Columnist.
A Gallup poll last month found that 50 percent of Americans identified themselves as "pro-choice" on abortion, surpassing the 44% who called themselves "pro-life." It was the first time in seven years that the pro-choice label was more popular — as recently as 2012, Gallup was reporting that the share of self-described "pro-choice" Americans had dipped to an all-time low of 41 percent. Whatever Americans may call themselves, however, fewer and fewer are getting abortions. From the Associated Press this week came word that abortion rates are plunging in almost every state, in many cases by more than a fifth since 2010. "Abortions have declined in states where new laws make it harder to have them," the AP's David Crary wrote, "but they've also waned in states where abortion rights are protected."
Noses went out of joint and knickers got in a twist when Israel's new deputy foreign minister delivered her inaugural speech to the Jewish state's diplomatic corps. "We need to get back to the basic truth of our right to this land," said Tzipi Hotovely, who is running the foreign ministry's day-to-day operations, while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu retains the title of foreign minister. The land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people, she declared, and their claim to it is as old as the Bible. "It's important to say this" when making Israel's case before the world, and not to focus solely on Israel's security interests. Of course security is a profound concern, Hotovely observed, but arguments grounded in justice, morality, and deep historical rights are stronger. She even quoted the medieval Jewish sage Rashi, who wrote that Genesis opens with God's creation of the world to preempt any subsequent charge that the Jewish claim to the land was without merit.
In his remarks to the White House Correspondents' Dinner in April, President Obama pledged that his administration would work tirelessly for the freedom of Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post reporter who has been held hostage by Iran since last summer on spurious espionage charges. "Jason has been in prison for nothing more than writing about the hopes and fears of the Iranian people," Obama said. "We will not rest until we bring him home to his family, safe and sound." Yet just four days later, the president warned Congress that he would veto any bill making approval of a nuclear deal with Iran contingent on the release of Americans in Iranian captivity. Obama may want the mullahs to set their US hostages free. But he wants that nuclear deal more.
What this country needs, says Bernie Sanders, is less deodorant. The 73-year-old senator from Vermont, now running for the Democratic presidential nomination, told CNBC's John Harwood in an interview on Tuesday that because American consumers can choose from so many brands of personal-care products, kids are going to bed with empty bellies. "You don't necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country," Sanders lamented. He didn't explain exactly how the profusion of toiletries and athletic footwear leads to childhood hunger, but for the only self-described socialist in Congress, it is no doubt a matter of faith that the abundance of capitalism must generate poverty and undernourishment.
The avarice of Bill and Hillary Clinton is a wonder to behold. They crave wealth, it seems, even more than they crave power, and display no qualms about exploiting their political stature to amass it. According to a required financial disclosure filing last week, the former president and his wife have collected more than $30 million since January 2014, most of it from speaking engagements for which they charged an average of $240,000 each. To put that figure in perspective, what the Clintons earn per speech is nearly five times what the median US household earns per year. Since leaving the White House in 2001, the Clintons have made more than $125 million just from what The New York Times has called "the family speechmaking business." Huge book advances have been worth many millions more. For all their poor-mouthing about being "dead broke" and needing to "pay our bills," the Clintons' income puts them well within the top one-tenth of 1 percent of all Americans.
Everyone had a field day with Jeb Bush's mishandling of the Iraq question Megyn Kelly posed during a TV interview last week: "Knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion?" Over the course of several days, Bush's answer switched from a firm yes ("I would have") to a firm no ("I would not have gone into Iraq"). Other GOP presidential hopefuls, quick to exploit Bush's fumble, quickly declared that in hindsight *they* wouldn't have gone to war. Obviously there will be no do-over of the Iraq war authorization; the next president can't hop a time machine back to 2003. But even as a theoretical exercise, it's impossible to answer Kelly's question without clarifying the meaning of "knowing what we know now."
Section 215 of the Patriot Act will not survive another month. The most controversial piece of the post-9/11 law that broadly expanded the federal government's surveillance powers is set to expire on June 1, and the House of Representatives on Wednesday gave its overwhelming approval to a far less sweeping replacement. On a 338-to-88 vote, Republicans and Democrats registered broad support for the USA Freedom Act, which will end the National Security Agency's bulk collection of "metadata" from millions of Americans' phone records. The legislation faces some opposition in the Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is pushing to extend the Patriot Act with no changes. That won't happen. Other Republican senators, including at least two who are running for president, want Section 215 scrapped or curtailed, and the political tides are with them.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's life is a meager compensation for the murder of Martin Richard, Lingzi Lu, Krystle Campbell, and Sean Collier. But it is the highest price he can be made to pay under our system of justice, and a jury of his peers has unanimously recommended that he pay it. From the outset, the death penalty was the sentence most Americans believed Tsarnaev should receive, assuming he was guilty of the grisly Boston Marathon bombing. Long before the case went to trial, all doubt of his guilt had vanished. Not even his lawyers tried to suggest otherwise. On the trial's opening day, defense attorney Judy Clarke bluntly acknowledged: "It was him." What all these weeks in the federal courthouse in South Boston established was not that Tsarnaev is a murderer and a terrorist — that we knew. What was made brutally clear is that he feels no remorse for the blood he shed and the pain he caused. Witness after witness described, in heartbreaking and agonizing testimony, what Tsarnaev's bombs had wrought. The jury saw and heard it all, and drew the logical conclusion: The heartbreak and agony were the whole point.
When the University of Massachusetts agreed in 2010 to acquire the Southern New England School of Law, there were skeptics aplenty. The decision to take over the small private institution and transform it into a state-run facility, rechristened the UMass School of Law, was disparaged by critics who said the merger was unnecessary, unrealistic, and unwise. Two University of Massachusetts trustees, Richard Lawton and Kenneth MacAfee, warned at the time that the law school proposal "stinks of political motives," and claimed it would "prove to be an embarrassment to our UMass brand." The Pioneer Institute analyzed the plan — which was premised on the assertion that a weak private law school could be made bigger, better, and more competitive without costing taxpayers a dime — and rated it "virtually impossible."
Last month marked the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, a moment vividly encapsulated by the frenzied scene of South Vietnamese desperately trying to reach the last helicopter on the roof of the American embassy. April was also the 150th anniversary of the surrender at Appomattox, when Robert E. Lee capitulated to Ulysses S. Grant, bringing the bloodiest fighting of the Civil War to an end. The two episodes seemingly have little to do with each other. But each, in its way, illustrates one of the bleakly recurring themes of US military history: When America's armed forces prematurely abandon the field, the results are usually heartbreaking for the people they leave behind. The Vietnam experience makes the point with aching sorrow. By 1972, the US war against the North Vietnamese communists was being won on the ground; it was lost in Congress and at the Paris peace talks under the political pressure of the antiwar movement.
Republican Carly Fiorina announced her candidacy for president this week, making her the second woman to join the 2016 race — the other, of course, being Democrat Hillary Clinton. Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, is considered a long shot for the GOP nomination, while Clinton is widely seen as a shoo-in for the Democrats. But who knows? The first caucuses and primaries are still many months off, and in politics anything can happen. This early in the presidential cycle, I make no predictions about how the race will play out. But one thing I'm sure of: America doesn't need to send a woman to the White House. Needless to say, many Clinton supporters vehemently proclaim the opposite.
Baltimore burns, shops are looted, rioters attack firefighters with bottles and bricks. And amid all the violence and ruin, what drives the chattering class into a froth of indignation? That anyone would use the word "thugs" to describe the vandals and criminals reducing Baltimore to rubble. As berserkers ran amok Monday, the city's mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, deplored the destruction: "Too many people have invested in building up this city to allow thugs to tear it down." *That* set the hounds baying. Rawlings-Blake was accused of using a racial slur. Baltimore City Councilor Carl Stokes angrily told CNN that calling rioters "thugs" is just like calling them the N-word. The Rev. Jamal Bryant, who delivered the eulogy at Freddie Gray's funeral, repeated the accusation: " 'Thugs' is the 21st-century word for the N-word," he said Wednesday, "and it is repulsive and it is offensive." Wale, the popular Washington, D.C.-based rapper, told Baltimore teens that Rawlings-Blake owed them a direct apology for saying something so "stupid." Others piled on.
Immigration restrictionists often claim that there are no "jobs Americans won't do," if only US borders would be secured against economic migrants who are willing to work hard for low pay and few benefits. If the fruit-and-vegetable industry couldn't rely on seasonal farmhands from Mexico and Central America, for example, growers would perforce offer the higher wages necessary to attract American citizens to pick the country's fresh produce. What alternative would they have? Let crops rot in the field? In reality, agriculture is no more of a zero-sum industry than any other, and there is no fixed number of people it must employ. That point is strikingly made by recent stories on the development of new technology poised to transform the nation's $2.5 billion strawberry business.
Naloxone isn't magic, but its power to rescue a heroin user from the brink of death can certainly seem miraculous. The anti-overdose drug, also known by the brand name Narcan, is easy to administer and has saved thousands of lives. First responders are often awestruck at how swiftly it can revive a dying addict. "It's just incredible," the deputy fire chief of Revere, Mass., marveled in a public-radio interview last year. "There's somebody who's on the ground who's literally dead. They have no pulse. Sometimes they're blue, sometimes they're black. And you administer this stuff and sometimes in a minute or two or three, they're actually up and talking to you." Free markets aren't magic either. Yet their ability to generate a life-saving drug like Naloxone, supplying quantities sufficient to make it widely available even when the need is great, can seem even more miraculous. That miracle is not enhanced when politicians rebuke the entrepreneurs who manufacture or distribute such wonder drugs for charging a price that the market will bear.
"Of the roughly 2 million Armenians living in the country in 1914, 90 percent were gone by 1918."
The penalty phase of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's trial is underway, and federal prosecutors have been getting some well-publicized advice about the penalty they should seek for the Boston Marathon terrorist. In a statement featured on the Boston Globe's front page last week, the parents of 8-year-old Martin Richard — the youngest victim murdered by the Tsarnaev brothers — said they would be in favor of the Justice Department "taking the death penalty off the table" in exchange for a life sentence and the waiver of any right of appeal. On Monday, the Globe spotlighted a similar call by Jessica Kensky and Patrick Downes, newlyweds who both lost legs in the 2013 bombing.
Who trusts Iran? Most Americans don't. According to two new polls, a majority of the public strongly doubts that the ruling theocrats in Tehran can be counted on to keep their end of any nuclear deal negotiated in the US-led "P5+1" talks in Lausanne, Switzerland. Asked in a Fox News poll how much of Iran's claims on nuclear matters can be trusted, 55 percent of respondents replied that the United States "can't trust anything" the regime says, while 28 percent were willing to trust only "a little." Similarly, a survey by NBC News found that 68 percent of Americans consider Iran unlikely to abide by any nuclear agreement. Nothing unusual there. Given Iran's long history of deceit, it would be strange if Americans and their allies *didn't* regard as worthless any nuclear promises the mullahs make.
Unlike some of Pope Francis's other headline-generating pronouncements, his description of Turkey's mass murder of 1.5 million Armenians during World War I as "genocide" was anything but inadvertent. Speaking at the Vatican during a Sunday mass to mark the centenary of the slaughter, the pope said it is "widely considered the first genocide of the 20th century" — a quote from Pope John Paul II, who used nearly the same words in 2001. But Francis went further, equating the destruction of the Armenians to the Nazi Holocaust and the Soviet bloodbaths under Stalin. And he linked the genocidal Ottoman assault on Armenia, the world's oldest Christian nation, with the epidemic of violence against Christians today, especially by such radical Islamist terror groups as ISIS, Boko Haram, and al-Shabaab.
It took Bibi Netanyahu nearly a week to apologize properly for his inflammatory comment on Israel's election day warning that Arab voters were "heading to the polls in droves." On Monday, speaking at his Jerusalem residence to a group of Israeli Arab community leaders, the newly reelected prime minister expressed his regret: "I know the things I said a few days ago wounded Israel's Arab citizens. That was not in any way my intention, and I am sorry." But even after four and a half years, there has been no apology from Barack Obama for *his* inflammatory remarks just before the 2010 election, when he exhorted Latinos to generate an "upsurge in voting" in order to "punish our enemies and ... reward our friends." Nor has the president ever expressed regret for his running mate's racially-tinged warning to a largely black audience in 2012 that the GOP was "going to put y'all back in chains" if Mitt Romney won the White House. In fact, the Obama campaign insisted no apology would be forthcoming.
It's remarkable what five centuries can do for a guy's reputation. When Richard III, the last Plantaganet king of England, was killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, his corpse was stripped and hauled in disgrace through the streets of Leicester, "all besprinkled with mire and blood … a miserable spectacle," as Holinshed's Chronicle recounted. Then it was stuffed into a crude grave, naked and coffinless, while "few lamented and many rejoiced."
