The Russians are like the devil. Each gets blamed (or credited) with more than they are responsible for. Intelligence officials recently went to Capitol Hill where, according to The Hill, “they briefed the House Intelligence Committee about Russia interfering in the presidential race in an effort to get Trump re-elected.” The initial presumption was that […]

Consider this a eulogy for competence. It’s an appreciation long overdue, but then, competence — the quality of being equal to the situation, of knowing what to do — was always easy to overlook. You learned to expect it, to take it for granted. Competence was not sexy. Another reason this eulogy is overdue is […]

Bernie Sanders may be on the verge of gaining an insurmountable lead in the Democratic nomination fight, but he’s not letting that get in the way of his socialist principles. Asked in a “60 Minutes” interview about old statements praising Fidel Castro’s supposed achievements in health care and education, Sanders stayed true to himself. “You […]

Mike Bloomberg was elected New York mayor two months after the outrage of Sept. 11, 2001. He took over a city reeling with grief and suffering economic losses tied to the terrorist attacks. Rather than lay off public workers who had performed gallantly in the crisis, he raised taxes on the well-to-do. The conservative media […]

You’d have thought she had thrown Bernie Sanders to his death from a tower of million-dollar bills. Actually, what film director Ava DuVernay tweeted on Saturday was just a mild rebuke: “I’m undecided. But I know this isn’t what I want.” She was responding to a Sanders tweet warning the Democratic and Republican establishments that, […]

A Feb. 22 ceremony in South Sudan’s capital, Juba, brought two enemies face to face. That’s one reason the ceremony may prove to be a major political step toward ending the country’s terrible six-year-long internal war. Terrible doesn’t adequately describe South Sudan’s war. The conflict, which still flickers, has killed an estimated 400,000 people, though […]

In 2016, candidate Donald Trump promised to repeal Obamacare and replace it with “something terrific.” The replacement never materialized. The repeal, however, had been making progress in a piece-by-piece fashion. President Trump has made a frontal assault on the Affordable Care Act by asking the U.S. Supreme Court to strike it down altogether. As it […]