Credit the comedian and HBO talk show host Bill Maher for being blunt. He has a gift for making text what is otherwise subtext.
Most individuals keep a pretty firm grip on their possessions — the cars, the house and the stuff inside it. They’ve got a fairly accurate grasp of their money, too, by taking a quick scan of their financial assets online. Personal data, though, is another story. The complexion of the information that tech giants glean from surveilling users’ Internet activities is as murky for most Americans as a trek in the woods after dark. Americans urgently need a more effective means of ensuring that their cyber-persona is not being stalked from the digital shadows by buck-raking marketers.
Americans don't agree on much of anything these days. The merits of hot dogs, apple pie and even baseball are probably divisive at this point.
The late Saul Alinsky, the legendary left-wing community organizer, must be looking up from wherever he is and smiling. The direction lately taken by the Democratic Party shows they've bought into his tactics, hook, line and sinker.
No crystal ball can predict the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, but surveys of public opinion offer insight into voter views that may shape the outcome. A look at how Americans regard the many challenges at home and abroad — among them immigration, health care, socialism and climate change — indicates an enduring affection for the conservative common sense.
No one really knows who first had the insight that there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics. It may have been Mark Twain or it may have been Benjamin Disraeli, or it may have been a punter at the local bar. But the sentiment has endured for more than a century because it expresses a fundamental truth. There are all kinds of ways to manipulate, abuse or obfuscate using statistics.
Finally, some salutary news. One of the world's most prolific mass murderers has finally shuffled off this mortal coil — though, unfairly to his hundreds of thousands of victims who were cut down prematurely — at the ripe old age of 93. Nuon Chea, Pol Pot's consigliere during the Khmer Rouge regime that terrorized Cambodia, died in a hospital bed over the weekend. He was serving a life sentence at the time.
It has happened again, and again. Not one, but two mass shootings over the weekend have triggered a desperate national outcry for action to stop the carnage. With a Texas-sized massacre in El Paso followed by another in Ohio, Dayton-area mourners punctuated a vigil led by Gov. Mike DeWine with chants of "do something." Indeed, something must be done, or possibly many things. Whatever the remedy, though, liberty must not be trampled along the pathway to security.
It once was said that partisan differences ended at the water's edge. Jamestown, Virginia, the site of the first permanent English settlement in the Americas, dating back to 1607, is on the coast, but that water's-edge constraint was thrown overboard last week by Virginia Democrats.
It takes uncommon stamina to run a marathon, and to finish. Winning takes something else again — endless tenacity juiced with the irrepressible confidence of, well, Donald Trump. The contest for the U.S. presidency requires these attributes, plus a four-leaf clover for good luck. With Democratic contenders for the 2020 election now catching their breath following their party's second series of televised debates, it's clear some contestants have the inside track and others are tripping over their shoelaces. This week's second round of debates demonstrated all are on the wrong track.
It's long been political conventional wisdom that governors tend to make the best presidential candidates — think Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Jimmy Carter. So far, not this time around, however. Several Democratic governors past and present are vying for their party's nomination for the presidency. Yet they've made nary a splash. In the debate in Detroit earlier this week, former Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado and current Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana were nothing but also-rans, outshone by not only Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts but also new age guru Marianne Williamson.
There is nothing improper about righting wrongs. Every generation has its moment to be impetuous and impatient to make the world a better place. Some actually succeed, but many fail owing to the all-too-human tendency to see an angel in the mirror and a monster on the street. Antifa, the self-proclaimed anti-fascist movement, is but the latest example of high-minded idealism gone bad. It has become the hate it hates.
In his roughly 700 years in Washington, former Vice President Joe Biden has had one bona fide achievement that he should be proud of: The 1994 crime bill that he co-authored. The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act came at a time when the United States was reeling from decades of high crime rates — major American cities, including Washington, D.C., were rife with open-air drug markets and the violence that came with them.
Have the folks who run the U.S. Postal Service heard the one about the first thing you do when you're stuck in a hole is to stop digging? A private corporation regulated by the United States government, it's perpetually in the red, this time to the tune of nearly $4 billion.
Most of us have seen a bad play or two; even the Great White Way produces the occasional turkey. But it's still striking to reflect that the congressional Democrats who presided over Wednesday's hearings with former special counsel Robert Mueller actually rehearsed their roles beforehand. In the event, so bad was the performance that one wonders whether their rehearsals were straight out of Mel Brooks' "The Producers" — like Leo Bloom and Max Bialystock, it's as if they were hoping to bomb.
