Columnist.
Attempting comprehensive tax reform is like trying to tug many bones from the clamped jaws of many mastiffs.
The French are too intellectually vain to borrow others' political ideas, but too interested in style not to appreciate and appropriate that of others. So, on May 7 they might confer their presidency on a Gallic Barack Obama.
In his first annual message to Congress, John Quincy Adams, among the most experienced and intellectually formidable presidents, warned leaders against giving the impression that "we are palsied by the will of our constituents." In this regard, if in no other, the 45th president resembles the sixth.
Three months ago, State Trooper Jonathan Otto, 33, of the Arizona Department of Public Safety pulled over a car that had caught his attention by traveling 104 miles per hour long after midnight, just south of Kingman. He smelled marijuana in the car.
When not furrowing their collective brows about creches and displays of the Ten Commandments here and there, courts often are pondering tangential contacts between the government and religious schools. Courts have held that public money can constitutionally fund the transportation of parochial school pupils to classes — but not on field trips. It can fund nurses at parochial schools — but not guidance counselors. It can fund books — but not maps. Daniel Patrick Moynihan wondered: What about atlases, which are books of maps? On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will consider the constitutional significance of this incontrovertible truth: "A scraped knee is a scraped knee whether it happens at a Montessori day care or a Lutheran day care."
With a mellifluous name suggesting bucolic tranquility, Rep. Mark Meadows, a North Carolina Republican, is an unlikely object of the caterwauling recently directed at him and the House Freedom Caucus he leads. The vituperation was occasioned by the HFC's role rescuing Republicans from embracing an unpopular first draft of legislation to replace Obamacare.
One hundred years ago, two events three days apart set the 20th century's trajectory.
Impulse control is unfashionable as well as unpresidential, but perhaps you should resist the urge to trip people who stride briskly down the sidewalk fixated on their phone screens, absorbed in texting and feeling entitled to expect others to make way. New technologies are shaping behaviors and dissolving civilities.
Sportswriter: "You hit only two home runs all last year and already you've hit seven this year [1969]. What's the difference?"
The Senate's coming confirmation of Neil Gorsuch will improve the Supreme Court, and Democrats' incontinent opposition to him will inadvertently improve the Senate — if Republicans are provoked to thoroughly reform the filibuster.
As a boy, Barry Goldwater Jr., son of the former senator and 1964 Republican presidential nominee, would step out of his father's house and shoot at tin cans 50 yards away. Now 78, he says he could fire in any direction and not endanger "anything but a cactus."
"Mend it, don't end it" was Bill Clinton's rhetorical straddle regarding affirmative action. Republican efforts to "repeal and replace" the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) look increasingly like "mend it, don't end it."
This week, the Senate Judiciary Committee will question Neil Gorsuch about the judiciary's role. Herewith some pertinent questions.
Although the National Endowment for the Arts' 2016 cost of $148 million was less than one-hundredth of 1 percent of the federal budget, attempting to abolish the NEA is a fight worth having, never mind the certain futility of the fight.
Encouraging developments are as welcome as they are rare in colleges and universities that cultivate diversity in everything but thought. Fortunately, state legislatures, alumni and philanthropists are planting little academic platoons that will make campuses less intellectually monochrome. One such, just launched, is Arizona State University's School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership.
The progressive mob that disrupted Charles Murray's appearance last week at Middlebury College was protesting a 1994 book read by few if any of the protesters. Some of them denounced "eugenics," thereby demonstrating an interesting ignorance: Eugenics — controlled breeding to improve the heritable traits of human beings — was a progressive cause.
Although America's political system seems unable to stimulate robust, sustained economic growth, it at least is stimulating consumption of a small but important segment of literature. Dystopian novels are selling briskly — Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" (1932), Sinclair Lewis' "It Can't Happen Here" (1935), George Orwell's "Animal Farm" (1945) and "1984" (1949), Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" (1953) and Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" (1985), all warning about nasty regimes displacing democracy.
The dyspeptic Henry Adams was not nice but not wrong when he described what now is named the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House, as an "architectural infant asylum." The granite pile, which once housed the State, War and Navy departments, was, Harry Truman said, "the greatest monstrosity in America." Actually, today's premier monstrosity is the federal budget, which is Mick Mulvaney's headache as the new head of the Office of Management and Budget, which is housed in the EEOB.
Since 1960, federal spending, adjusted for inflation, has quintupled and federal undertakings have multiplied like dandelions, but the federal civilian workforce has expanded only negligibly, to approximately what it was when Dwight Eisenhower was elected in 1952. Does this mean that "big government" is not really big?
Some American disasters come as bolts from the blue — the stock market crash of October 1929, Pearl Harbor, the designated hitter, 9/11. Others are predictable because they arise from arithmetic that is neither hidden nor arcane. Now comes the tsunami of pension problems that will wash over many cities and states.
