Search Results

By Line search: By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. During years working at New Hampshire Legal Assistance, I represented many homeless individuals. The reasons for homelessness were varied: eviction, job loss, divorce, domestic violence, and disability, among...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. Back in 2017, in what was the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, a gunman killed 60 people and wounded 411 at a music festival held on the Las Vegas Strip. The gunman who was perched on the 32nd floor of...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot.We just passed the Juneteenth holiday and although it may be the holiday with the coolest name, I don’t think the history behind the holiday is well-known or well-understood. I would argue it is one of our most...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. Probably there is no more famous novel in American literature than Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” So it is an event that there is an audacious new novel, “James” by Percival Everett, that recreates...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. The collective freak out of the Republican Party leadership after the criminal conviction of their cult leader, Donald Trump, was predictable. They appeared to be in a state of disbelief when a New York jury found...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. The current round of student protests brings back memories. I started at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut in the fall of 1968. One of my early college memories is demonstrating against then-Republican...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. Last week I saw a letter to the editor in this newspaper about Republicans. The letter said we are inundated with misinformation and name-calling. The writer explained that Republicans believe in God, America,...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. May 6 was Holocaust Remembrance Day. The world failed the Jewish people both before and during the years of World War II, with catastrophic consequences. Six million Jews ended up dying in the concentration camps....

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. Where the U.S. Supreme Court is concerned, the shocks keep coming. While you cannot always tell what a court will decide based on oral argument, it was bracing to watch a former president who tried to overthrow his...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. It has now been 14 years since Howard Zinn died. A historian, Zinn is mostly remembered for writing “A People’s History of the United States,” a controversial recounting of the American story. Zinn focused on the...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. Polls are omnipresent in America and I admit to deep skepticism about their accuracy. I think of Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton and the failure of the red wave to materialize in 2022 as examples that justify that...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. Previously I have written about the failure of lawyers and judges to respond to the growing threat of fascism in the United States. Very few lawyers who supported Trump’s anti-democratic coup attempt have faced any...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. Probably like many people in Concord, I was disappointed in the NH Superior Court’s decision finding that the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue the state for its removal of the Elizabeth Gurley Flynn historical...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. After the oral argument at the U.S. Supreme Court on the Mifepristone case, FDA v Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, most pro-choice commentators breathed a sigh of relief. It appeared that the Court was not buying...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. In my last My Turn, I outlined a progressive Democratic agenda that differentiates sharply from what the Republicans are selling. The Democrats are a big tent and I write with the recognition that some Democrats,...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. Many close observers of the 2024 presidential race have commented on Project 2025, the Republican plan for what they intend to do if Trump wins in November. The plan is a maximalist horror show that includes a...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. Up until the recent Alabama Supreme Court decision, the concept of extrauterine children was foreign to me. It is a hard concept to wrap your head around. I hadn’t seriously considered the idea that frozen embryos...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. Usually I harbor low expectations about how the U.S. Supreme Court will rule. That is because of the far-right plurality on the Court that rarely deviates from the Federalist Society “billionaires are us” party...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. After the January 6 Committee released its report, it would be easy to conclude that we learned everything about Donald Trump’s attempt to stay in power after the 2020 election. Recent events show that is not the...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. The bipartisan border deal that the Republicans ultimately walked away from on orders from Donald Trump was a Stephen Miller wish list. It embodied a number of terrible, cruel ideas. Yet, the Democrats promoted this...