Who are the poor? I would define the poor as those who must take a disproportionate part of their regular income – wages, food stamps (SNAP), financial assistance (TANF), etc. – to purchase basic necessities for their families. Basic necessities would be defined as food, housing and transportation. Politicians love to talk, especially in print […]

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s latest foray into trade policy is notable for its economic recklessness (it could tip Mexico into a recession, followed perhaps by the United States), its gratuitous insults of a close ally (Mexico) and its rank opportunism (it would shift power to the White House from Congress). For anyone who missed Trump’s […]

Breaking news: Some guy posted a doctored video of Nancy Pelosi. But fear not. The website The Daily Beast sprang into action. It tracked down the random, Trump-supporting man who allegedly posted the offending clip, hounded him until he talked, then published his name and other details about his life in a shocking instance of […]

Many pundits have this unfortunate habit of framing what they want as what the American people want. I’ve been guilty of this at times. After all, what is more gratifying than the idea that the American masses are marching behind your band? Similarly, some left-leaning writers are insisting that the great majority of Democrats wants […]

Elmo Cook knew nothing about it. He had heard the sirens in the middle of the night alerting all of Abilene that something had happened, but when he tried to turn on the radio, he found that his power was out. And when he left for work in the morning, the paperboy had not yet […]

WASHINGTON — President Trump is understandably frustrated by the crisis at the border. Anyone who watched the video of more than 1,000 illegal migrants sneaking through a hole in a fence near El Paso, Texas — the largest single breach of our border ever recorded — and still says we don’t need a border wall […]

It’s a familiar quote from Charles Dickens’ classic “Oliver Twist,” but with special contemporary relevance in light of a statement last week by Special Counsel Robert Mueller: “‘If the law supposes that,’ said Mr. Bumble… ‘the law is a ass — a idiot.’” But it isn’t so much that the law is fractured, rather it […]

That was a pretty stunning story about the White House asking some Navy officials to move the warship USS John McCain “out of sight” during President Donald Trump’s recent visit to Japan. The obvious fear was that sharing any stage with the war hero would unhinge the president. McCain died last August from brain cancer. […]

In the end, by-the-book Robert Mueller departed wildly from the book. He invented an extraconstitutional legal standard for his obstruction investigation and acted, at best, in violation of the spirit of the special-counsel regulations. His departing act was a public statement meant to influence the public debate in a manner inappropriate for a prosecutor, in […]