In an environment where every day has felt like a month and almost every news cycle has something that the media consider a potentially administration-shaking disaster, we finally have something worthy of the perpetually screaming headlines — a national-security adviser getting fired under a haze of suspicion about his dealings with Russia. This is gobsmacking […]
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Lamenting those who don’t value information
“I love the poorly educated!” — Donald Trump “Think! It ain’t illegal yet.” — Funkadelic It’s time we talked about the most consequential political divide in this country. That divide is not between liberals and conservatives. Rather, it is between the ignorant and the informed, between those who have information and can extrapolate from it […]
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Bloomberg View: NATO members may have to take on larger roles
By Leonid Bershidsky U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis has delivered to America’s allies a message often heard during Donald Trump’s election campaign: Spend more on defense or expect the U.S. to “moderate its commitment to the alliance.” While European members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization have agreed, they won’t necessarily rush to meet U.S. […]
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Proposed changes to Medicare just unacceptable
Maine has a special connection to the New Deal of 1933, whose originator, Frances Perkins, spent much of her life as a part-time resident of Newcastle. The Roosevelt initiatives that Ms. Perkins, the first woman to serve as a member of a presidential cabinet, helped craft were the beginning of the most important social compact […]
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The case of the cover-up in search of a crime
WASHINGTON — It’s a Watergate-era cliche that the cover-up is always worse than the crime. In the Mike Flynn affair, we have the first recorded instance of a cover-up in the absence of a crime. Being covered up were the Dec. 29 phone calls between Flynn and the Russian ambassador to Washington. The presumed violation […]
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Forget the jobs, enjoy the Trump circus
NEW YORK — Let’s say you are a Trump voter, the kind we often hear about — an honest, hardworking American who put up with Donald Trump’s unusual behavior because you wanted a president who would stop playing Washington’s political games, bring a businessman’s obsession with action and results, and focus on the economy. How […]
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DeVos has a new direction for education
American public school students fall well behind students around the world in math and science proficiency. This is not debatable. According to the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, both cited in The New York Times in 2012, “Fourth- and eighth-grade students in the United States […]
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Stay calm; the 'satchel' has strict rules
WASHINGTON — By now a few million Americans have met “Rick,” the aide-de-camp who carries the nuclear “football” for President Trump, and Richard DeAgazio, a Mar-a-Lago club member who posted a selfie of the two on his Facebook page. The entire Saturday evening in Palm Beach, where Trump hosted Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on […]
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Trump's image fraying at the edges
Why does President Trump rush off weekend after weekend to his Mar-a-Lago palazzo in Florida? Because Mar-a-Lago is totally under his control. There he can play the prince, favoring a wedding party with a cameo or entertaining the Japanese prime minister in lavish Palm Beach style. Why does he also spend so much time in […]
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Donald Trump simply not fit to be president
NEW YORK — Let’s not mumble or whisper about the central issue facing our country: What is this democratic nation to do when the man serving as president of the United States plainly has no business being president of the United States? The Michael Flynn fiasco was the entirely predictable product of the indiscipline, deceit, […]