10 of our top opinion columns this week: ICYMI

In today's fast-paced news environment, it can be hard to keep up. For your weekend reading, we've started in-case-you-missed-it compilations of some of the week's top Paste BN Opinion pieces. As always, thanks for reading, and for your feedback.

— Paste BN Opinion editors

1. Whistleblower allegation against Trump should outrage all Americans

By Tom Ridge

"If the allegations made this week by a Department of Homeland Security whistleblower are correct — that a senior intelligence analyst was told to stop providing intelligence reports on the threat of Russian interference in the 2020 election because it 'made the president look bad' — it should make anyone who had the privilege and responsibility to brief a U.S. president furious, and it should make all Americans shudder." 

2. Driven to tell the stories of America's forgotten homeless

By Suzette Hackney

"An estimated 568,000 people experienced homelessness in a single night in the United States in 2019, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. ... (But) according to the National Center for Homeless Education, the number of homeless children enrolled in public schools — prekindergarten through grade 12 — topped 1.5 million during the 2017-18 school year."

3. Trump wants to control what kids learn about slavery. That's so wrong in so many ways.

By Larry Strauss

"Just last week, President Donald Trump threatened to cut federal education funding to the state of California if schools there are found to include in the teaching of U.S. history the New York Times’ 1619 Project, its much debated exploration of chattel slavery and its deep and lasting effects." 

4. Democrats are making it tough for Don't-Like-Trumpers to vote against him

By Robert Robb 

"There are probably enough people to determine the outcome of the presidential election who can be described thusly: They prefer Donald Trump to Joe Biden on policy, but find Trump’s conduct as president to be deplorable and wearisome."

5. We're trapped in an obscene distortion of democracy. But we don't have to be

By Ellis Cose

"Consider this: the least populous 26 states have roughly one-sixth the population of the most populous 24. As a result, absolute authority for federal judicial appointments, and executive office confirmations, is in the hands of senators representing only 17.57 percent of the population."

6. On COVID, politics infects science at the CDC and the FDA

By The Editorial Board

"Evidence of how far America's premier science offices have fallen from grace in the Trump era came this week when a top U.S. health official accused scientists at the 74-year-old Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of sedition."

7. Now Trump wants Americans to pay for his defense in a rape-related defamation case

By Noah Bookbinder

"In its latest shocking but not surprising move, the Department of Justice, funded by you, the American taxpayer, is now trying to intervene in journalist E. Jean Carroll’s defamation lawsuit against President Donald Trump. You may recall that last year he denied he had raped Carroll in the 1990s and said she was 'not my type.'"

8. I thought I never personally experienced racism. Then I realized I just normalized it.

By Njeri Rutledge

"This summer, a white colleague recently asked if I had ever personally experienced racism. I instinctively said no. I didn’t have any singular life-threatening racial incident, nor been the victim of police abuse. Sure, crosses had been burned in my neighborhood when I was a child in Nashville, but not on my yard. I later found myself inexplicably angry — first at my colleague, and later, at myself."

9. The expensive burden of parole, probation unjustly places people in a second prison

By Jessica Jackson

"When President Donald Trump commuted Alice Marie Johnson's life sentence in 2018, many observers assumed that the grandmother was fully free. What they didn't realize at the time was that Johnson, who was convicted of a first-time, nonviolent drug offense, still wore the 'invisible shackle' of probation."

10. Racism once again dismisses George Floyd's life

By Ben Crump

"This year will be remembered as the year of the pandemics, both the COVID-19 pandemic and the 1619 pandemic — the plague of racism that began when the first slave ship carrying Africans in bondage reached our shores. It's a plague that continues today as Black men and women are killed before our eyes as though their lives had no value."