Five years ago next month, British voters, in the largest turnout ever, voted to leave the European Union by a 52% to 48% margin. It was an unexpected result, and a harbinger of Donald Trump's even more unexpected election as president five months later.
On taking the oath of office, Jan. 20, Joe Biden may not have realized it, but history had dealt him a pair of aces.
The U.S. economy peaked in late 2019 at $21 trillion. We are now remarkably 98% back to where we were before the terrible COVID-19 pandemic slammed these shores 14 months ago. This rebound is one of the outstanding U.S. achievements in history. Since June of last year, the economy has rocketed by 34% in quarter 3 of 2020, 4.2% in quarter 4 of 2020 and now 6.4% in the first three months of 2021. So far in this current quarter, growth is more than 10%.
Within hours of Saturday's shooting in Times Square where three bystanders, including a 4-year-old girl, were wounded, the two leading candidates to replace Mayor Bill de Blasio were on-site.
One important lesson from the COVID-19 pandemic, perhaps not realized now but in the future, is to keep politics out of medicine and public health.
On the surface, Joe Biden seems to be doing pretty well. But underneath, there are signs of problems, areas where partisan overstretch threatens the underpinnings of what some are hailing as the new order of things.
"There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money," is an insight the famed biographer James Boswell attributed to Samuel Johnson.
— A majority of states are now either solidly Republican or solidly Democratic on the presidential level, and the party a state prefers for president increasingly has a big edge in winning the state’s two Senate seats. Given these patterns, it’s possible to game out the basic contours of what the Senate “should” look like in the near future, barring some unexpected upheaval.
— Allocating Senate seats based on current presidential preferences produces an equilibrium of about 53 seats for the Republicans and 47 seats for the Democrats.
— This complicates the Democrats’ decision on whether to ditch the filibuster, because in a chamber where they may end up spending a lot of time in the minority in the future, ending the filibuster may destroy one of the few points of leverage the party would have.
Americans took out $1.7 trillion in government loans for college tuition.
There is something very fishy about the new 2020 Census Bureau data determining which states picked up seats and which states lost seats.
"Hear me clearly: America is not a racist country."
Ahead of a presidential election, opinion polls are a major news item. Most of these polls are not designed to reflect public opinion but instead to shape it. As most big media leans left, such shaping is always to the benefit of the Democrat party.
The COVID-delayed results of the 2020 census are finally in, with totals for the 50 states and the District of Columbia at nearly one-third of a billion -- 331,449,281 -- and with surprises having to do with the short run and what French historians call the "longue duree."
Joe Biden may not be a radical socialist, but he is doing the best imitation of one this writer has lately seen.
Do I live in an alternate universe?
The media tell me my side is winning.
Another pro-President Joe Biden union just told it's rank-and-file members: Sorry, guys, you are all fired.
"How many legs does a dog have if you call his tail a leg?" asked President Abraham Lincoln, who answered his own question:
How will future historians explain this? From 2001 to 2014, majorities of Americans, including supermajorities of blacks and non-Hispanic whites, told Gallup pollsters that "race relations" were either very or somewhat good.
How can America unite again to do great things if we are led by people who believe America suffers from a great sickness of the soul, an original sin that dates back to her birth as a nation?
