Bob Kalk

In Washington D.C. on April the 4th in 1949, the 12 founding members of NATO signed what became known as The North Atlantic Treaty. The agreement is short. It contained only 14 articles each characterized by internal flexibility. The treaty was founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty, and the rule of law. The signatories … Read more

Alexei Navalny is the founder of the Anti-Corruption Foundation and the leader of a party for Russia of the Future. Earlier, he was a Russian Opposition Coordination Council member. In August 2020, Navalny was hospitalized in serious condition after he was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent. He was medically evacuated to Berlin and discharged … Read more

The struggle between the the players and the owners within the USA’s National Football League is hardly unique within our country’s great economic divide. And, as similar struggles within major league baseball discount the interests of host cities that actively and financially courted teams, such marginalized stakeholders continue to eat major losses. Few citizens are … Read more

Just why is it considered criminal to yell “fire” in a movie theatre? While the applicable law within various locales is nuanced, the common thread is that people rely on the word of the screamer to their detriment. Clearly, when the screamer deliberately misleads people, in a way that is the proximate cause for crush … Read more

As Biden’s push to defend democracy is seen by many as too little too late, the twenty first century’s John Birchers continue to deny that the United States was ever intended to be a democracy. They parrot the talking points of earlier demagogues while exhibiting no depth of knowledge and little interest in developing any. … Read more

On March the 7th in 2021, on Fox News Sunday, Senator Joe Manchin said “The filibuster should be painful, it really should be painful and we’ve made it more comfortable over the years.” On NBC’s Meet the Press, Manchin also said “If you want to make it a little bit more painful, make him stand there … Read more

Inscribed over the doors of the Supreme Court building in Washington, DC are the words ‘Equal Justice Under Law.’ Unfortunately, those words have never rung true within the United States. They are now hardly even seen as aspirational by several of the justices currently occupying the high court. Consider, for example, the court’s sociopathic notion of … Read more

In 1960, A.J. Liebling tossed off one of his most memorable lines. In his May 14 column, in the New Yorker, Liebling wrote: “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” Even back then, in the face of corporate takeovers of newspapers and layoffs of hundreds of journalists, he worried that … Read more