Those who forget history are doomed to repeat its mistakes, blah blah blah, someone said -- Americans don't even pay attention to the news, so how the heck are they supposed to remember it after it becomes history?
California's "jungle primary" system, in which the two candidates who win the most votes advance to the general election in November regardless of their party affiliation, might have resulted in several bizarre outcomes. Look out: given the state's role as a political trendsetter, this weirdness could go national someday.
Then there was Eric Schneiderman.
President Donald Trump claims that people are illegally pouring into our country from Mexico. That's not true now; notwithstanding the ballyhooed caravan of Central American migrants who recently arrived at a California crossing, illegal crossings are hitting historic lows. There's actually a net outflow. But it was true until the early 2000s.
There was controversy about it, but the Inuit famously and really do have at least 50 words for snow. The Scots have 241!
We have succumbed, in recent years, to technological passivity, the assumption that there's nothing we can (or should) do about what an older generation used to call "progress." But that's not true.
At this writing, President Trump is considering "the possibility of retaliation in Syria in response to a suspected chemical attack on young children and families in the Syrian city of Douma," reported CBS News. "If it's the Russians, if it's Syria, if it's Iran, if it's all of them together, we'll figure it out," Trump said. "Nothing's off the table," including a military attack by the United States.
Eight hundred thousand people participated in the March for Our Lives rally in Washington on March 24, say organizers with the #NeverAgain movement sparked by the Parkland, Florida school massacre. The turnout was impressive -- but will it lead to new gun legislation?
Personnel is policy, they say in Washington. The appointment of John Bolton as national security advisor is by far President Trump's most dangerous decision.
Democrats are already counting their electoral chickens for the midterms - but their unwillingness to lay out a clear agenda may be about to hand the party their second devastating defeat in two years.
Like many other Americans this week, I have been impressed with the poise, passion and guts of the Florida teenagers who survived the latest big school shooting, as well as that of their student allies in other cities who walked out of class, took to the streets and/or confronted government officials to demand that they take meaningful action to reduce gun violence. As we mark a series of big 50th anniversaries of the cluster of dramatic events that took place in 1968, one wonders: does this augur a return to the street-level militancy of that tumultuous year?
On the one hand, because it's the 18th school shooting so far this year, the news that another psychologically damaged man shot 17 schoolchildren to death with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle is not news. Put it on page 27 below the fold, maybe?
This is advice for the Democrats. Democrats never take my advice. So why do I keep giving it to them?
You're reading this, so you probably follow political punditry. And if you follow political punditry, you've been hearing the usual corporate suspects predict that one of two things will happen in this fall's midterm elections: either the Democrats will win big (win back the Senate), or they'll win really big (the House, too). Outta the way, Congressional Republicans: here comes the Big Blue Wave!
Leftists want to change the world. They want peace, equal income, equal wealth, equal rights for everybody.
President Trump is under fire and we're all "shocked" that his s---hole mouth called the (predominantly black) nations of Africa "s---holes," helpfully comparing them to (predominantly blonde) Norway to make sure nobody missed the point. To drive home just how angry people are about this (and rightly so), Trump's comment overshadowed news that the government accidentally told the citizens of Hawaii they were about to get nuked. As George W. Bush would say, "that's some weird s---."
Steven Spielberg's new movie "The Post" depicts a newspaper's decision to defy the government, risk its financial health and imprisonment of its editors in order to report a hard truth and defend the press' First Amendment rights by publishing the Pentagon Papers.
What if Hillary Clinton had won 114,000 more votes in four key states? Or, what if she'd picked up the two to three percent of the vote she lost because Bernie Sanders' supporters sat on their hands on election day? She'd be "Clinton 2" or "Clinton 45" or "the second President Clinton" -- and the world would look very different.
One of the points many women have made since the beginning of the current national discussion about sexual assault and harassment has been that sexism and misogyny have cost women countless opportunities to achieve their full potential. Probably because this began with Harvey Weinstein, much of the mourning of opportunity costs focused on Hollywood: New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd mentioned her reaction to research she did on the topic: "I got more and more angry as I realized that these women were being systematically excluded based on ridiculous biases."
Some political experts doubted that Donald J. Trump would tough it out this long. This, after all, was a very strange man, possibly afflicted by obsessive-compulsive disorder to the point that he even floated the idea of staying in New York.
