Columnist.
Presidential campaigns inflate expectations that power wielded from government's pinnacle will invigorate the nation. Thus campaigns demonstrate that creationists threaten the creative ferment that produces social improvement. Not religious creationists, who are mistaken but inconsequential. It is secular creationists whose social costs are steep.
If you look beyond Donald Trump's comprehensive unpleasantness — is there a disagreeable human trait he does *not* have? — you might see this: He is a fundamentally sad figure. His compulsive boasting is evidence of insecurity. His unassuageable neediness suggests an aching hunger for others' approval to ratify his self-admiration. His incessant announcements of his self-esteem indicate that he is not self-persuaded. Now, panting with a puppy's insatiable eagerness to be petted, Trump has reveled in the approval of Vladimir Putin, murderer and war criminal.
Although he is just 22, Andrew Zeller is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in mathematics at Purdue University. He is one reason the school is a rare exception to the rule of unreason on American campuses, where freedom of speech is under siege. He and Purdue are evidence that freedom of speech, by which truth is winnowed from error, is most reliably defended by those in whose intellectual pursuits the truth is most rigorously tested by reality.
"Any agreement about anything involving nearly 200 nations will necessarily be primarily aspirational."
History, on the "right side" of which Barack Obama endeavors to keep us, has a sense of whimsy. Proof of which is something happening this week: Britain's last deep-pit coal mine is closing, a small event pertinent to an enormous event, the Industrial Revolution, which was ignited by British coal. The mine closure should not, however, occasion cartwheels by the climate's saviors, fresh from their Paris achievement. The mine is primarily a casualty of declining coal prices, a result of burgeoning world energy supplies. Thanks largely to the developing world, demand for coal is expected to increase for at least another quarter-century.
If Pagedale, Missouri, is a glimpse of the future, the future is going to be annoying. Pagedale might represent the future of governance unless some of its residents succeed in their lawsuit against their government. If they do, it will be because they successfully invoked the principle of substantive due process. Pagedale is 1.19 square miles of St. Louis County. Approximately 93 percent of its 3,000 residents are African-American and about 25 percent live below the poverty line. There is not much of a tax base for their government. But supposed necessity does not confer constitutionality on Pagedale's decision to budget on the assumption of a steady blizzard of capricious fines.
In today's culture of hyperbole, born of desperate attempts to be noticed amid the Niagara of Internet and other outpourings, the label "genius" is affixed promiscuously to evanescent popular entertainers, fungible corporate CEOs and other perishable phenomena. But it almost fits the saloon singer — his preferred description of himself — who was born 100 years ago, on Dec. 12, 1915, in Hoboken, New Jersey.
Progressives are increasingly preoccupied with income inequality, and their current hero, Sen. Bernie Sanders, favors increasing the tax system's progressivity. So, in this 103rd year of the income tax, it is timely to note that there still is no intellectually sturdy case for progressive taxation. Arguments for it are invariably arguments for increased equality of social outcomes. Because individuals have different vocational desires and different aptitudes for adding value to the economy, inequality is inevitable
Sen. Tim Scott, who evidently has not received the memo explaining that politics is a grim and bitter business, laughs easily and often, as when, during lunch in this city's humming downtown, he explains that South Carolina's Lowcountry is benefiting from what are called "halfbacks." These are migrants who moved from Northern states to Florida in search of warmth but, finding high prices and congestion, then moved halfway back, settling in South Carolina. Doing so, they have located in the state where, Scott believes and history suggests, the 2016 Republican presidential nomination will begin to come to closure.
As the administrative state distorts America's constitutional architecture, Clarence Thomas becomes America's indispensable constitutionalist. Now in his 25th year on the Supreme Court, he is urging the judicial branch to limit the legislative branch's practice of delegating its power to the executive branch.
Give thanks this day for some indirect blessings of liberty, including the behavior-beyond-satire of what are generously called institutions of higher education. People who are imprecisely called educators have taught, by their negative examples, what intelligence is not. Melissa Click is the University of Missouri academic who shouted "I need some muscle over here" to prevent a photojournalist from informing the public about a public demonstration intended to influence the public.
Never has American freedom of speech been attacked so flagrantly, promiscuously and on so many fronts. The most egregious examples come from campuses and Congress. On campuses, censorship proliferates as political advocacy is confined to designated spaces. In Congress, 54 Democratic senators have voted to amend the First Amendment to empower Congress to regulate the quantity, content and timing of political campaign speech. There are, however, smaller, less visible and hence especially insidious abridgements of the right to make oneself heard. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will decide whether to hear such a case from Texas, where it is a crime for a retired veterinarian to share his advice with people seeking it.
Paris was for all Americans, but especially for Republicans, a summons to seriousness that should have two immediate impacts on the Republican presidential contest. It should awaken the party's nominating electorate from its reveries about treating the presidency as an entry-level job. And it should cause Republicans to take another look at Chris Christie, beginning with his speech in Florida the day after the Paris attacks.
Yale's president, Peter Salovey, dealt with the Crisis of the Distressing Email about Hypothetical Halloween Costumes about as you would expect from someone who has risen to eminence in today's academia. He seems to be the kind of adult who has helped produce the kind of students who are such delicate snowflakes that they melt at the mere mention of even a potential abrasion of their sensibilities.
Were the lungs the seat of wisdom, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly would be wise, but they are not and he is not. So it is not astonishing that he is doubling down on his wager that the truth cannot catch up with him. It has, however, already done so. The prolific O'Reilly has, with his collaborator Martin Dugard, produced five "history" books in five years: "Killing Lincoln," "Killing Kennedy, "Killing Jesus," "Killing Patton" and now the best-selling "Killing Reagan." Because no one actually killed Reagan, O'Reilly keeps his lucrative series going by postulating that the bullet that struck Reagan in March 1981 kind of, sort of killed him, although he lived 23 more years.
Donald Trump is just one symptom of today's cultural pathology of self-validating vehemence with blustery certitudes substituting for evidence. Another is the fact that the book atop the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list is a tissue of unsubstantiated assertions. Because of its vast readership, "Killing Reagan: The Violent Assault That Changed a Presidency" by Fox News' Bill O'Reilly and his collaborator Martin Dugard will distort public understanding of Ronald Reagan's presidency more than hostile but conscientious scholars could.
The IRS scandal — the denial of essential tax-exempt status to conservative advocacy groups, thereby effectively suppressing the groups' activities — demonstrates this: When government is empowered to regulate advocacy, it will be tempted to suppress some of it. And sometimes government will think like Oscar Wilde: "The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it."
Yale historian Timothy Snyder is indebted to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who recently made Snyder's new book even more newsworthy than his extraordinary scholarship deserves to be. And Netanyahu is indebted to Snyder, whose theory of Hitler's anti-Semitism is germane to two questions: Is the Iranian regime's anti-Semitism rooted, as Hitler's was, in a theory of history that *demands* genocide? If so, when Iran becomes a nuclear power, can it be deterred from its announced determination to destroy Israel?
Americans have been betting on sports since the first time a Puritan pilgrim boasted that his horse was the fastest in Massachusetts Bay Colony and another said, "Wanna bet?" But fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly and government gotta fret about gambling on fantasy sports. Torrential television advertising by DraftKings and FanDuel is creating millions of customers for these sports fantasy businesses, thereby creating government anxiety lest Americans make unregulated choices inimical to their material and moral well-being.
The Republican Party, like Sisyphus, is again putting its shoulder to a boulder, hoping to make modest but significant changes in the Electoral College arithmetic by winning perhaps 12 percent of the African- American vote. To this end, they need to hone a rhetoric of skepticism about, and an agenda for reform of, the criminal justice system. They can draw on the thinking of a federal appellate judge nominated by Ronald Reagan.
