Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
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Can the republic survive Attorney General William Barr? That's the question that has seized the media and center left, which have worked themselves into a full-blown panic over an attorney general who is, inarguably, a serious legal figure and one of the adults in the room late in President Donald Trump's first term. Some 2,000 former Justice department employees have signed a letter calling on Barr to resign. An anti-Barr piece in The Atlantic opined that "it is not too strong to say that Bill Barr is un-American," and warned that his America...
The rich are different from you and me -- they can buy themselves instant presidential campaigns. Former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg has elbowed himself into the Democratic nomination race solely on the basis of his fortune. His campaign is high-handed as only a billionaire many times over could even contemplate. He entered late, is skipping the early contests and hasn't participated in any of the debates to date (although that will change soon, thanks to the Democratic National Committee retrofitting its rules for Bloomberg). It's a free...
And so 2016 finally draws to a close. It's been the longest election year in American history. It ran from Feb. 1, 2016, the date of the Iowa caucuses, to the Senate vote to acquit President Donald Trump in early February 2020. It's true that Nov. 6, 2016, was a signal event in this long election year, but it didn't really conclude anything, even though the result wasn't in doubt. Usually, contested elections are ties or near-ties. This is the first time an election has gone into overtime, with repeated attempts at what were in effect...
It's easy to forget what the Senate impeachment trial is supposed to be about. It's not a fight over whether the Senate will call a couple of witnesses that the House couldn't, or didn't bother to, obtain on its own. The underlying question is whether the United States Senate will impose the most severe sanction it has ever inflicted on any chief executive, voting to remove a president for the first time in the history of the country and doing it about 10 months from his reelection bid. This is a truly radical step that, if it ever came about,...
Every hostile nickname that Mitch McConnell gets is further confirmation of his effectiveness. The latest is "Midnight Mitch," a reaction to his resolution setting out the road map for the Senate impeachment trial. The measure stipulated that House impeachment managers could make their case over two days of 12-hour sessions, possibly pushing the presentations into the wee hours. Hence, the latest alliterative moniker for McConnell, also known to his enemies as "Moscow Mitch." McConnell relented slightly on the resolution, giving the managers...
Donald Trump isn't George W. Bush. That should be obvious to everyone by now, but his critics and even some of his supporters immediately acted as if it were 2003 on the cusp of the Iraq War when Trump took out Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani. Suddenly, the neocons had cachet again (Vox warned that "the Iraq War hawks are back"), and we were about to launch yet another endless war. Trump's decision to kill Soleimani, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote, repeating a common refrain, "has brought the United States to the brink of...
In the torrent of idiotic commentary unleashed by the killing of Qassem Soleimani, Colin Kaepernick's deserves a place of honor. The NFL washout and Nike persona who makes sure the company doesn't produce any overly patriotic sneakers tweeted, "There is nothing new about American terrorist attacks against Black and Brown people for the expansion of American imperialism." For Kaepernick, Soleimani is just another dark-skinned man brutalized by the United States. The Iranian terror master was, in effect, driving while nonwhite and paid the...
Never before has a boon to public health been met with such hysteria and ingratitude. Vaping is almost all upside in comparison with traditional smoking, a wanton destroyer of health and lives, and yet the nation is in the grips of a panic about e-cigarettes. In a rarity for the Trump era, the anti-vaping sentiment jumps traditional geographic and political bounds, running from the oval office to San Francisco, from President Donald Trump to his most fervent enemies. Trump has announced a proposed Food and Drug Administration ban on flavored...
President Donald Trump's impeachment letter to Nancy Pelosi is nothing if not sincere. The missive establishes, if there were any doubt, that Trump hates impeachment with a passion, and he expresses his contempt in his own inimitable voice -- scornful, hyperbolic, colloquial, on brand (Russia Witch Hunt, Do Nothing Democrats, etc.) and, above all, aggrieved. We've never had a president in the modern era who has actively cultivated an image of victimhood, a posture that once would have been considered whiny and weak, but that Trump has, through...
The Supreme Court just ensured that the nation’s homelessness crisis will continue. The court declined to take up an appeal of a ruling by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, covering the western United States, that homeless encampments are a de facto constitutional right. In the case, stemming from a Boise, Idaho, ordinance, the 9th Circuit maintained that enforcing a prohibition against camping in public places is a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. A quick reminder. The Eighth Amendment says, “Exc...
The Democrats believe that the 2020 election is too important to be left to the voters. It's obvious that President Donald Trump withheld defense aid to Ukraine to pressure its president to commit to the investigations that he wanted, an improper use of his power that should rightly be the focus of congressional investigation and hearings. Where the Democrats have gotten tangled up is trying to find a justification that supports the enormous weight of impeaching and removing a president for the first time in our history. They've cycled through...
The economy is in robust good health, but our social fabric isn't. By two basic measures of social vitality, births and deaths, American society is faltering. Both the fertility rate and life expectancy are declining, in a sign that people feel less secure and, in some cases, have no hope at all. We are attuned to headline-grabbing economic statistics -- GDP growth, the unemployment rate, wages -- as monthly and quarterly metrics of American well-being, but they aren't as telling as these more fundamental indicators. To put it bluntly,...
If the impeachment effort isn't taking the nation by storm, the Democrats have an answer -- blame it on Latin. The use of a Latin term, quid pro quo, is now thought to be a damper on the impeachment cause because it sounds complex and technical. Latin is one of the great legacies of the Roman Empire, influencing languages across Europe and giving us scientific, medical and legal terms that heretofore had been thought perfectly fitting. That was before Democrats felt they needed a more emotive phrase to characterize President Donald Trump's...
If there's one thing that elite opinion tends to agree about on the left and the right, it's that nationalism is a very bad thing. If anything, this view has become even more entrenched as nationalism has demonstrated its potency in recent years, from the election of Donald Trump to Britain's vote to leave the European Union. When President Trump first openly embraced the term "nationalist" at a 2018 campaign rally, commentators reacted in horror. Patriotism is about love, nationalism about hate, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof...
California is staying true to its reputation as the land of innovation -- it is making blackouts, heretofore the signature of impoverished and war-torn lands, a routine feature of 21st-century American life. More than 2 million people are going without power in northern and central California, in the latest and biggest of the intentional blackouts that are, astonishingly, California's best answer to the risk of runaway wildfires. Power -- and all the goods it makes possible -- is synonymous with modern civilization. It shouldn't be negotiable...
The Ukraine story hasn't been good for President Donald Trump, and there's only one way out -- to get impeached, and the sooner, the better. Trump obviously hates the idea of being impeached. He thinks it's unfair, and is raging against the process with every political and legal argument his team can muster and every insult and countercharge he can make on Twitter. But he doesn't have any choice in the matter. Impeachment is baked in the cake. There's no way that Democrats, having opened an impeachment inquiry (although without a vote), can...
Barack Obama and Donald Trump are diametrically opposed figures, representing the categorical rejection of the other for his supporters, yet they share significant foreign-policy DNA. They both defined themselves in opposition to George W. Bush's foreign policy. Obama probably wouldn't have defeated Hillary Clinton for the 2008 Democratic nomination if she hadn't voted for the Iraq War and if he didn't speak out against it at the time. Likewise, Trump outpaced all his 2016 GOP rivals in denouncing our Middle East commitments. Obama represented...
Little did Dr. James Naismith know when he invented the game of basketball in Springfield, Mass., in 1891 that, more than a century hence, it would become beholden to its Chinese overlords. The NBA disgraced itself kowtowing to Beijing after the general manager of the Houston Rockets, Daryl Morey, tweeted his support for Hong Kong protesters. The words he associated himself with -- "Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong" -- would seem uncontroversial. Who doesn't hope for the best for plucky demonstrators trying to advance democracy against...
Impeachment is about to make everything worse. If our politics seems overheated, our institutions beleaguered and our public debate degraded, just wait until we are in the midst of the impeachment debate. Democrats have had an impeachment itch that they've been desperate to scratch ever since Donald Trump took office. For them, Ukraine is equal parts a genuine outrage and an excuse, the release valve for nearly three years of fear and loathing. Rather than conducting himself as if he's aware that a hysterical opposition is eager to impeach...
Greta Thunberg needs to get a grip. The celebrity teen climate activist addressed the United Nations and excoriated the assembled worthies for coming "to us young people for hope. How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words." Someone may have stolen her childhood, but the guilty parties can't be found at Turtle Bay. A 16-year-old from Sweden, Thunberg thundered, "I should be back at school on the other side of the ocean," which would have been easy enough to achieve, beginning with not taking two weeks to...
At least Bernie Sanders is an equal opportunity misanthrope. He doesn't like rich people, and it turns out he doesn't necessarily like poor people, either. At the recent CNN town hall on climate change, a questioner asked the socialist senator if he'd be "courageous" enough to endorse population control to save the planet. Sanders answered "yes," and then, after referring to abortion rights, endorsed curtailing population growth, "especially in poor countries around the world where women do not necessarily want to have large numbers of...
The fastest way to trend on Twitter, and not in a good way, is to say that the right to bear arms is a God-given right. Texas state Rep. Matt Schaefer established this beyond a doubt in a Twitter thread in the aftermath of the West Texas shooting spree. He said that he wouldn't use "the evil acts of a handful of people to diminish the God-given rights of my fellow Texans." Progressives were aghast, and when actress Alyssa Milano objected, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz jumped in to support Schaefer's argument (in less bombastic terms). The basic...
Tory Prime Minister Boris Johnson has, to his credit, seized the initiative in the battle over whether Britain will truly exit the EU, and on what terms. But no one can know how this high-stakes gamble will turn out. Johnson just lost his slender parliamentary majority, and the prospect of a new election looms. If things break the wrong way, the winner could be opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn, a throwback leftist redolent of the bad old days of Britain's self-imposed stagnation. It's hard to exaggerate the threat represented by Corbyn and Co....
The New York Times, an organization devoted to gathering and publishing information, doesn’t want people to gather or publish information inconvenient to it. A group of Trump-supporting operatives has been finding and archiving old social media postings of Times employees and other journalists for use in the ongoing brawl between the president and the press. There’s no indication that this is dumpster diving rather than an effort to scour readily available sources for stupid, embarrassing or offensive things that journalists have said pub...
Beto O'Rourke has taken the measure of America and found it wanting. "This country, though we would like to think otherwise," he intoned, "was founded on racism, has persisted through racism and is racist today." This is now a mainstream sentiment in the Democratic Party. Bernie Sanders said earlier this year that the United States was "created" in large part "on racist principles." The New York Times has begun the so-called 1619 Project, marking the 400th anniversary of the importation of slaves from Africa. The series seeks nothing less than...