President Donald Trump signaled that he is entitled to raze the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts if he is not permitted to add his name to the building’s front wall. Trump’s appointees to the center’s board of trustees rubber-stamped adding the president's name to the Kennedy Center. After a federal judge blocked that name change, Trump’s henchmen padlocked the building last Tuesday. Trump’s appointees at the Justice Department notified the federal court that “without the prominent recognition of the Trump Administration, and President Trump’s efforts, the donors will not contribute,...

In this age of social media and A.I. illusions, an old Russian scam provides the best lens to understand America’s two most recent presidents. In eighteenth-century czarist Russia, a fake village was built by a Russian governor named Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin to deceive Catherine the Great about the condition of the peasants she ruled. “Potemkin Village,” according to Time magazine, “signifies any deceptive or false construct, conjured often by cruel regimes, to deceive both those within the land and those peering in from outside.” In Washington a few years ago, the media partnered...

One of America’s most talented antiwar artists and political satirists passed away last week. Tom Blanton did one of the best daily roundups of government oppression and outrages stories on the Internet. His Project for a New American Revolution was an inspiration for me and thousands of other folks over the years. Tom was also one of the best and funniest headline writers I knew. He was principled, courageous, and talented as the day is long.He was 68 years old and a lifetime resident of Richmond, Virginia. His Flickr page showcases his political art and other smackdowns of contemporary...

President Trump effectively claims that he is entitled to preemptively kill suspected drug traffickers anywhere on earth, or at least in the Western Hemisphere. The U.S. military has killed hundreds of people in its attacks on suspected smugglers’ boats off the coast of South America. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth proclaimed that illicit drugs are “tantamount to chemical weapons” and the dead suspects “are the al-Qaeda of our hemisphere, and we are hunting them with the sophistication and precision that we hunted al-Qaeda.”  Anyone whom the U.S. military killed is automatically posthumously...