First he killed him. Now he’s suing him. I have no idea whether Robert Rialmo, the Chicago police officer who shot 19-year-old Quintonio LeGrier to death the day after Christmas, was justified in doing so. Certainly, the sequence of events Rialmo describes seems to suggest he was within bounds when he opened fire. According to […]
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Bernie, Hillary share gloomy outlook
Watching last Thursday’s debate between Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders one might have thought a Republican had been in the White House for nearly eight years. Hearing their complaints about the economy (bad), discrimination (rampant), health care (too many without it), unemployment (too many not working, or working at low-paying jobs), […]
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GOP governors gang up on Rubio at debate
GOFFSTOWN, N.H. — There was a time when Republican governors were not all that different from Democratic governors. The politicians from both parties who ran the states tended to be a pragmatic lot. They were pro-business because they wanted their people to have jobs but they championed government spending in the areas that contribute to […]
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False charms of Sanders’ single-payer
WASHINGTON — Could Bernie Sanders’ “Medicare for all” proposal — national health insurance — be as good as he says? It’s doubtful. No one claims that today’s system is ideal. It’s complex, confusing, costly and incomplete. Even after the Affordable Care Act, about 30 million people remain uninsured. To hear Sanders tell it, his single-payer […]
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Lessons to be learned, courtesy of Trump
Donald Trump’s loss in Iowa wasn’t just a victory for conservatives, but a loss for the mogul’s routinely low and dishonest style of campaigning. There was nothing subtle about his disgraceful attacks on Ted Cruz’s eligibility to run for president, although Trump at times tried to wrap them in a hilariously transparent tissue of concern […]
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Sitcoms influence how people think
So it turns out sitcoms can erase bigotry. That’s the bottom line of a study recently presented before a conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. And it doesn’t even have to be a particularly good sitcom. To judge, at least, from a screening of its first two episodes, the Canadian sitcom on […]
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Cheap oil makes for perilous politics
NEW YORK — One of Donald Trump’s stock campaign lines is that the Iran nuclear agreement was “terrible.” I’m beginning to wonder if that’s true, but in a sense opposite of what he means. Iran has ended up with a much worse deal than it expected. Remember, Tehran entered the negotiations in the heady days […]
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Put an end to the ‘establishment’ nonsense
WASHINGTON — The reigning idiocy of the current political season is the incessant tossing around of “establishment,” an epithet now descending into meaninglessness. Its most recent abuse is by Donald Trump supporters rationalizing his Iowa defeat with the following consolation: If you tally up Trump and Ted Cruz (and throw in Ben Carson), a whopping […]
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Invasion of Muslims a threat to U.S.
Just as radar warns of approaching storms, so does the flood of migrants entering Europe warn us of a deluge yet to come, not only for Europeans, if they continue to allow unrestricted immigration, but for the United States. Reports that women in Cologne, Germany, have been groped and robbed by men described by authorities […]
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Depression a tough challenge for boys
The United States faces many crises. Yet, despite what are becoming ongoing national dialogues on mental health, education and gender equality, the ways these crises intersect is rarely discussed. Specifically, more must be done to recognize and rebel against the ways boys’ and men’s conditioning toward self-reliance and toughness of character compounds the pain of […]