I would like to respond to the recent letters to the editor in the Sun Journal regarding the Greater LA Triple Crown 5K Series and our decision to use something other than bottled water for our events. I would first like to acknowledge that Poland Spring Bottling Co. has been incredibly generous in their support […]
Op-Eds
Posted inOp-Eds, sj-web
Questions remain about Sept. 11 Saudi role
Formerly classified, 28 pages of a probe into the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks are a mystery no longer. Their release 14 years after Congress made the rest of its report public was supposed to end suspicions of an official Saudi role in the horror. It did not. Nearly 15 years has passed since terrorists weaponized […]
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Trump doesn’t have plausible program
WASHINGTON — The Republican National Convention in Cleveland this week ought to be interesting, but whether it will be informative is another question. Barring a last-minute surprise, the delegates will nominate real estate magnate Donald Trump to be the GOP presidential candidate, and he will pledge — probably repeatedly — to “make America great again.” […]
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Republicans have lost their heritage
The Republican Party came to life as the bastion of “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Speech, Free Men.” It was a reformist party dedicated to stopping the spread of slavery and to fighting a “Slave Power” its founders saw as undermining free institutions. The new political organization grew out of the old Whigs and reflected […]
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Obama offers dishonest characterizations about police actions
President Barack Obama is a lawyer, not a statistician, and it shows. After the controversial officer-involved shootings in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Falcon Heights, Minnesota, Obama unloosed a series of statistics in his remarks in Warsaw, Poland, to show “racial disparities that exist in our criminal justice system” — in other words, racial bias by […]
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Some places deserve to be respected
Here’s something I never thought I’d have to say. People should not play Pokemon at Auschwitz. Nor at the Sept. 11 memorial in New York City, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, or Arlington National Cemetery. You would think this obvious, but apparently it isn’t. According to reports, people have been playing the […]
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Obama’s Whac-A-Mole strategy
NEW YORK — It has become conventional wisdom to note that Barack Obama has failed in his efforts to extricate America from military conflicts in the Middle East. Having promised to end these wars, he has in the last year expanded American interventions in Iraq, Syria and other countries. The troop drawdown in Afghanistan has […]
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NATO’s response to Russia a case of too little, too late
WASHINGTON — “The most significant reinforcement of our collective defense any time since the Cold War,” President Obama called it. A bit of an exaggeration, perhaps, but it was still an achievement: Last week’s NATO summit in Warsaw ordered the deployment of troops to Eastern Europe, the alliance’s most serious response yet to Russia’s aggression […]
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Democrats, Republicans must change the narrative on guns
On June 13, the day after the greatest mass shooting in this nation’s history, I issued a deeply personal statement in my public capacity as chairman of the Maine Democratic Party. It would be a perverse exercise to attempt to quantify the relative horror of such astonishing acts of violence. But on that occasion, my […]
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Realize the humanity of all citizens
A lone Dallas sniper. A nation reels in shock. It is unimaginable, surreal that 12 policemen, charged with keeping the peace during a peaceful rally, are viciously gunned down. Words fail to describe the helplessness and sickened horror of a nation’s people. We hear the list of victims’ names read, and their photographs and stories […]