President Trump assures Americans regularly that he has a “great relationship” with an array of world figures, among them Xi Jinping of China and Kim Jong-un of North Korea. It’s comforting to hear. It would be more gratifying, though, to see these relationships bear fruit. Try as he might, the president has been stymied in his efforts to seal crucial deals with his Asian counterparts. Americans may be subject to creeping doubts, but there is no substitute for persistence.
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The silly season has arrived. Just as busy people are ready for a well-deserved break from midsummer’s heat and humidity, the foretellers of global warming have burst forth with warnings that without drastic action, there will be no escape. Climate is a common concern the year ‘round, but notions about preserving its natural balance track seem to rise with the temperature. The sensationalizing of heat waves and the disincentivizing of meat consumption as a cooling scheme are ideas of value for entertainment, but not for implementation.
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If your wallet has felt a little fatter recently, you're not alone. After a decade or so of stagnation, Americans' wages are finally starting to grow, and not a moment too soon. As of this spring, wages were growing at about 3.4 percent year over year — the highest rate in more than a decade. The grim post-Great Recession slog is finally over.
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The United States can't run on a shoestring, but even a king's ransom wouldn't suffice when there is little interest in fixing the hole in the nation's money pocket.
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Politics is sometimes a lot like high school, with its surfeit of backbiting, goofy, mean occasionally clever nicknames, and scrambling for popularity, but the latest cannonading of tweets and trivia between President Trump and "the Squad" is taking metaphor a bridge too far. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's feud with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her ladies, and now with the president, is a serious breach of how the government is supposed to work. The exchange demonstrates just how juvenile things have become on Capitol Hill.
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Democrats dissatisfied with the contents of the Mueller report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election can't seem to resist the temptation to pry off the lid of Pandora's box. Craving the key to impeaching President Trump, they risk the danger of refusing to let bad enough alone. Their obstinacy could ultimately serve the greater good they don't intend, giving Republicans a stage for exposing mischief unleashed by the Obama administration.
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Professional soccer has been banging on the American consciousness for decades, trying to win recognition as the equal of baseball, football and basketball in the public eye. The media elites have tut-tutted and clucked their tongues, lamenting the reality that American sports fans have not embraced professional soccer in the way of the rest of the world.
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Diplomacy isn't always diplomatic. Kim Darroch, late the British ambassador in Washington, had several choice things to say about what he thinks of President Trump, and now he's gone. He put his remarks in a cable (more correctly called a "cablegram") to London and a busybody in the Washington embassy or the Foreign Office in London leaked them to a London newspaper, the Mail on Sunday.
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Children may be our closest brush with heaven this side of eternity. Their innocent vulnerability reaches out to the rest of us for compassion and protection. That's why the cynical and the conniving wield them as the perfect tool to enhance political machinations. We're watching now the use of immigrant children from Central America to tug at heartstrings and break down common-sense respect for the secure borders that comprise the central pillar of national sovereignty. Compassion for the suffering of others, especially children, is a virtue. But irresponsibility posing as compassion for the plight of young illegal migrants eventually undermines the goodwill of millions of Americans.
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Beware of Greeks bearing false promises. That's the lesson of the end of the Syriza government in Athens, whose four years in power ended over the last weekend in a definitive general election.
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Politicking is about possibilities and promises, and President Trump used both in opening his bid for re-election. The most ambitious item in the category of "promises made, promises kept" is preparing astronauts for a trip to Mars.
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"Virtue-signaling" is a favorite sport on the rich left. Baseball, boxing and football are for sissies. Virtue-signaling is the current fad word for acting "holier than thou," perfected by creative liberals to publicly express feel-good sentiments to advertise a signaler's moral correctness.
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The executive suites of corporate America have been the source of a lot of bonehead mistakes. Some of those mistakes are famous (perhaps infamous to stockholders): New Coke, the AOL-Time Warner merger, the Blockbuster Video (remember them?) decision to turn down a profitable acquisition offer from Netflix. But Nike's capitulation to the new forces of political correctness sets a new standard of industrial-strength dumb.
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Summer has arrived and the heat is on, naturally. Some like it hot, but for those who don't, recalling the ache of last winter's frigid fingers and toes may ease the discomfort. It's smart to remember the atmospheric tribulations that blow hot and cold and resist the madding crowd, certain, like Chicken Little and climate-change hysterics, that the sky is falling. To do otherwise is to succumb to the well-established disease called "Weather Amnesia."
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The hallmarks of a functioning democracy are clear enough. Open elections, a free and unfettered media, an unbiased judiciary system. The most important is the guarantee that a citizen can write or speak his opinions, popular or not, without fear. The United States does well on open elections (despite the Russians), a free media (fake news aside), and an honest judiciary. On fearless free speech, not so much, or not as much as used to be.
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American medicine is the best in the world, so an ancient bit of wisdom goes, "just don't get sick." American medical innovations are unmatched anywhere in the world, and when the rich get really, really sick the United States is where they come. The politicians who keep trying to "fix" the system's shortcomings — and they're real — haven't yet managed to destroy the system. But they're coming close.
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Alek Sigley is that oddest of ducks, a fan of the misery of life in North Korea. Mr. Sigley, a 29-year-old Australian from Perth, is one of the few Westerners who makes his home in the totalitarian state. He is a graduate student at Kim Il-sung University. Mr. Sigley says he has long felt a fascination with socialism. He may be the only Australian resident of North Korea.
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The G-20 summit opens Friday to address issues important to the global economy, but for President Trump the world is not enough. He has special business on the side that could be more pivotal than the gathering's broad agenda. From China to Russia to Iran to the Koreas, the president's dealmaker checklist could boost or break his momentum as he prepares to meet the field of Democratic presidential contenders head-on.
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For much of the 19th and early-20th centuries, the state of Illinois was a powerful magnet. Between 1850 and 1900, the state's population grew five-fold, from 850,000 to more than 4.8 million. Some of that growth was attributable to natural population increase — big families were the rule then — but population growth was supercharged by both domestic and international migration.
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Tough words softened by gentle deeds are preferable to gentle words trampled by rough and reckless action. President Trump vows to begin deporting illegal immigrants by the millions, a campaign promise that helped elect him and may well do so again. He didn't invent the chaos on the border, but he is the first president to try to do something about it. The nation yearns for an equitable immigration system that enables the orderly entry of foreign nationals without infringing the rights of law-abiding Americans. There's nothing in the president's words or deeds that dash that wish.
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Forty-nine soldiers from "the Great War," as World War I was once known, can now "requiescat in pace." The people of Prince George's County, Maryland, can rest in peace, too. The U.S. Supreme Court liberated the Peace Cross in Bladensburg this week from the anger of vandals who wanted to evict the 40-foot-tall cross from its place of honor on a traffic roundabout, where it has commemorated the "valor, endurance, courage and devotion" of the heroic dead for nearly a century.
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President Trump is accused by his critics, enemies and assorted soreheads of being the most divisive president since, well, maybe Chester Alan Arthur, or somebody. Perhaps he is, but much of the record of his first three years suggests that sometimes divisiveness works. He puts on a good show, too. His opening rally this week in Orlando, Florida, was a raucous whopper.
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