Almost all of us know (because President Trump boasts of it in nearly every speech) that our 3.5% unemployment rate has reached a 50-year low. But this official decline in joblessness doesn't tell the entire story of the improvement in the job market in the United States. And it doesn't fully capture the change in direction between what happened under President Barack Obama and Trump.
On the holiday set aside in 2020 to honor Martin Luther King, the premier advocate of nonviolent Gandhian civil disobedience, thousands of gun owners gathered in Richmond to petition peacefully for their rights.
Russia -- OK, not the actual Russian government but a private troll farm company located in Russia -- bought $100,000 worth of political ads on Facebook designed to change the outcome of the 2016 election. Except that only a small fraction of those ads were political. Also except that the small fraction was divvied up between pro-Hillary Clinton and pro-Donald Trump ads. And especially except that $100,000 in Facebook ads can't affect the outcome of a $6.8 billion election.
About the impeachment of President Donald Trump she engineered with her Democratic majority, Nancy Pelosi said Wednesday: "It's not personal. It's not political. It's not partisan. It's patriotic."
Seriously, Madam Speaker? Not political? Not partisan?
Elections are a form of communication. Voting tells politicians, and the press if they're capable of getting the message, what citizens will tolerate and what they won't. The Democrats haven't voted yet, but they've been campaigning for more than a year and have just had their last debate before the Iowa caucuses two weeks from Monday.
— The Kansas Senate race is getting a lot of national buzz, but we still see the GOP as clearly favored to hold the seat.
— The chances of Republicans springing Senate upsets in New Hampshire and Virginia appear to be growing dimmer.
— Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D-CA) decision not to hold a special election for CA-50 makes it likelier for Republicans to hold the seat.
— Vermont is a sleeper Democratic gubernatorial target.
In November, I was banned in Boston after speech-squelchers on the left and right forced the cancellation of my lecture at Bentley University, a small private institution. The grassroots activists who had invited me were rejected by every major event venue in the nation's purported Cradle of Liberty. The tail-tuckers cited security concerns or jacked up their rental fees to make it prohibitively expensive to gather peacefully to discuss -- gasp! -- ideas.
People who want to work should be allowed to work. That includes people who once went to jail.
Over the holidays, I read Elton John's biography, "Me." He writes about his friendship with Freddie Mercury, the ultratalented lead singer of the rock group Queen. Mercury tragically died of AIDS at the age of 45 in 1991. Mercury was one of the last people to die of the disease in Britain during the epidemic years. John writes sadly and almost offhandedly that if Mercury had lived one year longer, he probably would have survived because of the AIDS medication that eventually saved millions of lives.
The directed killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, Iran's blood-soaked field marshal in the "forever war" of the Middle East, has begun to roil the politics of both the region and the USA.
Since 1969, "Virginia Is for Lovers" has been the tourism and travel slogan of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Advertising Age called it "one of the most iconic ad campaigns in the past 50 years."
In all the reportage and commentary on the killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, I haven't seen much mention of an interesting parallel between the Iranian mullah regime's attacks on America this past week and its attacks when it first came to power 40 years ago.
— Nationalization has pushed urban and rural areas apart; Maine and Nebraska are no exceptions to this trend, and their unique electoral vote allocation systems are highlighting that division.
— The Omaha-based NE-2 supported Republicans in the past two presidential elections, but by decreasing margins, and could feasibly vote blue in 2020.
— Maine’s two districts, once political mirror images of each other, have drifted steadily apart. The Crystal Ball sees Donald Trump as a favorite to carry ME-2 again, though Democrats should retain the state’s other three electoral votes.
— In a close national election, Maine and Nebraska’s respective second districts could provide potentially decisive electoral votes.
My plan to "Keep America Great" is very simple:
1) Stop exporting American soldiers to countries that hate our guts.
2) Stop importing people from countries that hate our guts.
Congressional hearings were created to educate lawmakers so they have knowledge before they pass bills or impeach a president.
Let's face it: 2019 is going to be a hard year to beat -- stocks and 401(k) plans up more than 25% on average, wage gains of 3% to 5%, 7 million surplus jobs and the lowest unemployment and inflation rates in nearly 50 years. That's a lot to celebrate.
Fifteen years after the U.S. invaded Iraq to turn Saddam Hussein's dictatorship into a beacon of democracy, Iraq's Parliament, amid shouts of "Death to America!" voted to expel all U.S. troops from the country.
People born in the 1960s may be the last human beings who will get to live out their full actuarial life expectancies.
"Climate change now represents a near- to mid-term existential threat" to humanity, warns a recent policy paper by an Australian think tank. Civilization, scientists say, could collapse by 2050. Some people may survive. Not many.
From the first years of the one-fifth of this century already completed, we've been told that a new, ascendant America -- more nonwhite, more culturally liberal, more feminist -- was going to dominate our politics for years to come.
If Western elites were asked to name the greatest crisis facing mankind, climate change would win in a walk.
