Ranked-choice voting does not favor Republicans or Democrats. It does help independents, moderates and third-party candidates. That might be why both major parties are uncomfortable with it. The major parties might lose seats to candidates who do not tow a hard left-leaning or hard right-leaning party line, i.e. candidates who would be more willing to […]
Op-Eds
Posted inOp-Eds, sj-web
How did we ever forget this song?
It’s like listening to a song you used to know. It’s an old sweet song, a hymn of hope and possibility. It’s a tune you haven’t heard in far too long. That’s how it is when Rev. Dr. William Barber speaks morality. It’s not just that Barber, pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, N.C., […]
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President Trump plays into the hands of Iran's hardliners
NEW YORK — Jeb Bush said Donald Trump would be a “chaos president.” And this week, Trump lived up to the billing, choosing to defy virtually the entire world, including America’s closest European allies, and raising tensions in the most unstable part of the globe, the Middle East. It is hard to understand the rationale […]
Posted inOp-Eds, sj-web
Triumph of the bean counters
“So, what is the bottom line?” You’ve heard the question a hundred times. Or more. At the end of that sentence, it is clear that the speaker is interested in one thing. Only one thing. How much money did it make (or lose)? This is the ultimate triumph of the bean counters, the accountants who […]
Posted inOp-Eds, sj-web
Trump's trade showdown brings great risk
WASHINGTON — It must be obvious to almost everyone by now that the Trump administration’s trade policies, though involving less melodrama than relations with North Korea and Iran, threaten to do enormous harm to America’s foreign policy — and to the United States. I use the word “threaten,” because we don’t yet know whether President […]
Posted inOp-Eds, sj-web
Freeing predators to bilk little people hurts everyone
The most vivid takeaway from the financial meltdown of 10 years ago was that nearly everyone got hurt. Stock investors took a beating. People who had carefully set aside money for retirement saw a third of their savings vanish. Consumer spending collapsed, pushing two of the Big Three U.S. car companies to the edge of […]
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Gina Haspel is too qualified to pass up
WASHINGTON — It was one of the Clinton administration’s biggest counterterrorism successes. Just weeks after al-Qaida terrorists trained by Iran blew up U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, Gina Haspel’s phone rang in the middle of the night. She was in her final weeks as station chief in what the CIA describes as […]
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Good riddance to the flawed Iran deal
The Trump Administration deserves thanks and congratulations for terminating American participation in the toothless Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action, the ostentatiously official name of the Obama Administration’s “nuclear weapons deal” with Iran’s clerical dictatorship. For numerous reasons, President Trump made the decision to exit the flimsy pact. “We’re out of the deal,” Trump National Security […]
Posted inOp-Eds, sj-web
Have Trump supporters gotten tired of him?
The “wall of protection” conservative media has erected around President Trump may be crumbling. Fox News Channel, whose opinion programs — especially Sean Hannity’s — have been staunch defenders (some critics say mouthpieces) for the president, and The Wall Street Journal, which editorially has been generally supportive of the president’s policies, last week went on […]
Posted inOp-Eds, sj-web
Reality and the future of information
“If Reality Is Altered, What Can We Believe In?” In 1994, that was the headline of the first column I ever wrote about the manipulation of images and words — digital lies that made it difficult to know what was really real. Small wonder, I said, we were a nation “paralyzed by cynicism.” Twenty-four years […]