The U.S. Department of Agriculture has come up with cheerful new labels for genetically modified foods. The bright green and yellow circles depict a happy sun, a winking smiley face or a verdant landscape stamped with the letters “BE,” for “bioengineered” — rather than the familiar “genetically modified” or “genetically engineered.” It’s a shame the […]
Op-Eds
Posted inOp-Eds, sj-web
Forming a circle. Again
As the old joke has it, if Democrats were to organize a firing squad, they would first form a circle. With almost everything going their way for the mid-term election and with the possibility of making Donald Trump a one-term president in 2020, Democrats may be circling up again. Their ability to snatch defeat from […]
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Congrats, Trump voters. You've been vindicated.
WASHINGTON — For those conservatives who voted for Donald Trump because of the Supreme Court, congratulations: You’ve been vindicated. Had Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election, she would have replaced the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia with a liberal jurist — giving the Supreme Court a left-wing activist majority for a generation. Because Trump won, […]
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An assault on meritocracy
LONDON — In recent weeks, you might have heard about two seemingly unrelated issues that are actually quite connected. In New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio signaled his desire to scrap the highly competitive exam for eight New York public high schools, including Stuyvesant, and began taking more limited steps to admit more black and […]
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Taxes — what do we pay?
There is a saying that two things cannot be avoided: death and taxes. Sometimes it feels as if we might experience “death by taxes.” However, we will leave the subject of death for another time. But, how many actually understand what or how much they pay in taxes? The most common discussion about taxes usually […]
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Yemen's seaport battle for food and the future
In fractious Yemen’s swirl of tribal, sectarian and proxy wars, two conflicts stand out: America’s drone and special operations war on al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula bases and personnel; and the much larger ethnic-sectarian war pitting Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia’s coalition against Shia Iran’s Houthis rebel proxy army. The Houthis belong to the Zaidi sect […]
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What Trump gets
In the 1950s, the great neo-conservative intellectual Irving Kristol acknowledged Joe McCarthy’s stark failings, but famously refused to take the side of his critics. “For there is one thing,” he wrote, “that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: He, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesman for American liberalism, they feel they know […]
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Ranked-choice and the instant-runoff tradition in small Maine towns
No doubt the best known and most historic feature of Maine elections last month was introduction of ranked-choice voting, making us the first in the nation to put it to the test in a statewide election. But the concept of “instant runoff” is actually deeply rooted in a more than 230-year-old practice in many local […]
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The return of Smoot-Hawley?
WASHINGTON — The ghost of Smoot-Hawley seems to haunt President Trump. You will recall that Smoot-Hawley was the sweeping tariff legislation that Congress passed and President Hoover signed in mid-1930. Most economists have exonerated the legislation as a major cause of the Great Depression, but it certainly didn’t help. It contributed to the deep economic […]
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2018 Analysis: Men suffer about 70 percent of fireworks injuries
In the eyes of many Americans, the Fourth of July is a day for parades, barbecues and, of course, fireworks. The tradition got its start at the beginning of our nation’s history after the Founding Fathers met in Philadelphia to write and sign the Declaration of Independence. A day after the Continental Congress adopted the […]