Ours is not an age for reflection, patience and slow-dancing. Our age demands instant gratification. Sooner than that, if possible. Thus the slow-dancing in the latest exchange since the famous Singapore handshake, originating in a hand-carried letter to Pyongyang. The response came back in another hand-carried letter, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo continuing as postman.
Baseball is the reason God made summer. Summer stretches out with the solace and symmetry of a long fly ball to deep center field, climbing ever higher and hanging in the sky as if the afternoon could go on forever. Whether watching a ball game from a box seat on the third-base line or through a hole in the right-field fence, we could only wish it would.
Robert Mueller's indictments of 13 Russians for interfering in the 2016 presidential election is not the end of his investigation, nor was the announcement Friday an interim report on what he has found so far. President Trump's victory lap on Friday might prove to be premature, but nobody can rightly blame him for what sounds like the last laugh at accusations that he colluded with the Russians to defeat Hillary Clinton.
A policeman's lot is not a happy one, and these are miserable days for the FBI, stung by accusations that it bungled high-profile political investigations, and just when the legacy media was ready for an all-out assault on Donald Trump and guns for conducting the massacre of children in Florida the FBI is revealed to have ignored a tip that would likely have prevented unspeakable tragedy.
This week marked the 28th anniversary of the release of Nelson Mandela from prison. On Wednesday, one of Mr. Mandela's prison neighbors at Robben Island, Jacob Zuma, resigned as president of the country a year short of the term to which he was duly elected.
When is a slur a slur? We've become the apologetic society, mindlessly trading in regrets, amends and excuses, demanding pardons for often meaningless or unintended affronts and transgressions. An apology asked for is no apology at all, but this never occurs to the bruised snowflakes among us.
The Trump budget looks a lot like the budgets Barack Obama drew up. There's no way an economist with his head on straight would defend the indefensible maneuvering of Congress and the president over the past several days.
The Trump budget looks a lot like the budgets Barack Obama drew up. There's no way an economist with his head on straight would defend the indefensible maneuvering of Congress and the president over the past several days.
Nobody likes to get his picture took. Vanity, thy name is woman. (Shakespeare's observation was actually written as "frailty," but good luck with correcting it now.) Vanity is a curse not restricted to the ladies. You need look no further than the White House for proof of that.
A tumultuous year has passed since Vice President Mike Pence, as president of the Senate, cast the deciding vote to confirm Betsy DeVos as secretary of education.
If race-consciousness becomes an Olympic sport, and who can say it won't, the United States will have a lock on the gold medal. Silver and bronze, too. There's no escaping race obsession that thrives in every crevice, cleft, nook and cranny in America. A body can step on it unaware everywhere.
Costa Rica, proclaimed National Geographic magazine only last year, is "the happiest country in the world." It's certainly one of the most stable, but there's more. "Costa Ricans enjoy the pleasure of living daily life to the fullest in a place that mitigates stress and maximizes joy."
A judge in New York, where irreverence of everything is prized, once suggested that the grand jury system for bringing criminal indictments be abolished because district attorneys with a gift of glib gab can easily persuade grand jurors to "indict a ham sandwich."
What triggered the 2,000-point Dow Jones Industrials index sell-off on Friday and Monday was the positive jobs report. That's correct. Positive. Not only did employers hire 200,000 more workers during January, but the pay of the average worker rose by 3 percent after inflation. This was the biggest gain in wages in a decade. The labor market tightens.
Every time there's a threat of a government shutdown, a threat once rare but now not so rare, there's a discussion of who is so important that he is declared "essential" and who must show up for work, anyway.
The civic shakedown of the oil and gas producers continues, and the frenzy has spread to California. Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York started it in January when he said he would seek billions of dollars in reparations from five major companies, including Exxon, BP and Chevron.
Not so long ago the conventional capital wisdom, retailed wholesale by the pundit class, held that all that was necessary to replace the Republican Congress with a large, left-thinking Democratic Congress bent on revenge, was to count the votes. The liberal landslide was on the way.
Nobody likes torturing dogs, or even cats, and the Veterans Administration is under pressure to stop certain experiments. The opposition to the program is even bipartisan, which makes the legislation a rare animal in Washington, where even celebrating the decline in black unemployment is a celebration too far for rabidly partisan Democrats lest President Trump get credit for good fortune.
"Resistance" is highly popular in the salons of the Democratic left, but it's a dish best served hot inside the Democratic bubble. The dish does not travel well, and there appears scant appetite for it where happy people live.
If the waves of illegal immigrants wading the Rio Grande to get into the United States were likely to be Republican voters, as a wide-awake wise man observes, Chuck Schumer would be on the border now, laying bricks, and scolding Nancy Pelosi, his apprentice hod-carrier, to keep the mortar coming for President Trump's "big, beautiful" wall.
Anyone, even a Democrat reluctant to say so, can see that the economic state of the Union is pretty good. Unemployment is down in key sectors, including among blacks, where the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says the number is as low as it has been since the racial number was broken out in 1972. Businesses have committed to expansion, paying bonuses and raising wages because of — and they are specific about this — the Trump tax cuts.
Settling a grudge requires stamina, because it can take so long to resolve. Ronald Reagan established his reputation for being amiable but tough when necessary early in his administration, when he fired the entire air-traffic controllers' union in 1981 for trying to hold the nation's safety and security hostage in a dispute over a contract. Some Democrats have never forgiven him.
