Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
Sorted by date Results 51 - 75 of 87
The day has arrived in the Democratic Party when Sherrod Brown is a kind of moderate. The impeccably progressive Ohio senator who has long occupied a spot on the left flank of the Democratic caucus is declining to sign up for the fashionable radical causes of the hour. Brown has not endorsed the Bernie Sanders "Medicare-for-all" plan that contemplates the end of private insurance in America, nor for the outlandishly expensive and eminently mockable Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez "Green New Deal." This marks Brown out from other Democratic senators...
If Democrats are held to their own standards, then all three embattled state officials in the Commonwealth of Virginia should resign. Even if Gov. Ralph Northam didn't appear in blackface in an image in his medical-school yearbook, he confessed to once darkening his face as part of a Michael Jackson costume. Attorney General Mark Herring, who called Northam's conduct indefensible, also used blackface once. Meanwhile, Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax has been accused of sexual assault. If ever wearing blackface -- even in the 1980s, as both Northam and...
Sen. Kamala Harris committed a most unusual gaffe at her recent CNN town hall -- not by misspeaking about one of her central policy proposals, but by describing it accurately. Asked if the "Medicare-for-all" plan she's co-sponsoring with Sen. Bernie Sanders eliminates private health insurance, she said that it most certainly does. Citing insurance company paperwork and delays, she waved her hand: "Let's eliminate all of that. Let's move on." She met with approbation from the friendly audience in Des Moines, Iowa, but the reaction elsewhere was...
The fundamental offense of the Covington Catholic High School kids wasn't so much allegedly mobbing, mocking or getting in the face of an American Indian drummer at the Lincoln Memorial. It was wearing red Make America Great Again hats. That was the actual, incontestable conduct that created the predicate for the presumption of guilt and all the rest of the grief they've been subjected to since. For much of progressive America, if you are wearing the hat, you are suiting up for Team Racist. You are marking yourself out as a bigot and a goon. Yo...
The walls supposedly are always closing in on Donald Trump. The end is always beginning. He's going to quit. He's going to be impeached and removed. He's going to decide not to run again. Somehow or other, he's going to relieve everyone of the responsibility of ever thinking of him again, and especially of the responsibility of defeating him in an election. Such scenarios are a constant topic in private conversations. The allure is obvious. It is the promise of deliverance. After tormenting his enemies for so long, Trump's going to make it...
The FBI took it upon itself to determine whether the president of the United States is a threat to national security. No one had ever before thought that this was an appropriate role for the FBI, a subordinate agency in the executive branch, but Donald Trump isn't the only one in Washington trampling norms. The New York Times reported the astonishing news: "Counterintelligence investigators had to consider whether the president's own actions constituted a possible threat to national security." U.S. presidents over the decades have made many foo...
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's so-called Green New Deal makes the obligatory nod to the original New Deal, but FDR's handiwork is much too modest an antecedent. The Green New Deal calls for a top-down revolution in the operation of American society so sweeping that it would be disturbing if it weren't so wholly ridiculous. It shows all the thoughtfulness of a college sophomore pulling an all-nighter to write a term paper for his Millennial Socialism 101 class. The Green New Deal, as explained in draft legislation to create a congressional...
Donald Trump may watch the stock market more closely than any day trader. For a president who underlined the increasing importance of working-class whites to the GOP coalition and who trampled so much bipartisan economic orthodoxy during the campaign, to be so overtly obsessed with the stock market is a strange disconnect. In fact, no president in memory has so publicly staked himself to the market. Trump has, in contrast, paid relatively little public attention to wage growth, which is the measure that more closely tracks with his particular...
Never before has a former FBI director boasted about taking advantage of an administration's disorganization for his own ends. But never before has a former FBI director been as self-satisfied as James Brien Comey Jr. In an interview at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, Comey delighted his audience with his tale of how he exploited the Trump White House's disarray in its initial days to send two FBI agents to talk to then-national security adviser Michael Flynn without honoring the usual processes (e.g., working through the White House...
The office of the presidency is known for wearing down the mere mortals who hold it. At the very least, it prematurely ages its occupants. Often, it humiliates them, forcing them to rehabilitate their reputations later (George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter). In the worst case, it chews them up and spits them out (Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon). It is a journalistic trope that this is happening to Donald Trump before our eyes. The media constantly write stories about how the president is panicked and cornered, barely able to handle his duties,...
Shakespeare famously wrote of the "sceptered isle" of Britain acting as a moat "against the envy of less happier lands." Lately, the less happier lands are winning in a rout. Britain is suffering a political meltdown as it struggles to make good on a historic vote in 2016 to leave the European Union. The decision for a so-called Brexit was a stirring statement of independence and self-government by a people who have defined themselves down the centuries by their stiff-necked resistance to anyone -- whether overweening monarchs or continental...
Mitch McConnell just did our constitutional order an enormous favor by burying the so-called Robert Mueller protection bill, hopefully never to rise again. There's been much harumphing about how Republicans are in the tank for President Donald Trump by not getting on board the bipartisan bill, but it is a singularly misbegotten piece of legislation. Plan A, i.e., passing the thing, would have been hard enough. But its supporters apparently didn't think through a need for a Plan B or C: Trump would have vetoed the bill if it passed Congress,...
It's roughly the one-month anniversary of CNN reporter Jim Acosta repeatedly telling President Donald Trump at a press conference that the migrant caravan is "hundreds and hundreds of miles away" and "not an invasion," and objecting to a campaign ad that showed migrants climbing border walls -- "they're not going to be doing that." Now, thousands of migrants from the caravan have arrived in the border city of Tijuana, Mexico, and hundreds of them stormed a border crossing, climbing the fence and throwing rocks. U.S. border agents used tear gas...
Joe Biden is a gaffe-prone 75-year-old Washington veteran -- who is exactly what Democrats need. The suburbs have turned against Republicans, but Donald Trump's working-class base is still with him in a geographic and demographic stand-off that will -- absent a game-changer -- define the 2020 election. The play for Democrats should be obvious: Make a serious appeal to Trump's voters, take back the Blue Wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, and win the presidency. In other words, go with Joe Biden or someone like him with a...
Midterm losses typically humble a sitting president of the United States, but Donald Trump is beyond humbling. He is the most unbowed president ever to lose a house of Congress. Anyone who thought Trump would be taken down a notch, even by a more stinging electoral rebuke, doesn't know the man. He will remain the ringmaster of American politics until the day, presumably in January 2021 or 2025, when he gets on Marine One for the last time. He made the midterms about him, because, really, what else would he make them about? Trump will never lose...
It's appropriate that the U.N. special rapporteur devoted to adequate housing has visited encampments in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Mumbai -- and San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley. The homeless situation in those cities and others around the country is positively Third World, a blight that shows the persistence of human folly and misery, despite what we take to be our steady progress to greater enlightenment and prosperity. San Francisco is a crown jewel of the new economy, and a sink of vagrancy. One of the more compelling pieces of...
It's not any less awful for being so familiar. The last three high-profile attacks that have convulsed the nation, two in recent weeks, have been carried out by fringe loners who fit the stereotype of the perpetrators of such crimes precisely -- they didn't fit in, they were "off," they kept to themselves. The word that comes up again and again in accounts of their lives is "alone," always alone. The life of Cesar Sayoc, who mailed crude pipe bombs to Democrats ranging from George Soros to Hillary Clinton to Robert De Niro, was a pitiable...
Is the INF Treaty so important that the Russians should be allowed to cheat on it without consequence? That's the implication of the criticisms of President Donald Trump for saying that he's pulling out of the Cold War-era arms-control agreement. Mikhail Gorbachev deemed Trump's stated intention "unacceptable" and "very irresponsible," although it isn't the U.S. that has been flagrantly violating the treaty for years. The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, signed in 1987, was a central achievement of the Reagan-Gorbachev diplomacy of...
It's doubtful that a former American presidential candidate has ever formally endorsed incivility before, but Hillary Clinton is ever full of surprises. In an interview on CNN, the erstwhile advocate of "if they go low, we go high" switched around to unapologetically call for going low. "You cannot be civil with a political party," she explained, "that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about." She added that if Democrats retake a house of Congress, well, then, "that's when civility can start again." Clinton's statement is yet m...
Democrats suffered a stinging loss in the fight over Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation, and have concluded that the constitutional system is to blame. You see, if only the Founders hadn't forged the Great Compromise between large states and small states at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, giving each state equal representation in the U.S. Senate, they would have defeated Brett Kavanaugh handily. It's only because smaller red states have two senators just like larger blue states that the judge got confirmed. For the left, the U.S. Senate is n...
It's time for "To Kill a Mockingbird" to give up its treasured place in American culture. The 1960 novel by Harper Lee was published to instant acclaim, has sold more than 30 million copies and is ubiquitous in high school curricula. The 1962 movie version, starring Gregory Peck, is a classic in itself and won three Academy Awards. But nothing is forever, even for a book commonly called "timeless." Lee's novel is deeply out of sympathy with a moment when on college campuses, and in the culture more broadly, due process isn't what it used to...
The attempted political assassination of Brett Kavanaugh is bad for the country, but good for a Trumpian attitude toward American politics. The last-minute ambush validates key assumptions of Donald Trump's supporters that fueled his rise and buttress him in office, no matter how rocky the ride has been or will become. At least three premises have been underlined by tawdry events of the past weeks. First, that good character is no defense. If you are John McCain, who genuinely tried to do the right thing and carefully cultivated a relationship...
President Donald Trump is showing that it's possible to preside over a period of peace and prosperity and still be notably unpopular. Over the past several months, Trump has opened even more of a wedge between the largely benign material conditions in the country and his own political standing, which is precarious and appears to be sliding backward. This isn't how it's supposed to work. Republican politicos believed, reasonably enough, that last year's tax cuts would stoke growth and create a good-news backdrop for Republicans in the midterms....
The economic recovery is really beginning to reach into Trump country. The president is famous for his extravagant promises, involving, invariably, the biggest and the best. The landscape is littered with examples, although he never promised to create blue-collar jobs at the fastest clip since 1984, something he achieved in the first half of 2018. A labor market that has been rocky since the financial crisis, and hasn't truly delivered for many workers for decades, is robust enough to reach all corners of the economy, including Trump areas...
History is usually airbrushed to remove a figure who has fallen out of favor with a dictatorship, or to hide away an episode of national shame. Leave it to Hollywood to erase from a national triumph its most iconic moment. The new movie "First Man," a biopic about the Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong, omits the planting of the American flag during his historic walk on the surface of the moon. Ryan Gosling, who plays Armstrong in the film, tried to explain the strange editing of his moonwalk: "This was widely regarded in the end as a human ach...
