Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
Sorted by date Results 76 - 87 of 87
The Battle of Michigan Avenue is finally over, and it was won by the protesters. The lopsided fight between anti-war demonstrators and the brutish police force of Chicago's Democratic mayor Richard Daley the night of Aug. 28, 1968, in the midst of the Democratic convention, was a debacle for the left. The protests didn't stop the Vietnam War or the presumptive Democratic nominee, Hubert Humphrey, the sitting vice president who was much too establishment for the radicals. The event, broadcast on TV -- indeed, unfolding right in front of the...
John Brennan may not know it, but he is acting in a drama scripted and produced by Donald J. Trump. As Eli Lake of Bloomberg perceptively observed, President Trump isn't trying to silence Brennan by revoking his security clearance, as the former CIA director's defenders insist, but elevate him as a foil. Trump couldn't hope for a better poster boy for the so-called deep state than a former CIA director who immediately began to sound like a commentator for MSNBC upon leaving government -- and, indeed, signed up as a commentator for MSNBC. It...
It's never a good idea to negotiate with a hostage-taker, but when it's a NATO ally, there isn't much choice. The Trump administration has been trying to get back a Christian pastor detained in Turkey since October 2016, and when a possible deal at the sidelines of the NATO summit fell through, decided to drop the hammer. The administration sanctioned Turkey's justice and interior ministers -- remember, these are top officials of a fellow NATO country. The action hit the Turkish currency and stock market hard. Then President Donald Trump interv...
Elizabeth Warren is branching out. The Massachusetts senator, who has made a career of unfairly maligning bankers and other alleged capitalist malefactors, is now smearing the criminal justice system, too. In a speech at a historically black college in New Orleans, she declared that "the hard truth about our criminal justice system: It's racist ... I mean front to back." Her riff is a sign that the Democrats are going to leaven their lurch toward socialism with a condemnation of America as fundamentally racist. The U.S. criminal justice system...
It's begun. We are having a debate over socialism. Not over whether it's fair to call Democrats socialists. Not over whether socialism has been good for Venezuela or some other faraway, unfortunate country. But socialist policies right here in the United States. The press attention to a new study of the costs of "Medicare for all," or universal health coverage paid for by the government that goes much further than Obamacare, is a sign that it is a live issue. Popularized by Bernie Sanders, Medicare-for-all is not just a fringy left-wing...
It's Tehran's turn for the "fire and fury" treatment. In response to Iranian President Hasan Rouhani telling Donald Trump not to "play with the lion's tail" because "war with Iran is the mother of all wars," the president fired back in an emphatically all-caps tweet warning of "CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE." Since the last time Trump theatrically threatened a regime with destruction he quickly turned around and had warm talks with Kim Jong Un in Singapore, his Twitter account has lost some of...
In an era of partisan polarization, it is rare to get agreement on anything, but about this there should be a consensus: The Supreme Court is an undemocratic institution whose power should be carefully circumscribed. The right has long been of this view, and the left is suddenly and opportunistically partway there. In an essay capturing progressives' newfound skepticism, Ezra Klein of Vox wrote that the Supreme Court "has always been undemocratic" and is now becoming even "more dangerous." This represents a welcome turnabout from cheering the...
Angela Merkel is, her supporters like to gloat, the leader of the free world. Just don't ask her to spend as if she is. Donald Trump has made the German chancellor one of his favorite rhetorical targets, especially over Germany's anemic defense expenditures. This has led to worries about the future of the trans-Atlantic alliance, and reflexive support for Merkel among the American political elite. Trump shouldn't openly mock Merkel, or suggest that there have been annual dues to NATO that Germany has failed to pay. Trump tends to view foreign c...
The prospect of overturning Roe v. Wade will be at the foreground of the battle over Justice Anthony Kennedy's replacement, and it should be. Roe is judicially wrought social legislation pretending to the status of constitutional law. It is more adventurous than Miranda and Griswold, other watchwords of judicial activism from its era. It is as much a highhanded attempt to impose a settlement on a hotly contested political question as the abhorrent Dred Scott decision denying the rights of blacks. It is, in short, a travesty that a...
In the 1950s, the great neo-conservative intellectual Irving Kristol acknowledged Joe McCarthy's stark failings, but famously refused to take the side of his critics. "For there is one thing," he wrote, "that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: He, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesman for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing." The sentiment could equally apply to President Donald Trump and the issue of immigration. Trump's team is still trying to figure out how to extricate itself from...
The Harvard University admissions process appears to be an ongoing microaggression against Asian-Americans. A group called Students for Fair Admissions is suing the school for alleged racial discrimination and has filed documents in federal court making a persuasive case, based on data provided by the school. Harvard denies it, but one of the imperatives of the affirmative action regime in college admissions is that schools never admit what they are doing. The great and good at Harvard will insist that Asian-Americans all be called by their...
Justin Trudeau may be the annoying, youthful avatar of chic progressivism -- but he's not our adversary. After leaving the G-7 summit, President Donald Trump blasted the Canadian prime minister on Twitter as weak and dishonest, in the kind of invective once reserved for "Little Rocket Man." The Trump presidency routinely produces unprecedented events, and here is another: Never before has a president of the United States spoken as scornfully in public about the head of state of a friendly, allied country. Particularly one who has appeared in Vo...
