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| It's Saturday, which means it's time for the round-up of this week's top premium columns. |
| These are columns our subscribers loved or that people subscribed specifically to read. Subscribe, read, share and let us know your thoughts. |
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| By Tim Swarens |
| Chris Cuomo is burning down the house. Perhaps we should stand back simply to admire the flames. |
| On Wednesday, Cuomo asked for an arbitrator to award him $125 million because CNN fired him for what even a first-year journalism student would have understood to be egregious ethical violations. |
| Cuomo's Trumpian-style lack of ethics is old news. But his rationale for demanding enough money to make a tech exec envious is truly novel: I wasn't the only dishonest journalist on CNN's payroll. |
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| By Rex Huppke |
| There's nothing strategic about bombing a city of nearly half a million people to dust. But that's what Russian President Vladimir Putin is doing to the coastal Ukrainian city of Mariupol. |
| There's nothing strategic about killing civilians. Or targeting an art school sheltering 400 people. Or a theater. |
| This is not the work of a master military strategist. It's far simpler. It's the hideous, unconscionable actions of a bully angry he's not getting his way. |
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| By Dr. Jerome Adams |
| I remember being at the White House in March of 2020. We were frantically trying to figure out how close the U.S. health care system was to collapse. How many people were actually in the hospital with COVID-19? How many intensive care unit beds did we have available? How many ventilators? "We don't really know," was the answer from top health officials. "Why the (bleep) not?" bellowed President Donald Trump, as I recall. |
| Well, the truth was, we didn't have the authority to compel hospitals and health care institutions to report that information to the government – so most didn't. |
| We've come a very long way since then. From the president of the United States being unable to get this information to make significant national crisis response decisions, to most Americans now being able to get local data via real-time dashboards from their state health departments. But the problem is, the government's authority to continue collecting this information – and the public's ability to access it – may soon disappear. |
 | | Surgeon General Jerome Adams at the White House on March 20, 2020. | | Alex Wong/Getty Images | |
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| By Rex Huppke |
| Before I get into the scurrilous voter fraud accusations against Mark Meadows, a voter-fraud evangelist and Donald Trump's former chief of staff, let me ask this question: Who among us has not listed a rented 14-by-62-foot single-wide mobile home in Macon County, North Carolina, that we've never stayed in as our permanent residence on a voter registration form? |
| I mean, c'mon. I'm pretty sure that's not even a crime anywhere as long as you disregard state and federal election laws. And it's definitely not voter fraud as long as the person voted for Trump. (I read that in a copy of the Constitution I bought in the Mar-a-Lago gift shop last year.) |
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| By Kurt Bardella |
| It started with a GIF. |
| The Republican National Committee posted an image on social media Tuesday of Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson with her initials, "KBJ," crossed out and replaced with "CRT." |
| In the late morning, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who has twice voted to confirm Jackson for other federal judicial posts, inexplicably asked, "What faith are you, by the way?" It's worth noting that such a question would be illegal for an employer to ask a candidate during a job interview. |
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| By Connie Schultz |
| Last Friday, Sue was in her car listening to an interview about baseball on sports radio when an excited voice interrupted with breaking news: The Cleveland Browns had acquired Houston Texans Deshaun Watson. He is a quarterback of heralded talents who just a week earlier had escaped indictment but faces nearly two dozen civil claims of sexual misconduct from March 2020 to March 2021. |
| I was Sue's first call, and she was inconsolable. "We got that bad guy," she said. "We just went from the lovable losers that everyone cheered for to the most hated team in the NFL." |
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| By Jill Lawrence |
| When Donald Trump occasionally read a speech directly from a teleprompter, a speech filled with sentences and sentiments that sounded nothing like him, some in the pundit corps would declare that "this is the moment Donald Trump became president." The moment always passed, and the line quickly became a running joke. |
| Let's not make the same mistake with the Republican Party and Ukraine. |
 | | President Donald Trump meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the InterContinental Barclay New York hotel during the United Nations General Assembly, on Sept. 25, 2019, in New York. | | Evan Vucci, AP | |
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 | | Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb. 24, 2022, in Orlando. | | John Raoux, AP | |
| By The Editorial Board |
| The makeup of the U.S. family has changed. |
| "Parents today are raising their children against a backdrop of increasingly diverse and, for many, constantly evolving family forms," the Pew Research Center says. At least 15% of kids are living with parents in a remarriage, and 7% are living with cohabiting parents. |
| America's multiracial population grew from 9 million in 2010 to 33.8 million people, according to the 2020 Census. While about 70% of children under 18 live with native-born parents, more than a quarter reside with at least one foreign-born parent. |
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| By Rex Huppke |
| I was told by former President Donald Trump that I must be willing to lay down my life to prevent my son Tanner from going to school and being turned socialist by critical race theory. |
| At a rally last weekend, Trump said: "Getting critical race theory out of our schools is not just a matter of values, it's also a matter of national survival. We have no choice, the fate of any nation ultimately depends upon the willingness of its citizens to lay down, and they must do this, lay down their very lives to defend their country. If we allow the Marxists and Communists and Socialists to teach our children to hate America, there will be no one left to defend our flag or to protect our great country or its freedom." |
| I don't know what critical race theory is – if I did, I would surely be a Socialist or Marxist or Communist, or possibly all three – but I do know it's the most important issue America is facing. So I hereby accept Trump's call: I will gladly die in a hail of chalkboard erasers hurled by middle-school history teachers if that's what it takes to make sure my son's school curriculum includes only subjects of which I approve. |
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| By Carli Pierson |
| After the latest uptick in violence in the country, the State Department posted a "Reconsider travel to Mexico" warning. |
| At first glance it seems reasonable: Gunfire hit a U.S. Consulate and Mexican military installations in the Mexican border city of Nuevo Laredo on Sunday night. In late February, up to 17 men were lined up and shot to death, execution-style, in the western state of Michoacan. A week later, in the state of Queretaro, more than 20 people were injured during a soccer match between rival teams – authorities called it "a dark day in Mexican soccer." |
| And recent killings of tourists in the Yucatan Peninsula and the murders of five Mexican journalists less than two months into 2022 have U.S. officials extra spooked. |
| No doubt, parts of Mexico are kind of terrifying right now. Nevertheless, there are still some things worth unpacking in the State Department's announcement. |
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