Several months ago President Donald Trump “went postal” on Amazon, continuing his feud with Jeff Bezos, who is said to be the world’s richest man, and owner of The Washington Post, which the president frequently denounces as a fountain of fake news.
A crying child on the border, hugging his mother’s legs and begging not to be separated from her, breaks everybody’s heart (except those with a heart of stone). Such a child, in a newspaper photograph, or 30-second video on television or online, sweeps explanations, discussion and all else away.
Never throw anything away. You never know what might return to high fashion.
Human events sometimes seem to spill across the globe without rhyme or reason, but occasionally events converge in harmonic fashion, revealing a stunning opportunity.
Donald Trump's romance with Emmanuel Macron continued to blossom Tuesday when they planted a tree together on the White House lawn. The French president brought the sapling, a cutting from the European Sessile oak, with him from Paris.
Abad novelist couldn't make this up: American politicians who pretended to sing only from the hymnbook of peace now want to spoil the best opportunity in three generations to pacify the warmongers of North Korea, and turn back the tide of nuclear proliferation which threatens us all. Their fuzzy rationale is that the mover of the promising breakthrough is Donald Trump, and the imperative of his enemies to destroy his presidency must come first. Seldom have political differences become so untethered from the reality of the common good.
There's new interest in indexing the capital gains tax to account for inflation. This is something good for everyone that conservatives have been pushing for years. The White House is working now to determine whether the president has the legal authority to make this change in tax policy by his own hand. There's evidence that he can.
President Trump invited hoots of ridicule from the elites from coast to coast (though not so much from the Great Lakes to the Gulf) when he said "trade wars are good, and easy to win." Nevertheless, with trade tensions bubbling between the United States and the People's Republic of China, the Trump administration has notched a couple of significant triumphs. That's a good thing, because a rebalancing of the Sino-American trade relationship is all to the good.
The typical congressman just can't help himself. He's the grown-up kid who fished his daddy's credit card out of his pants pocket while Daddy slept, and he has been the big man on the high-school campus since. This lack of self-restraint was further demonstrated last week when a vote on a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution failed once more.
Critics know what's wrong with the European Union. It suffers from what they call a "democratic deficit." Democracy is often loud, usually messy and everyone gets a voice. This is inconvenient for the elites and the bureaucrats.
If Robert Mueller ever needs work, we would be happy to commend him to a school of journalism looking for a dean.
Life is not fair, as John F. Kennedy famously said, and sometimes it's not fair for everybody. The Arizona Supreme Court last week ruled that the "Dreamers," children brought to the United States by their illegal-immigrant parents, are not eligible for in-state tuition rates at Arizona's three state universities and at its network of community colleges.
The "world's oldest profession" it may be, but prostitution and human trafficking have moved briskly into the 21st century. The Internet is crowded with websites purveying sex for money.
"Nice guys finish last" is part of the lore of baseball, an insight by Hall of Fame player and manager Leo Durocher, but it could be the epitaph for the Washington career of Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House who is widely praised for civility and good manners. He announced Wednesday that he's fed up and going home.
Alas, these are not happy days for the fundamental civil rights we've always taken for granted in America.
Sadiq Khan is the mayor of London, who now sees the error of his earlier ways of enforcing the law. London is suffering a wave of murder, which is no stranger to Old Blighty, as fans of "Midsomer Murders" and other popular imported British television fare well know. But this murder in London is up close and personal, mayhem is often random, and there's getting to be more of it.
If the U.S. Navy appointed its first atheist chaplain, as the organized atheists demanded (twice), what could his duties as a chaplain be? Perhaps he could tell a sailor seeking spiritual solace in the face of death not to worry, he has no soul, anyway.
The judge who ruled the other day that coffee purveyors in California must put a cancer-risk warning label on their beans calls to mind the old joke about the man, getting a little long in the tooth, who was told by his doctor that he would have to give up wine, women and song. "But Doc," he replied, "if I have to give up wine and women, what will I have to sing about?"
President Trump is disgusted by his signature on the $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill he signed last month. He said so when he signed it. He noted, correctly, that the new law appropriates tens of billions of dollars of spending that the agencies don't need and even in some cases, don't want. (Who says bureaucrats can't push themselves away from the trough?)
Winnie Mandela, who died Monday at age 81 after a lengthy illness in her native South Africa, was different things to her family, to Africa and to the world. CNN described her as an "anti-apartheid crusader." The BBC called her an "anti-apartheid campaigner." Some newspapers described her merely as "controversial." The Rev. Jesse Jackson said she was the "face of hope and courage." For years after her husband's imprisonment she was the unfortunate face of a just cause. The kindest description was "the former wife of Nelson Mandela."
Californians have always lived with the fear that a really big rumble along the San Andreas fault, and there goes Hollywood's tinsel, San Francisco's templed hills and the wild northern California coast, sliding headlong into the Pacific.
The revolution, when it comes, won't be on television, to the disappointment of couch potatoes everywhere, but there's already "the resistance," which is on a channel near you. In the 14 months since Donald Trump became president, "resistance" programming has dominated the air waves, and cable and satellite, too.
