Saying that anything in the annals of American political history is “unique” or “unprecedented” is dangerous, for the simple fact that the past is filled with so many oddities from which we can draw parallels. That said, we’re struggling to come up with something equivalent to what we’ve seen in Virginia over the past week.
Crying "hate" is a lazy way to debate. But in the Beltway, where honest discussion and vigorous deliberation are desperately needed, the rhetorical sloth is so thick you need a Big Foot circular saw to cut it.
San Francisco is one of the richest cities it the world. It's given us music, technology and elegant architecture.
"Once that picture with the blackface and the Klansman came out, there is no way you can continue to be the governor of the commonwealth of Virginia."
Well, what do you know! It turns out that amateur economist Donald J. Trump knows more about sound monetary policy than Fed chairman Jerome Powell and his team of hundreds of Ph.D. economists.
To manifest his opposition to President Donald Trump's decision to pull all 2,000 U.S. troops out of Syria, and half of the 14,000 in Afghanistan, Gen. James Mattis went public and resigned as secretary of defense.
Turnout at Davos was lousy this year. President Trump, preoccupied by the government shutdown, was a no-show at last week's World Economic Forum there. So were British Prime Minister Theresa May (Brexit) and French President Emanuel Macron ("gilets jaunes"). Chinese President Xi Jinping, Davos' 2018 star, and Russian President Vladimir Putin weren't there either. Neither were some of the usual financial and media big names.
Redistricting in the U.S. House of Representatives is not a unified process as is the case for most national legislatures, but the result of the cumulative actions in the states that have more than one representative. Nevertheless, it is useful to look at the entire House to see how the decisions in the states combine to form a fair or biased playing field for the parties.
Sunday is the Super Bowl.
I look forward to playing poker and watching. It's easy to do both because in a three-hour-plus NFL game there are just 11 minutes of actual football action.
Here we go again. If you think the manure-spreaders of sensationalism who masquerade as ethical practitioners of journalism learned anything from last week's MAGA-bashing Covington Catholic High School hoax, I have three words for you:
The government shutdown is over -- for now -- but the political ramifications are still being sorted out. The media has been chortling that Donald Trump "caved," and he may well have lost this battle with congressional Democrats. Their "victory," such as it is, is to notify American voters that they are so opposed to a wall and a secure border that they were willing to keep the government shut down for four weeks to ensure it doesn't happen.
"Pay the soldiers. The rest do not matter.
This was the deathbed counsel given to his sons by Roman Emperor Septimius Severus in A.D. 211.
Is it true that Donald Trump's bad habits are contagious? Is it true that his Democratic opponents and, even more, his critics in the press are increasingly given to terminological inexactitudes, if not downright lies?
If it was the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that black and white would come together in friendship and peace to do justice, his acolytes in today's Democratic Party appear to have missed that part of his message.
— There is at least one plausible Electoral College scenario that produces a 269-269 tie, which would throw the presidential election to the House of Representatives elected in 2020.
— If the House decides the presidency, you might think that Democrats would have the advantage, given their new majority. But it’s the Republicans that hold — and are likely to maintain — the advantage.
Sometimes, a three-point celebration is just a three-point celebration. Sometimes, a pep rally is just a pep rally. Sometimes, a smile is just a smile. And sometimes, a hat is just a hat.
It's School Choice Week.
School choice is a noble cause. In much of America, parents have little or no control over where their kids attend school. Local governments assign schools by ZIP code.
On Saturday, Donald Trump shrewdly flipped the table on Nancy Pelosi in the government shutdown standoff. He has now proposed a grand bargain on immigration: legalization of some 1 million so-called Dreamers -- the foreigners who were brought into the U.S. illegally by their parents -- and an immediate end to the shutdown, if she agrees to expand funding to $5.7 billion for the wall.
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible ... make violent revolution inevitable," said John F. Kennedy.
It was no coincidence that Donald Trump scheduled a trip to Britain to promote one of his golf courses in Scotland, on June 23, 2016. That was the day of the Brexit referendum in which 52 percent of the electorate --17.4 million voters, more than any party has ever won in a general election -- voted for the UK to leave the European Union.
