act and its subsequent amendments and reauthorizations.

The change was most transformative, of course, for Black Americans, who seized the passage of the law to win local, state and federal representation at numbers not seen since Reconstruction. In 1964, there was just a handful of Black officeholders at any level of government in the South. By 1980, hundreds of Black Americans had won local and state office.

With that said, it took a major amendment to the Voting Rights Act and a Supreme Court decision to give Black Americans the opportunity to win more than token representation in Congress. In 1982, Congress reauthorized and amended the V.R.A. to combat disparate impact in voting and electoral outcomes. Four years later, in 1986, a unanimous Supreme Court declared that the Voting Rights Act forbade voting schemes that impaired the ability of “cohesive” groups of language or minority groups to “participate equally in the political process and to elect candidates of their choice.” Following this decision, states across the country — especially in the South — used the 1990 census and redistricting to create majority-minority state legislative and congressional districts where Black voters could elevate Black lawmakers and officials to federal office.

At the 10th anniversary of the act in 1975, there were 17 Black members of Congress, up from six in 1965. All of them served in the House of Representatives. At the 20th anniversary in 1985, there were still only 20 Black Americans in the House (and none in the Senate). By 1995, however, there were 43 Black Americans serving as voting members of Congress, including one senator, Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois… (To continue reading click here)

May 4, 2026

Wednesday, May 6, 2026, at 5 PM Pacific, we welcome Tim Naftali who will be in conversation with Madeleine Brand on the topic: “DEMOCRACY STRESSED: CAN AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS STILL CONTAIN POLITICAL EXTREMISM?” (Register Here)

Tim Naftali is a CNN Presidential Historian and a Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. Formerly a Professor of History and Public Service at New York University, Naftali served as Founding Director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs Presidential Recordings Program and as Director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library. In addition to the biography “George H. W. Bush”, he is the author of “Impeachment: An American History” and a co-author of “Khrushchev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary.”

Madeleine Brand is an American broadcast journalist and radio host with more than three decades of experience in public media.  She currently hosts Press Play, an award-winning daily news and culture program on NPR’s KCRW-FM in Los Angeles.

New York Times/Opinion

By Maureen Dowd

May 2, 2026

His Majesty and Our Travesty

The last time Charles came here for a state visit, nobody seemed to notice.

I saw him up close during his trip in the autumn of 1985, from his stop at JCPenney in a suburban mall to promote British clothing to a starry state dinner. I was impressed.

The Prince of Wales had a reputation back then as a bit of a wimp, always chafing in the shadow of his towering mother, resentful about being relegated to cutting ribbons.

In a flashy decade full of bling kings like the New York developer Donald Trump, Charles seemed like a man from another time. He yearned to be taken seriously and to have an impact on global issues. As the charming British actor Peter Ustinov, who attended the state dinner, told me: “He has a clear sense of what he would do if allowed to. One regrets that he didn’t live in 1400.”

Touring the sights in Washington, Prince Charles impressed salesclerks and senators alike with his genuine interest in culture and politics and his playful and self-deprecating small talk.

As I wrote in The Times back then, “He went out of his way to move past protocol, and was equally at home discussing the architecture of Baltimore, the actresses on the television show ‘Dynasty,’ the opera roles that Beverly Sills made famous and the tenuous state of international relations.”

It didn’t matter. Nobody was paying attention. He was simply the man who accompanied Princess Diana to Washington…

(To continue reading click here)

The Economist

May 1, 2026

Donald Trump could rescue John Roberts

The president is giving the chief justice the chance to emulate his hero and affirm America’s constitutional order

It would be a dull quest, but a difficult one, to find a 70-something white male conservative less like President Donald Trump than Chief Justice John Roberts. Mr Roberts is mild where the other is bombastic, endowed with impeccable establishment credentials where the other has credentialled himself, obsessed with consensus and continuity, not disruption. The chief justice never tweets; he has attained just one wife. And yet, as Mr Trump has been building a movement to remake America to suit himself, Mr Roberts, like the stewards of so many American institutions, has been failing at his job, at least by the standards he set when he became the chief 20 years ago.

Mr Roberts wanted to lead a Supreme Court that would transcend partisanship and speak with one voice. He wanted to stop the justices’ drift towards promoting their own theories of law, if not their own celebrity, and to persuade the court to refocus upon its institutional role in ballasting American governance for the long haul. “If it doesn’t,” he told Jeffrey Rosen, a writer and legal scholar, in 2006, “it’s going to lose its credibility and legitimacy.” During Mr Roberts’s tenure, as the court’s jurisprudence has swerved with shifts in its ideological balance, and as justices have thrilled their political tribes by issuing not just their own opinions but their own books and speeches, public respect for the court has plummeted, as measured by polls.

Now Mr Roberts, at 70, confronts a test as severe as any faced by a chief justice since his role model, John Marshall, squared off with Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Mr Trump is claiming extraordinary powers for the presidency. With Republican leaders in Congress acting more like White House interns than champions of a coequal branch, the federal courts are providing the only check on Mr Trump, who has not merely mocked judges but demanded their impeachment. He has said he will obey the courts, but he has also declared: “I am—we are—the federal law.” He is, as ever, playing the madman, and keeping his options open.

(To continue reading click here)

Slate

By Rick Hasen

April 29, 2026

The Supreme Court’s Conservatives Just Issued the Worst Ruling in a Century

This evisceration of the Voting Rights Act requires us to take SCOTUS reform more seriously

Wednesday’s 6–3 party-line decision in Louisiana v. Callais will go down in history as one of the most pernicious and damaging Supreme Court decisions of the last century. All six Republican-appointed justices on the court signed onto Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion gutting what remained of the Voting Rights Act protections for minority voters, while pretending they were merely making technical tweaks to the act.

This decision will bleach the halls of Congress, state legislatures, and local bodies like city councils, by ending the protections of Section 2 of the act, which had provided a pathway to assure that voters of color would have some rudimentary fair representation. It’s the culmination of the life’s work of Chief Justice John Roberts and Samuel Alito, who have shown persistent resistance to the idea of the United States as a multiracial democracy…

(To continue reading click here)

April 29, 2026

If you missed today’s program featuring Elie Honig in conversation with Larry Mantle, you can watch the program at THIS PAST EVENTS LINK. The program will post a few hours after it ends. Starting Thursday morning, you can listen AT THIS PODCAST LINK

On Wednesday, May 6, 2026, at 5 PM Pacific, we welcome Tim Naftali who will be in conversation with Madeleine Brand on the topic: “DEMOCRACY STRESSED: CAN AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS STILL CONTAIN POLITICAL EXTREMISM?” (Register Here)

Tim Naftali is a CNN Presidential Historian and a Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. Formerly a Professor of History and Public Service at New York University, Naftali served as Founding Director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs Presidential Recordings Program and as Director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library. In addition to the biography “George H. W. Bush”, he is the author of “Impeachment: An American History” and a co-author of “Khrushchev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary.”

Madeleine Brand is an American broadcast journalist and radio host with more than three decades of experience in public media.  She currently hosts Press Play, an award-winning daily news and culture program on NPR’s KCRW-FM in Los Angeles, where she explores national, international, and local issues through a Southern California lens.  Brand previously reported and anchored for National Public Radio (NPR), serving in roles that included correspondent, host on Morning Edition and All Things Considered, and co-host of Day to Day.

New York Times

By Nick Corasaniti, Emily Cochrane and Tim Balk

April 29, 2026

How the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Ruling Could Affect the Midterms and Beyond

Democrats stand to lose at least one blue-leaning district in Louisiana, but the timing was unclear. Florida has approved a redder map, and Republicans in several other states are weighing new districts.

The Supreme Court’s ruling on the Voting Rights Act in the middle of a heated primary season could create a chaotic scramble among states that are considering drawing new congressional maps ahead of November.

The decision is likely to modestly improve Republicans’ fortunes ahead of the midterm elections, giving them a slight edge in the redistricting wars. How big of an edge remains to be seen. But Republicans are still facing significant headwinds in their quest to retain control of the House in November, with the war in Iran driving gas prices up and President Trump’s approval ratings down.

And the ruling all but guarantees that the redistricting arms race will stretch into the 2028 election, with both Republican and Democratic states likely to redraw their maps yet again to eke out a partisan advantage.

The court’s ruling declared Louisiana’s congressional map to be an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. But the political implications there and in other states remained unclear as strategists from both parties raced to determine if there is time to redraw maps this year.

(To continue reading click here)

Slate

By Rick Hasen

April 29, 2026

The Supreme Court’s Conservatives Just Issued the Worst Ruling in a Century

This evisceration of the Voting Rights Act requires us to take SCOTUS reform more seriously

Wednesday’s 6–3 party-line decision in Louisiana v. Callais will go down in history as one of the most pernicious and damaging Supreme Court decisions of the last century. All six Republican-appointed justices on the court signed onto Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion gutting what remained of the Voting Rights Act protections for minority voters, while pretending they were merely making technical tweaks to the act.

This decision will bleach the halls of Congress, state legislatures, and local bodies like city councils, by ending the protections of Section 2 of the act, which had provided a pathway to assure that voters of color would have some rudimentary fair representation. It’s the culmination of the life’s work of Chief Justice John Roberts and Samuel Alito, who have shown persistent resistance to the idea of the United States as a multiracial democracy…

(To continue reading click here)

New York Times

April 29, 2026

Read Supreme Court’s Ruling and Dissent on Louisiana Voting Map

The justices, split along ideological lines, found that Louisiana’s voting map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.

To read the court ruling click here 

April 27, 2026

This Wednesday, April 29, 2026, at 5 PM Pacific, we welcome Elie Honig who will be in conversation with Larry Mantle on the topic: “THE NEW AMERICAN LEGAL REALITY: ELIE HONIG ON POWER, PRECEDENT, AND THE ROAD AHEAD” (Register Here)

Elie Honig is CNN’s Senior Legal Analyst and a former federal and state prosecutor. He served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, where he prosecuted organized crime, public corruption, and violent crime, successfully convicting more than 100 members of La Cosa Nostra. Honig is the bestselling author of three books, including “Hatchet Man” and “Untouchable.” He was nominated for an Emmy Award for his CNN documentary on the Adolf Eichmann trial. He has been named to Mediaite’s “Most Influential People in News Media” list for five consecutive years.

Larry Mantle has been the host of AirTalk with Larry Mantle on NPR-member station LA’ist (formerly KPCC) 89.3 FM, since April 1st, 1985.  AirTalk is the longest-running daily talk show in Southern California.

Election Law Blog

By Rick Hasen

April 25, 2026

The Just-Qualified California Voter ID Measure to Go Before Voters in 2026 is Shockingly Poorly Drafted and Will Raise Many Questions If Passed

“Now that the California voter id measure has qualified for the ballot, I sat down today to give it a read. I was shocked at how poorly written and full of holes the measure is.”

To begin with, the measure does not explain what “government issued” identification qualifies. For example, does an expired driver’s license count? A student identification issued by a public university? Does it even have to be issued by the government, when the definition is: “Government-issued identification means documentation that allows conclusive verification of the voter’s identity”? What about a baptism certificate or other document that is not issued by the government but allows conclusive verification of identity? Conclusive to whom? Who judges? Is there a right to appeal?

More difficult is what is supposed to happen with people who vote by mail. Each voter voting by mail must include “the last four digits of a unique identifying number from government-issued identification that matches the one designated by the voter for their voter registration. The type of identification designated by each voter must be indicated in their voter registration record, noted on the mail ballot envelope provided to them, and available to them on request by phone or electronically.” Does this mean that everyone who wants to vote by mail has to reregister and provide a government identification number to election officials? Or is this only for people who are new registrants or who move? (It doesn’t say one way or the other in the text)…

This measure is a disaster as drafted, and if passed will lead to mounds of litigation, uncertainty, and increased costs.

(To read the FULL article click here)

ProPublica

Doug Bock Clark and Jen Fifield

April 13, 2026

Inside Trump’s Effort to “Take Over” the Midterm Elections

In mid-December 2020, federal officials responsible for protecting American elections from fraud converged in a windowless, dim, fortified room at the Justice Department’s downtown Washington, D.C., headquarters.

They had been summoned by Attorney General William Barr.

Over the preceding weeks, Donald Trump’s claims that the presidential election had been stolen from him had reached a crescendo. He’d become obsessed with a conspiracy theory that voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan, had switched votes from him to Joe Biden.

With each day, Trump ratcheted up the pressure to unleash the might of the federal government to undo his defeat.

Barr interrogated experts from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, crammed in beside top FBI officials around a cheap table. He needed the group of around 10 to answer a crucial question: Was it really possible the 2020 presidential vote had been hacked?

(To continue reading click here)

April 22, 2026

If you missed today’s program featuring Aaron David Miller in conversation with Patt Morrison, you can watch the program at THIS PAST EVENTS LINK. The program will post a few hours after it ends. Starting Thursday morning, you can listen AT THIS PODCAST LINK

On Wednesday, April 29, 2026, at 5 PM Pacific, we welcome Elie Honig who will be in conversation with Larry Mantle on the topic: “THE NEW AMERICAN LEGAL REALITY: ELIE HONIG ON POWER, PRECEDENT, AND THE ROAD AHEAD” (Register Here)

Elie Honig is CNN’s Senior Legal Analyst and a former federal and state prosecutor with 14 years of experience. He served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, where he prosecuted organized crime, public corruption, and violent crime, successfully convicting more than 100 members of La Cosa Nostra. He later led the New Jersey Division of Criminal Justice as Director. Honig is the bestselling author of three books, including “Hatchet Man” and “Untouchable,” and writes a weekly column for New York magazine. He hosts podcasts for Vox Media and was nominated for an Emmy Award for his CNN documentary on the Adolf Eichmann trial. He has been named to Mediaite’s “Most Influential People in News Media” list for five consecutive years.

Larry Mantle has been the host of AirTalk with Larry Mantle on NPR-member station LA’ist (formerly KPCC) 89.3 FM, since April 1st, 1985.  AirTalk is the longest-running daily talk show in Southern California.

New York Times/Opinion

Thomas L. Friedman

April 21, 2026

How Israel Lost Its Way and How Trump Can Save Lebanon

If you are looking for two pictures that summarize where Israel’s geopolitical strategy under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has taken the country, you could not do better than a couple of snapshots featured over the weekend in the Israeli press. The first is a photograph of an Israeli soldier using a sledgehammer to smash a statue of Jesus in Debel, a Maronite Christian village in south Lebanon a few miles north of the Israeli border.

The picture, the Times of Israel diplomatic reporter Lazar Berman wrote, “so perfectly encapsulated some of the worst tropes about Israel and Jews that many instinctively assumed it was an A.I.-generated product meant to slander the Jewish state. Friends of Israel who thought the photograph might be real prayed it wasn’t, so damaging was the picture. Their prayers went unanswered. An I.D.F. soldier had indeed taken a hammer to the face of a statue depicting Jesus.” He added, “There was no A.I., no manipulation, no getting around an image that points to a deep moral morass” in the military and Israeli society.

The second is a picture in Haaretz of a group of beaming right-wing Israeli ministers as they opened a newly re-established settlement, Sa-Nur, in the northern West Bank. It is one of four isolated Israeli settlements plunked down in the region that lies under Palestinian civilian and security authority. The idea behind these settlements is to make it impossible for a contiguous Palestinian state to ever be established. As Haaretz noted, Bibi’s defense minister, Israel Katz, boasted at the ceremony of the government’s expected legalization of around 140 West Bank farm outposts — to foil any “Palestinian attempts to establish a presence in the area.”

Just another day of the Netanyahu government playing President Trump for a fool. This is the Trump who declared in September 2025: “I will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank.”

Why are these two pictures so revealing? They are the perfect representations of Netanyahu’s strategy today, if one can call it a strategy: Meet every threat around you by smashing it with a sledgehammer, no matter how many enemies of Israel it makes, and offer no creative ideas for translating military achievements into lasting strategic gains — not in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and the West Bank or with Saudi Arabia and Iran.

(To continue reading click here)

The Economist

Leaders | Our cover

April 16, 2026

America wakes up to AI’s dangerous power

After Mythos, a laissez-faire approach is no longer politically tenable or strategically wise

SHOULD A HANDFUL of men be entrusted with the world’s most potent new technology? Five geeks so famous that they can be identified by their first names—Dario, Demis, Elon, Mark and Sam—exercise almost godlike command over the artificial-intelligence models that will shape the future. The Trump administration has stood aside even as those models have gained jaw-dropping capabilities, convinced that unfettered competition between private firms is the best way to ensure America wins the AI race against China.

Until now. Suddenly, America’s free-wheeling treatment of AI looks as if it is coming to an end. The reason is that the models’ dizzying progress also poses a threat to America’s own national security, unnerving members of the Trump administration previously more inclined to worry about overregulation. At the same time, growing resentment among American voters is turning AI into a political lightning-rod. A laissez-faire approach is no longer politically tenable or strategically wise.

The watershed was Anthropic’s announcement of Claude Mythos on April 7th. The model-maker’s latest creation is so startlingly good at finding software vulnerabilities that, in the wrong hands, it would threaten critical infrastructure, from banks to hospitals. AI models increasingly pose other risks, too, from biosecurity hazards to industrial-scale scamming.

Anthropic’s boss, Dario Amodei, wisely thought Mythos too dangerous for general release. Instead he has reserved it for use by around 50 big firms, in computing, software and finance, so that they can boost their own defences. America’s treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, was so unnerved that he summoned the biggest banks for urgent talks. …

(To continue reading click here – you may need to create a free account)

April 20, 2026

This Wednesday, April 22, 2026, at 5 PM Pacific, we welcome Aaron David Miller who will be in conversation with Patt Morrison on the topic: “WAR MAKING AND PEACEMAKING: THE FUTURE OF THE US-ISRAELI RELATIONSHIP” (Register Here)

Aaron David Miller is an American Middle East analyst, author and negotiator.  He is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.  He worked for the U.S. Department of State for 24 years, has advised on Arab-Israeli negotiations to both Republican and Democratic secretaries of state and has participated in American efforts to broker agreements between Israel, Jordan, Syria and the Palestinians.  He is a frequent commentator on CNN, MSNBC, Bloomberg and NPR.

Patt Morrison has a share of two Pulitzer Prizes as a longtime Los Angeles Times writer and columnist. As a public television and radio broadcaster, she has won six Emmys and a dozen Golden Mike awards. Her first book, “Rio LA,” about the Los Angeles  River, was a bestseller. Her most recent book is “Don’t Stop the Presses!  Truth, Justice, and the American Newspaper.”  

The Economist

April 14, 2026

International | The Telegram

If it starts, a nuclear-arms race will be unstoppable

A sobering interview with the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency

THE WORLD stands on the brink of a nuclear-arms race. If one can be avoided, a big reason will be this: currently, the first country to start such a race risks paying a terrible price. Rogue states caught sprinting for a bomb face crippling sanctions and military strikes. Meanwhile, any halfway-respectable country that flouts the Non-Proliferation Treaty—a legal ban on the creation of new nuclear-armed powers, signed by 191 states—risks becoming a pariah, with unknowable economic and diplomatic costs.

Less happily, if a nuclear-arms race does get under way, it will carry on, like toppling dominoes. That is not this columnist’s breathless judgment. It is the view of the world’s nuclear police chief, Rafael Mariano Grossi, soberly expressed on April 13th in an interview for “Inside Geopolitics”, a video show produced by The Economist. As director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mr Grossi has the task of persuading countries not to break nuclear-arms curbs, and of sounding the alarm if they try. Asked whether he is worried about a nuclear-arms race, the veteran Argentine diplomat replies: “I really am.” Can he confirm reports that many countries are privately debating getting nuclear arms, whether that means Iran’s neighbours in the Persian Gulf, or American allies such as Germany, Japan, Poland or South Korea, who are no longer sure that they are protected by an American nuclear umbrella? “These discussions are being held,” he answers.

Mr Grossi concedes that the existing non-proliferation regime has, over the years, failed to stop several countries from joining the club of nuclear-armed powers. But he calls it “one of the last points of stability that we have” in a dangerous world. If more countries pursue nuclear arsenals, a domino effect will “inevitably” lead “a good number of countries” to follow, he suggests.

Mr Grossi deplores the strategy of nuclear bluffing that led Iran to its current grim fate. He notes how the Iranian regime boasted of having all the elements needed for a nuclear bomb, including uranium enriched almost to weapons grade, then asked the world to believe that it had no intention of ever building bombs or warheads. …

(To continue reading click here)

The Economist

Leaders | Our cover

April 16, 2026

America wakes up to AI’s dangerous power

After Mythos, a laissez-faire approach is no longer politically tenable or strategically wise

SHOULD A HANDFUL of men be entrusted with the world’s most potent new technology? Five geeks so famous that they can be identified by their first names—Dario, Demis, Elon, Mark and Sam—exercise almost godlike command over the artificial-intelligence models that will shape the future. The Trump administration has stood aside even as those models have gained jaw-dropping capabilities, convinced that unfettered competition between private firms is the best way to ensure America wins the AI race against China.

Until now. Suddenly, America’s free-wheeling treatment of AI looks as if it is coming to an end. The reason is that the models’ dizzying progress also poses a threat to America’s own national security, unnerving members of the Trump administration previously more inclined to worry about overregulation. At the same time, growing resentment among American voters is turning AI into a political lightning-rod. A laissez-faire approach is no longer politically tenable or strategically wise.

The watershed was Anthropic’s announcement of Claude Mythos on April 7th. The model-maker’s latest creation is so startlingly good at finding software vulnerabilities that, in the wrong hands, it would threaten critical infrastructure, from banks to hospitals. AI models increasingly pose other risks, too, from biosecurity hazards to industrial-scale scamming.

Anthropic’s boss, Dario Amodei, wisely thought Mythos too dangerous for general release. Instead he has reserved it for use by around 50 big firms, in computing, software and finance, so that they can boost their own defences. America’s treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, was so unnerved that he summoned the biggest banks for urgent talks. …

(To continue reading click here)