"This is not a normal court." So said President Joe Biden last week as the Supreme Court was handing down its rulings in big cases decided since its current term began last October.
No one knows whether last weekend's Wagner Group uprising means the end of President Vladimir Putin's control of Russia, just as no one knew before the last few weeks of 1999 that Putin would replace Boris Yeltsin and become Russia's leader for the next quarter-century.
Are America's 45th and 46th presidents politically invulnerable? That's a conclusion you might come to from the response to the indictment of Donald Trump on June 8 and the guilty plea by Joe Biden's son Hunter announced on June 20.
Some observations on special counsel Jack Smith's indictment of former President Donald Trump:
Gov. Chris Sununu (R-N.H.) is not running for president. In his state's first-in-the-nation primary, "I can be more effective for the Republican Party in ways few other leaders can," he wrote in the Washington Post.
The Wollman Rink episode, or, rather, the unduly optimistic conclusion I drew from it, explains a lot about Donald Trump's presidency and why he may not do as well against Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) in the contest for the Republican nomination, as current poll numbers suggest.
A conservative, to paraphrase and slightly alter Irving Kristol's saying, is a liberal who has been mugged by reality -- especially by a reality that is plain to the vast bulk of ordinary people but remains inexplicably invisible to liberal intellectuals and politicians.
The report of special counsel John Durham is, or ought to be, devastating for anyone who has put any credence in what has now been definitively revealed to be the Russia collusion hoax.
Getting words right can clear up a lot of confusion about politics and public policy. Example: "segregate" is a verb that requires a subject. "Segregate" is not an impersonal verb, nor is "segregation" a mere accidental result of unrelated outside processes.
Reports of the death of the Republican Party continue to be premature.
Lies beget lies. That's one way to summarize nearly the past decade of presidential politics, as well as the potentially dismal presidential race underway.
Are we watching a replay of King Canute commanding the waves to recede? That thought occurred to me while reading about the Biden administration's latest step in advancing the president's 2021 goal of having half of all new autos be electric by 2030.
It's just one poll, conducted by SSRS Research for CNN, but it provides interesting evidence about where voters are on issues, and it isn't glaringly inconsistent with other survey research.
What do you do to win an election when your candidate is universally known and unpopular with a majority of voters? That's a question both major parties have had to face in the last few years. Both look like they're going to face it for some time longer.
Twelve or 13 months from now, the race for the Republican nomination for president -- and the race for the Democratic nomination, if there is one -- will probably be over.
Amid news that Donald Trump is about to be indicted by a hyperpartisan prosecutor and of his hysterical responses, and prompted by vagrant reading about the War of 1812 and Woodrow Wilson's violations of civil liberties in World War I, a thought occurred to me. America seems to go crazy every 50 years or so.
As one who has spent pleasant time on Sand Hill Road and the Stanford campus, I'm dismayed by the demands for special treatment coming from the denizens of one of America's most privileged and affluent precincts.
Big city elections provide clues about trends in national politics, the composition and attitudes of Democratic constituency groups, and voters' responses to emerging matters. Recent examples include the March 2019 primary for mayor of Chicago and the June 2021 Democratic contest in New York City.
When the Wall Street Journal reported in a front-page lead story that the Department of Energy had concluded the COVID-19 pandemic resulted from a leak from China's Wuhan laboratory, you might have argued it was old news. The FBI had already, it turns out, come to the same conclusion and with a higher degree of confidence (moderate) than the Energy Department (low).
Jimmy Carter, the 39th and the longest-living U.S. president, has chosen to enter hospice care at age 98. This is a good time to try to place his presidency in history.
