Columnist.
First it was the debacle of Healthcare.gov, the botched ObamaCare website, that dominated coverage of the Affordable Care Act's rollout. The new insurance exchanges were a disaster -- technical malfunctions, frozen screens, interminable wait times, error messages, lost data. President Obama had promised that the new system would make getting health insurance as easy as shopping online -- "the same way you'd shop for a plane ticket on Kayak or a TV on Amazon," he'd said. What he delivered instead, as Democratic Senator Max Baucus predicted months ago, was a "huge train wreck."
Is there an idiom in Arabic for cutting off your nose to spite your face? Saudi Arabia's abrupt rejection on October 18 of the UN Security Council seat to which it had just been elected was described as "bizarre" and "baffling," a "perplexing" decision that that left diplomats "gasping" and was "met with incredulity." No member of the United Nations had ever done such a thing, and the Saudi government's explanation was about as subtle as an uppercut.
Americans are sharply divided over all kinds of things these days, but whether the Washington Redskins need a new name doesn't seem to be one of them. In an Associated Press poll earlier this year, 79 percent of respondents said the team's name should remain unchanged; only 11 percent wanted "Redskins" to be replaced.
As Democrats begin maneuvering for the 2016 presidential race, there isn't one who would think of disparaging John F. Kennedy's stature as a Democratic Party hero. Yet it's a pretty safe bet that none would dream of running on Kennedy's approach to government or embrace his political beliefs. Today's Democratic Party -- the home of Barack Obama, John Kerry, and Al Gore -- wouldn't give the time of day to a candidate like JFK.
For weeks we've been told that if Congress doesn't raise the federal debt ceiling by Thursday, the government will go into default and the world as we know it will spin out of control. The predictions of doom have been hysterical. Bloomberg reported that a US default would be the first by a major Western government "since Nazi Germany 80 years ago." Warren Buffett compared debt-ceiling politics to weapons of mass destruction -- "like nuclear bombs, basically too horrible to use.
You know why Republican conservatives *really* want to defund ObamaCare? "Everyone knows why," wrote Salon's editor Joan Walsh last week as brinksmanship over the health-care law triggered the federal shutdown.
It has been more than two weeks since Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz issued a "respectful request" for customers to stop bringing guns into his company's coffee shops, and the response by and large has been one of courteous compliance. Considering how polarized and emotional America's gun debates usually get, some people were sure Starbucks was in for weeks of controversy. "The backlash and boycott talk has already begun," reported the Los Angeles Times the day Schultz's open letter appeared. Entrepreneur.com's Ray Hennessey, an experienced business editor, warned that Starbucks risked "alienating a large portion of its customer base."
Is mayoral candidate Martin Walsh for or against binding arbitration for public-sector labor contracts? He certainly is. Like presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004, who voted to fund the war in Iraq before he voted not to fund the war in Iraq, Walsh -- a state legislator and longtime union official -- would like to have it both ways on binding arbitration. In January Walsh filed a bill giving third-party arbitrators the power to impose "final and binding" terms for police and firefighters' contracts, stripping municipal councils of their legal authority to approve the award before it can take effect. It wasn't the first time Walsh supported such a measure. If it ever became law, public-safety unions would have even more of an incentive than they already do now to make extreme demands and then hold out for arbitration.
Intrigued by news coverage of Pope Francis's interview with the world's leading Jesuit journals, I wanted to read the whole thing for myself. The [full English text](http://www.americamagazine.org/pope-interview), downloaded from the website of the New York-based America magazine, was 19 pages long. The part that generated all the excited headlines -- "Pope Says Church Is 'Obsessed' With Gays, Abortion and Birth Control" was how The New York Times announced it on page 1 -- amounted to only about five paragraphs. Maybe the Catholic Church isn't the institution that's obsessed.
Xia Yeliang knows that he may end up behind bars. He knows that his career in academia -- he is a distinguished professor of economics at Peking University -- may be about to end. He knows that he may become a social pariah, as friends and colleagues face mounting pressure to avoid him. He knows the anguish his wife may suffer for her loyalty to him. Like his friend Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel Peace laureate who has spent much of the past 25 years in Chinese prisons, Xia had few illusions about what he was getting into when he signed Charter 08, a valiant manifesto calling for human rights and an end to one-party rule in China. Since then Xia has grown increasingly outspoken in his defense of liberty and his condemnation of Communist Party censorship and persecution. So when he learned that the economics faculty at his university intends to vote this month on whether to expel him, he understood which way the wind was blowing.
Democrats jeered when John McCain told a New Hampshire audience during the 2008 presidential campaign that he would be glad to see US troops remain in Iraq for decades, even a century, once the war was over. "We've been in Japan for 60 years [and] in South Korea for 50 years," he said. A similar long-term stay in a postwar Iraq, buttressing allies and providing stability in a volatile region, would "be fine with me as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed."
The Syrian crisis is in a frenzy, Egypt's political system is imploding, a new wave of Sunni terrorism is bloodying Iraq, post-Qaddafi Libya is collapsing into lawlessness and ruin, and Iran is edging closer to the nuclear threshold. Yet Secretary of State John Kerry goes on flogging the dead horse of the Israeli-Palestinian "peace process."
Altruism puzzled Charles Darwin. If evolution was propelled by natural selection -- by the gradual predominance within species, including *Homo sapiens*, of those individuals best adapted genetically for survival and reproduction -- where do generosity and compassion come from? Why don't societies grow more pitiless and cutthroat over time? How did selflessness, charity, and integrity ever establish a foothold, let alone become moral virtues that all enlightened communities esteem?
The state Ethics Commission came up with three solutions to state Senator Dan Wolf's conflict-of-interest problem. Allow me to suggest a fourth. Wolf is the pilot and entrepreneur who founded Cape Air in 1989 and over the next two decades built it into one of the country's most successful regional airlines. He was elected to the Massachusetts Senate in 2010, and now hopes to run for governor. But the Ethics Commission ruled last month that Wolf was in violation of state law, which bars elected officials from having a business relationship with any state agency. Since Wolf still owns 23 percent of Cape Air, and since Cape Air pays the Massachusetts Port Authority for landing rights at Logan Airport, the commission decreed the would-be governor had to choose from one of three unpalatable options.
During a visit last week to Dachau, the former concentration camp near Munich, German Chancellor Angela Merkel laid a wreath in memory of the tens of thousands the Nazis murdered there. The memory of their fate, she said, "fills me with deep sadness and shame." Dachau -- the original concentration camp, established in March 1933 -- radiates a constant reminder about the bottomless human capacity to commit evil, or to look away when evil is committed. "How could Germans go so far as to deny people human dignity and the right to live?" Merkel asked. "Places such as this warn each one of us to help ensure that such things never happen again."
Can you judge a police officer's abilities by the color of his skin? When Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis earlier this month promoted five officers to sergeant, the commotion it generated had everything to do with the officers' race. All five happened to be white, even though the pool of 21 officers eligible for promotion on the basis of their Civil Service test scores had included nine nonwhite candidates. The commissioner was blasted by a minority officers' advocacy group, which accused him of making a "conscious effort" to keep minorities from moving up.
At their meeting in Boston last week, Republican National Committee members voted unanimously not to sponsor or sanction any presidential primary debate with NBC or CNN during the 2016 election cycle. Both networks have projects about Hillary Clinton in the works that Republicans predict will be "little more than extended commercials" promoting a potential run for the White House by the former secretary of state. (NBC is planning a miniseries about Clinton starring Diane Lane; CNN will produce a full-length feature film to be shown in theaters next year.) The RNC, saying it's fed up with the media's liberal favoritism, will refuse to partner with either NBC or CNN as the next primary season gets underway.
Days after Massachusetts residents began feeling the sting of new tax increases, Florida's Republican governor, Rick Scott, cheerfully reminded them that they have other options. On Aug. 6, Scott sent letters to 100 Massachusetts business owners, inviting them to relocate to the Sunshine State "because we have the perfect climate for your business." He trumpeted his state's "incredible economic turnaround," and drew a few pointed contrasts: "While Florida's unemployment rate has seen the second-largest drop in the country, Massachusetts' June unemployment rate increased to the highest since November 2011," Scott wrote. "While Florida ranks fifth in the nation for our business tax climate, Massachusetts is stuck at No. 22, according to the Tax Foundation." And now that taxes are up again -- Beacon Hill raised taxes on gasoline and cigarettes, and enacted a 6.25 percent sales tax on software and computer services that has the tech sector in an uproar -- "it's bound to get worse in Massachusetts."
When the US government's National Counterterrorism Center compiled its annual report for 2009, it didn't overlook the deadliest terror attack on American soil since 9/11. "On 5 November 2009, at 1:30 PM, in Fort Hood, Texas," the report notes in its chronology of "high-fatality terrorist attacks" -- those that took at least 10 lives -- "an armed assailant entered the Fort Hood Soldier Readiness Processing Center and opened fire, killing one civilian and 12 soldiers, wounding seven civilians, 17 soldiers, and 18 [other] people, and damaging the facility.... No group claimed responsibility, although authorities believed an unaffiliated Sunni extremist was responsible."
There is no connection, of course, between the prosecution of notorious gangster James "Whitey" Bulger and the recent spate of scandals and revelations roiling the Obama administration. Or is there? Law enforcement and criminal justice are essential functions of government. No civilized society could survive for long if it lacked tools to combat lawlessness or make dangerous villains answer for their crimes. And Bulger was certainly dangerous -- "one of the most vicious, violent criminals ever to walk the streets of Boston," as Assistant US Attorney Fred Wyshak called him in summing up for the prosecution last week.
