In recent days an alarming number of asylum seekers, including children and pregnant women, have been deported to Haiti despite efforts by the Biden administration to put a moratorium on all deportations. This is happening during a pandemic and a growing, violent political crisis in Haiti.

Take action: Urge President Biden to immediately halt deportations to Haiti

On a recent frigid early morning in a cramped, small-town Kroger twenty minutes outside Columbus, a long line twists and turns near the in-store pharmacy, one of 2,200 in-store pharmacies Kroger operates.

The line is somewhat socially distanced, mostly middle-aged men, some wearing camo, others sporting Harley Davidson logos, some have brought their own folding chairs. Fights have nearly broken out in the past over losing a place in line.

But this line of a dozen or so is not waiting for the vaccine. Kroger’s in-house state-controlled liquor store is mere feet from the pharmacy. They are waiting to find out if a high-end whiskey costing $400 a bottle has arrived or not.

When the liquor store’s door opens, the expensive whiskey did make it in overnight, and the line moves briskly with happy customers.

Standing not far from this scene is a long-time Kroger employee who spends her days stocking pizzas and other frozen goods into tall glass-doored freezers.

With tired eyes she glances at the absurdity of those buying $400 bottles of whiskey, then turns to a Free Press reporter.

he Republican Party’s post 2020 state-by-state assault on voting rights has begun with the demand that all mailed-in paper ballots include photo ID.

The Jim Crow racism is beyond obvious. Instead of having to guess, mailed-in photo ID lets election officials quickly identify which ballots came from citizens of color … and then pitch them on the spot. By banning student IDs, they can also eliminate ballots coming from college campuses.

Thus the Nixon-Trump/Atwater-Rove-Bannon Republicans have picked up the KKK burning cross straight from hands of the Jim Crow Democrats.

They’re flooding at least 28 state legislatures with more than a hundred laws meant to undermine American democracy. 2020 taught them that, in Trump’s own words, if people of youth and color could cast ballots and have them reliably counted, “you’d never have another Republican elected again.”

Tuesday, February 9, 2021, 8:00 - 9:00 PM
Medea Benjamin, Marcy Winograd, and Hanieh Jodat-Barnes will be joined by Dr. Melina Abdullah, one of the original organizers of the Black Lives Matter movement and leader of the Los Angeles BLM chapter, and Reverend Liz Theoharis, the co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for a Moral Revival. Dr. Melina Abdullah, an academic and activist, is the co-founder of the Los Angeles Black Lives Matter chapter and chair of the department of Pan-African studies at California State University, Los Angeles. Reverend Liz Theoharis, in addition to leading the Poor People's Campaign with Reverend Dr. William Barber, is the director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary.  RSVP here to receive the zoom link. 

Impeachment dramas on Capitol Hill have routinely skipped over a question that we should be willing to ask even if Congress won’t: “What about a president’s unimpeachable offenses?”

The question is the flip side of one that Republican Gerald Ford candidly addressedwhen he was the House minority leader 50 years ago: “What, then, is an impeachable offense? The only honest answer is that an impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.”

By narrowly defining which offenses are impeachable, political elites are implicitly telling us which offenses aren’t.

So, when the House approved two articles of impeachment on Donald Trump in December 2019 and one impeachment article last month, the actions were much too late and much too little.