WASHINGTON — The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is dead, but could it have an afterlife? Maybe. Among President Donald Trump’s first acts was an order withdrawing from the TPP. This fulfilled Trump’s campaign promise to torpedo the high-profile agreement between the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim countries, led by Japan and Mexico. As important, […]
Op-Eds
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Trump must learn to answer to the people
Dear Mr. So-Called President: So let me explain to you how this works. You were elected as chief executive of the United States. I won’t belabor the fact that you won with a minority of the popular vote and a little help from your friends, FBI Director James Comey and Russian President Vladimir Putin. The […]
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Small aircraft carriers Navy’s best bet
The U.S. Navy may be on the verge of a light aircraft carrier renaissance. New technology spurs the revival, both new smart weapons in the arsenals of potential military adversaries and new American weapons systems, the USMC F-35B strike fighter being the most pertinent example. The issue is complex, so the back-story here is particularly […]
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GOP should learn from Democrats' mistakes
It’s beginning to look a lot like August 2009 in reverse. In that summer of the Tea Party, conservative activists packed the town-hall meetings of Democratic congressmen and peppered them with hostile questions. It was an early sign of the abiding opposition that Obamacare would encounter, and the prelude to Democratic defeats in 2010, 2014 […]
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Can't anybody here play this game?
Sooner or later in any administration, Casey Stengel comes to mind. The great Yankee manager, ending his career with the then-hapless New York Mets, looked down the dugout one dismal day in 1962 and asked, “Can’t anybody here play this game?” The answer for the Mets was no. It is the same now for the […]
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Trump might not last even two years
WASHINGTON — Good news: In two years, we’ll have a new president. Bad news: If we make it that long. My “good” prediction is based on the Law of the Pendulum. Enough Americans, including most independent voters, will be so ready to shed Donald Trump and his little shop of horrors that the 2018 midterm […]
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History provides evidence that walls work
“You must always leave the wall” — “The Fantasticks” While the debate continues about when, how quickly and who will pay for a “wall” across America’s Southern border, at least one country known for its liberal politics is offering a lesson. The “City of Light,” Paris, France, has decided to spend 20 million euros ($22 […]
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Are we safe yet? The answer's complicated
Comes now Timothy Geithner, treasury secretary from 2009 to 2013, to tell you that much of what you “know” about Dodd-Frank — Congress’s response to the 2008-2009 financial crisis — is wrong. It’s a timely review because the Trump administration is promising to overhaul the law. The title of Geithner’s essay, carried in the current […]
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Borrowing from Abe may be right move
I have occasionally been accused of metaphorically hugging Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, but so far I’ve never had the chance to do so in literal terms. Not so Donald Trump, who gave a brotherly hug to the Japanese leader at a meeting at the White House on Friday. But I hope that in addition […]
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Liberals right to fear Sessions, Gorsuch
WASHINGTON — When Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell silenced Elizabeth Warren last week as she was reading Coretta Scott King’s 1986 letter denouncing Jeff Sessions, he jogged the memory of another Massachusetts Democrat, Rep. William Keating. “I went to bed that evening seeing what was occurring,” Keating said in an interview, “and when I woke […]