Columnist.
Tyson Timbs made a mistake, but not one as important as Indiana's Supreme Court made in allowing to stand the punishment the state inflicted on him. He was a drug addict — first with opioids prescribed for a work-related injury, then heroin — when his father died.
Never one to use a scalpel when there is a machete at hand, the president denounced the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, a dunderheaded move but a reason for giving thanks today because it elicited from Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., 2018's most exquisitely mixed metaphor: "He shot from the hip with a sledgehammer instead of using a scalpel."
The world's oldest political party has developed an aversion to discretion.
In the hierarchy of pleasures, schadenfreude ranks second only to dry martinis at dusk, so conservatives are enjoying Harvard's entanglement with two things it has not sufficiently questioned — regulatory government and progressive sentiment.
In the previous 50 years, the state of Mississippi has validated Lord Tennyson's belief that "men may rise on stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things."
America's body politic has recently been scarred by excruciating political shingles, and 2018 campaigning was equivalent to acid reflux. But Tuesday's elections indicated that some political antibodies are strengthening the nation's immune system.
Until last week it seemed that the Division 1 college basketball industry could produce nothing more risible than its pieties about cherishing the amateurism of the "student-athletes" who generate, but get mere crumbs of, the industry's billions.
Here in the state's southeast, which calls itself the Bootheel and nurses a genial distrust of Missouri's metropolitan fleshpots (St. Louis, Kansas City), the loudspeaker is blasting out John Mellencamp's "Small Town" as Josh Hawley's cowboy boots alight from his campaign bus at this stop on the "Stop Schumer Fire Claire Tour."
"Life happens," Stacey Abrams instructs a small but boisterous crowd in a sun-drenched park south of Atlanta. She says: Your car breaks down. Your child gets sick. Could happen on election day. So, vote early.
After showing off his swastika tattoo, Randy Metcalf became involved in a barroom brawl. One of his opponents was an African American, who he and his friends knocked unconscious.
This year's election that most implicates fundamental issues of American governance will not fill a legislative or executive office.
Early in his Marine Corps career, which he concluded as a four-star general, Walt Boomer was decorated for valor in Vietnam. He distilled into three words the lesson of that debacle: "Tell the truth."
If Sen. Ben Sasse is right — he has not recently been wrong about anything important — the nation's most-discussed political problem is entangled with the least-understood public health problem.
On the road again, and full of indignation about, or perhaps admiration for, what he called "made-up" and "fabricated" Democratic accusations during the recent judicial confirmation turmoil, America's feral president swerved into a denunciation of a nonexistent bill — "It's called 'the open borders bill'" — that, he thundered, "every single Democrat" in the Senate has "signed up for."
The descent of American capitalism into a racket is being greased by professed capitalists in government, in collaboration with professed capitalists in what is called, with decreasing accuracy, the private sector.
Preferring verbal felicity to practical wisdom, a character in a Benjamin Disraeli novel quipped, "A majority is always the best repartee." Not really. Open societies that want to remain so should prefer persuasion to raw power, even the power of majorities. Which is why Republican Sen. Jeff Flake served the nation, its highest tribunal, constitutional morality and even his ungrateful party by not being a team player.
Without being aware of it, Vernon Madison might become a footnote in constitutional law because he is barely aware of anything.
When John Keats said that autumn is the season of "mists and mellow fruitfulness," he did not anticipate this American autumn.
The current era of scorched-earth politics began five years after there was, according to Christine Blasey Ford, in 1982, an alcohol-soaked party in a suburban Washington home. There her 15-year-old self was, she says, assaulted by 17-year-old Brett Kavanaugh, who categorically denies this accusation.
