The public-opinion polls in the Virginia gubernatorial race are tightening. Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, the Democrat who had opened a comfortable lead over Ed Gillespie, the Republican, over the summer, has only a tiny lead in most polls now, and a new Monmouth survey puts Mr. Gillespie up by a point.
“United we stand, divided we fall” was a warning of the consequences of political fissures in the age of Lincoln, and it’s no less on point now. The United States is splitting in two along political lines, and the ominous trend could spell disaster one day soon enough. Unless Americans can set aside their differences and make common cause about something, the nation could fall into the widening gulf. America is the exceptional nation, but not a nation immune to all risks.
Defiance can be noble, and it can be merely subversive. In the case of sanctuary cities, counties and states, there’s nothing noble about trashing the laws of an orderly society to shield uninvited intruders from justice. Jurisdictions that do so risk more than the loss of money. They walk a narrow path to anarchy.
Michael Bloomberg, the super-rich purveyor of business news, fancies himself the Terminator. The food police took a knockdown last week in Chicago, when the Cook County board of commissioners repealed a tax on soda pop, but the former mayor of New York City promised defiantly, “I’ll be back.”
Germany has been the force for European stability and restraint in the years since World War II, but now it may be the new “sick man of Europe.”
Retaliation isn't always out of bounds. With their pre-game kneeling ritual, National Football League players have put a big hurt on their teams — and the fans — who pay their enormous salaries. Fans from coast to coast have responded with a forearm to the league's all-important TV ratings, leaving the muscled men flat on their backs, looking at the sky and wondering what hit them. The NFL is the king of sports entertainment, for now, but it's reassuring that when their favorite stars sneer at their country, Americans will still show where their hearts are.
Maximum hot air, minimum bottom line. That's the prospect for the world over the next few weeks in the wake of President Trump's Friday declaration that he won't certify that the Islamic mullahs in Iran are living up to their end of the deal they made with Barack Obama. This was the one-sided agreement by which the mullahs would give up their quest for nuclear weapons.
Nearly a week went by before Hillary Clinton pulled together a statement about Harvey Weinstein's abuse of women. Hillary's against abusing women and it turns out that she took so long to say so because she was trying to find the words to describe how deep her outrage runs. Abuse of women, and even credible accusations of forcible rape, are not unknown in Hillaryworld. Perhaps she hoped to draft Bubba's help to describe her outrage. Bubba's good with words. Or perhaps she was so busy tabulating good ol' Harvey's contributions to various Clinton "charities" that she just didn't get around to it sooner.
Puerto Rico is a mess. But it was a mess before Hurricane Maria swept through with new misery three weeks ago. Electricity is still at a premium. By one estimate, electric power has been restored to only 10 percent of the island's customers.
The race for governor of Virginia looked like a slam dunk for the Democrats only a fortnight or so ago, and now it doesn't. Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, the Democrat, is still the betting favorite (for people who do that sort of thing), but his double-digit lead in the public-opinion polls has been cut in half.
New ideas sell better than old, and the trendy idea at the moment, the equivalent of that aroma that comes with new cars, is climate change. Or more precisely, global warming. (New labels are prescribed for fads getting soggy around the edges.) Then along came Donald Trump, who was unafraid to ask the simple question that Al Gore and his anvil chorus dreaded someone asking: Is the current view of how climate works actually accurate? The next generation deserves an honest answer.
The Democrats pretend to be the party that knows all about high tech. But some of them would get lost on a leisurely Sunday-afternoon drive through Silicon Valley. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, whom the Great Mentioner has suggested for consideration as the Democratic nominee for president, circa 2020, has inserted a couple of provisions into the National Defense Authorization Act which, if enacted, would put in jeopardy just about every Pentagon computer system and leave the country less safe, but — and here's why the Warren mischief is so attractive to Democrats — make the bureaucracy much bigger.
Canada is experiencing a sharp surge of illegal aliens, and they're not just a few angry Hillary voters making good on their bluster about moving north if Donald Trump won the election.
There's something that doesn't love a wall, wrote the poet Robert Frost, and that something for the moment is comprised of Democrats. President Trump's long-promised wall along the U.S. border with Mexico is slowly rising from the desert floor and his noisy political opponents are mounting a campaign to bring it down.
The deal between Mahmoud Abbas' Palestinian Authority on the West Bank and Hamas in the old Gaza Strip is considerably less valuable than it looks. Although Mr. Abbas' West Bank authority will assume civilian responsibilities there, Hamas will remain in control of security, and will neither lay down its weapons nor dismantle its security forces and militias. Hamas has received arms from Iran in the past and now threatens the entire region.
You have to give a little to get a little. That's the art of the deal. But when Barack Obama bargained with Iran's mullahs over their nuclear program, he gave away the store — including the cash drawer — and only got a little time in return before the advent of the Islamic bomb. Buying peril on the lay-away plan does the world no favors. President Trump calls it "the worst deal ever negotiated," and he wants to alter it. To act in the interest of the United States, after all, is his sworn duty as president and commander in chief.
These are not happy times for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which doesn't have a lot to do with the South, poverty or the law, and it thrives far from the center of the political spectrum. The center is mostly a cash machine, and it has raised hundreds of millions of dollars, mostly from well-meaning but gullible liberals — "progressives" in the current argot — in the name of fighting injustice and hate. Lately it has been called out as a hate group itself.
Not so long ago, President Trump's new guidelines for the Department of Health and Human Services for protecting freedom of religious faith would have been superfluous and unnecessary. A casual observer might have read them in puzzlement, as if the government had reaffirmed its opposition to robbery or murder.
