It’s wrong to characterize the last couple of months as a loss for DeSantis. His book was a success, and he’s in the process of racking up an impressive string series of victories during the current session of the Florida legislature.

The hens and Uncle Tony and Otis and the hog and the frenzied woodpeckers wouldn’t have appeared in the suburbs where I spent some of my formative years. Back then nature meant keeping your yard mowed to a level that approximated those of properties up and down the street. Anything else meant you just didn’t quite fit in.

The cure to lawlessness is not to indulge the lawbreakers by justifying or seeking to explain their behavior. It is to enforce the law. Doing so serves to tell others there are consequences for illegal behavior and justice will be swift and certain.

New Yorkers should thank Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan for helping (unwittingly) remind the country how safe their metro area is compared to his own.

A strict lock-’em-up, law-and-order approach has its place, but so does the helping-hand, summer jobs approach that tackles the root causes of crime and aimlessness among young people most likely to slip over the edge into crime.

Republicans at the national level, right now, are scared. You can hear it in their silence on the issue of abortion after a district judge in Texas struck down the FDA approval of the abortion pill mifepristone. That decision also came immediately after Republicans lost a key race for a Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin to a progressive jurist who ran, to a large extent, on abortion.

Remember how conservatives used to decry “judicial activism?”? As I recall, that was before they began to see an advantage in some judicial activism of their own.

When a train goes off the tracks between Jackman and Rockwood, it harms the fish and the rest of the environment. In East Palestine, Ohio, it harms all the people, too.