It is still not publicly known what President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed on Monday during their two hours of one-on-one conversation in Helsinki. But the White House confirmed Wednesday that they did talk about an issue…
Posted: 20 July 2018 [07:02 PM] Posted: 20 July 2018 [07:02 PM] WASHINGTON - “Socialism has known increments of success, basic failure and massive betrayal. Yet it is more relevant to the humane construction of the twenty-first century than any other idea.” With those words, the late Michael Harrington began his book…
Posted: 20 July 2018 [07:00 PM] For all the haze obscuring President Donald Trump’s real foreign policy agenda, one element is increasingly clear: He wants to get past terrorism and focus on other national security challenges. As former counterterrorism officials, we sympathize with the sentiment, given…
Posted: 19 July 2018 [07:41 PM] Talk about political hot air: A 20-foot-tall inflatable baby in President Donald Trump’s likeness made the whole world look up as it flew over London last week during his visit. Now, after a crowdfunding campaign to bring it to the…
Posted: 19 July 2018 [07:41 PM] To President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, what unfolded in Helsinki on Monday was apparently a success - or even “better than super,” according to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. To many observers in the United States -…
Posted: 18 July 2018 [05:05 PM] Last week was a big one for billionaires. Kylie Jenner, kid sister of reality-television star Kim Kardashian, scored a Forbes magazine cover extolling her efforts at the helm of her makeup company, valued by the magazine at $800 million. The…
Posted: 18 July 2018 [05:03 PM] WASHINGTON - Surely, now, we can concede that letting Trump be Trump has exhausted itself - even among the smugly credulous. For a year and a half, we’ve heard his supporters say: Watch what he does, not what he says.…
Posted: 18 July 2018 [05:03 PM] The U.S. economy continues to show strength in the wake of tax reform and deregulation, but the downside of robust growth is that Donald Trump thinks this means he can dabble at trade war with impunity. He ought to…
Posted: 18 July 2018 [05:01 PM] “Our relationship has never been worse than it is now,” President Donald Trump said in a news conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki on Monday. I was the assigned duty officer at Fort Niagara in Youngstown, New York,…
Posted: 17 July 2018 [06:33 PM] On Monday, I tweeted about the summit between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin - and it seems to have hit a nerve among Republicans. I wrote: “GOP better be thinking about what to do about a [president]…
Posted: 17 July 2018 [06:32 PM] Smug, self-righteous, politically correct New Haven, where it takes only minutes to assemble a rally denouncing President Trump, supporting illegal immigration, accusing someone of racism, or condemning freethinkers, presumes to run the world while it can’t even take care of…
Posted: 17 July 2018 [06:31 PM] Maybe there never will be any rest for them. Even in an exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., titled “The Sweat of Their Face: Portraying American Workers,” laborers of every kind - slaves and free people, clockmakers…
Posted: 16 July 2018 [04:21 PM] WASHINGTON - When it comes to President Trump, it’s hard to pick his worst decision from the plethora he has provided. His most recent - to brazenly insult our NATO allies - surely ranks among the top three in my…
Posted: 16 July 2018 [04:20 PM] Thank you, Rod J. Rosenstein. You are just the person the country needed to hear from right now. The deputy attorney general’s announcement Friday that a dozen Russian intelligence agents have been charged with conspiring to hack Democrats during the…
Posted: 16 July 2018 [04:19 PM] Dear Granddaddy, I can’t stand it when I see parents who don’t watch their kids. Jessica - Mad Mom Hey, Jessica. I would say that today most of us parents really do watch our kids. In…
Posted: 15 July 2018 [08:26 PM] The extraordinary rescue of the 12 young footballers and their coach from a flooded cave network in Thailand is a magnificent story of human indomitability and ingenuity. The most eagerly followed rescue mission since 33 Chilean miners were trapped for…
Posted: 15 July 2018 [08:24 PM] The Washington Post People line up to file past the open, butternut brown casket at the African-American museum, silently paying tribute. Men remove their hats, mothers wipe at tears as Mahalia Jackson’s voice fills the room. “I once was…
Posted: 15 July 2018 [08:23 PM] The Washington Post When Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico last fall, President Donald Trump playfully lobbed rolls of paper towels to those taking shelter. He also lobbed praise at first responders and other federal officials. Everything was going great,…
Posted: 15 July 2018 [08:21 PM] One hundred and three. That’s the number of small children a federal judge ordered the federal government to reunite with their migrant parents by Tuesday. Yet even that modest number proved too taxing for the Trump administration, which wrenched toddlers…
Posted: 13 July 2018 [07:13 PM] Ever since Britain voted to leave the European Union two years ago, the exit has been complicated by the refusal of its chief promoters to face the fundamental contradictions in their position. They claimed that the country could escape from…
Posted: 13 July 2018 [07:12 PM] WASHINGTON - Be prepared for a festival of hypocrisy, evasion and misdirection from supporters of the confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Begin with the idea that because Kavanaugh is qualified, well-educated, intelligent and likable, senators should…
Posted: 13 July 2018 [07:11 PM] As an activist for Asian-Americans, I am skeptical of the lawsuit brought against Harvard University for the perceived unequal treatment of Asian-Americans in college admissions. The case, filed by the advocacy group Students for Fair Admissions, purports to represent my…
Posted: 12 July 2018 [06:01 PM] Hours after the last teenager made it out of a cave in Thailand alive, Elon Musk started a Twitter argument over how much credit he deserved for offering to help save the kids. The rescue efforts captured international attention for…
Posted: 12 July 2018 [05:56 PM] WASHINGTON - Even before President Trump announced his nomination Monday of federal appeals court Judge Brett Kavanaugh to fill departing Justice Anthony Kennedy’s slot on the Supreme Court, the foul scent of anti-Catholicism began seeping into public commentary. In particular,…
Posted: 12 July 2018 [05:56 PM] Liberals throughout the country applauded three years ago when, proclaiming that the Constitution requires states to confer same-sex marriage, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed 44 years of precedent in constitutional law as well as practice going back to the adoption…
Posted: 11 July 2018 [06:06 PM] Controversial shootings by police lead to a national outcry and a range of reforms that reduce police killings of suspects by half. Sound like a pie-in-the-sky hope for the future? It’s precisely what happened in the 1970s and ‘80s. America’s…
Posted: 11 July 2018 [06:06 PM] In the annals of screwball commentary about media conspiracies, the Washington Examiner’s chief congressional correspondent Susan Ferrechio distinguished herself. She was speaking with host Howard Kurtz on the Fox News program “Media Buzz” on just how former Environmental Protection Agency…
Posted: 10 July 2018 [07:15 PM] So it’s Judge Brett Kavanaugh. There will be time enough to explore the nominee’s views and record. Let’s step back a bit and get some perspective on the national debate that we are about to have. Those on the left…
Posted: 10 July 2018 [07:13 PM] WASHINGTON - So many policy proposals aimed at reducing economic inequality emphasize moving disadvantaged people into higher-paying, higher-skilled jobs, typically with more access to education and training. We do need to invest far more in expanding opportunity for fellow citizens…
Posted: 10 July 2018 [07:12 PM] Dear Granddaddy, I have been reading your column and just wanted to let you know that I’m applying your strategy of self-assigned homework so I can jump ahead another year in math over the summer. Savanna B. - Seventh…
Posted: 09 July 2018 [03:55 PM] President Donald Trump has finally told us how he regards the #MeToo movement: with #contempt. Trump announced as much at a rally in Montana on Thursday night, when he mocked the pain of the women and men who have come…
Posted: 09 July 2018 [03:54 PM] What a great July 4. The skies over America the Beautiful were filled with fireworks, and the Twittersphere was filled with three Democratic senators blowing themselves up. My U.S. senator Kamal Harris, Massachusetts’ Elizabeth Warren and New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand…
Posted: 09 July 2018 [03:52 PM] Prompted by poses struck by candidates for the Republican nomination for governor, the Hartford Business Journal asked its readers the other day: “Can Connecticut realistically eliminate the state income tax and produce a balanced state budget?” Two-thirds of the readers…
Posted: 08 July 2018 [08:47 PM] Just a month has passed since the high-profile deaths of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain, yet suicide has already dropped off the public radar. That’s because it’s far too easy to personalize individual tragedies; far more difficult is confronting the…
Posted: 08 July 2018 [08:46 PM] By The Washington Post The first round of U.S. tariffs on China took effect Friday: Will July 6, 2018, turn out to be a date that lives in economic infamy, like June 17, 1930, the day President Herbert…
Posted: 08 July 2018 [08:45 PM] The Washington Post A few days ago, reporters on Air Force One asked President Donald Trump if he would accept Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. They had good reason to do so. As Trump prepares for…
Posted: 06 July 2018 [06:02 PM] It’s hard to imagine a better quick story summing up the Donald Trump administration than the one that broke Sunday night about a bill the White House was preparing to, as Jonathan Swan at Axios put it, “declare America’s abandonment…
Posted: 06 July 2018 [06:00 PM] WASHINGTON - We human beings cling to dogmas long after they’re disproven. We tend to believe things that make us feel better or remind of us of a past that we miss. This is certainly true of our assumptions about…
Posted: 06 July 2018 [05:58 PM] It’s increasingly clear that President Donald Trump isn’t really confused about how the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s funding really works. Rather, he doesn’t care, because he wants a different global security system from the current one. In Trump’s vision, the…
Posted: 05 July 2018 [07:43 PM] The Washington Post “Abolish ICE” has become the new rallying cry of the left, which is trying to turn the fury Americans are feeling about the horrors at the Mexican border on the little-understood agency known as U.S. Immigration and…
Posted: 05 July 2018 [07:43 PM] Drone technology offers the potential to change our world - from enabling historic transformations in e-commerce to faster emergency response. But the technology also has a dark side. It can be used to spy on us, to threaten our…
Posted: 05 July 2018 [07:41 PM] This year, millions of Americans have voted in congressional primary elections. These folks, who comprised just 15 percent of the eligible electorate in the last midterms, are wasting their time. Thus far, a vast majority of incumbents running…
Posted: 04 July 2018 [04:31 PM] Will Nancy Pelosi continue to make the House her home for much longer? Two recent events give one pause for thought. During a press conference in June, Pelosi assailed the president’s policy of separating children from their undocumented parents at…
Posted: 04 July 2018 [04:29 PM] BOSTON - When Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., quickly tweeted: “This is the fight of our lives.” She’s right. But how will the fight be defined and how it can be won? With…
Posted: 04 July 2018 [04:25 PM] From Hartford to San Diego illegal immigrants and their supporters rallied to demand abolition of ICE, the U.S. government’s immigration and customs enforcement agency. That was in effect to demand the erasure of the country’s borders and end any control…
Posted: 02 July 2018 [06:02 PM] Dear Granddaddy, I’m frustrated that my bosses forced me to give my teachers professional development the last week of school. Beth G. – School Principal As an educator, I’m surprised, too, Beth. As a principal, you must be shaking…
Posted: 02 July 2018 [05:58 PM] I understand why the national media is so obsessed over the story of children of illegal immigrants being separated from their parents at the Mexican border. It’s a heartbreaking sight to see photos of innocent little kids traumatized and crying…
Posted: 02 July 2018 [05:54 PM] Gerald Fischman, Rob Hiaasen, John McNamara and Wendi Winters were journalists who survived layoffs, newspaper ownership changes, declining readership and even a denigrating president who called the work of people such as them “fake news.” But none of them, nor…
Posted: 29 June 2018 [07:03 PM] WASHINGTON - Our constitutional system of “checks and balances” only works if those in a position to operate the levers of checking and balancing do their job. It is clear that a Republican Congress and Republican appointees to the Supreme…
Posted: 29 June 2018 [07:02 PM] Born out of the prosecutions of antiwar speech during World War I, the American Civil Liberties Union has spent the succeeding decades litigating and lobbying to protect speech rights for everyone, from communists to Nazis. Without the ACLU, Americans wouldn’t…
