Washington — One of the assumptions that economists sometimes use to frame their models is to specify that some variables will be held constant, a concept that’s expressed with the Latin phrase ceteris paribus. We often make the same mistake in politics and foreign policy. We concentrate ...
Miami — Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) had the best line when it comes to the latest Florida election in which contests for governor and the U.S. Senate are still undecided. Rubio tweeted: “Bay County was hit by a Cat 4 Hurricane just 4 weeks ago, yet managed to count votes & submit timely ...
Washington — Those of us who participated in the 2000 presidential election are getting political PTSD from the current gubernatorial and senatorial recounts in Florida. President George W. Bush was eventually declared winner in the Sunshine State (and, thus, the election) by 537 votes out of ...
The Greek philosopher Heraclitus taught us that “character is destiny.” Nowhere is character more apparent than in how one responds to adversity. After the failed U.S.-organized invasion of Fidel Castro’s Cuba, President John F. Kennedy rightly took responsibility: “Victory has 1,000 ...
Austin, Texas — A conference here to gather American business and military experts to discuss the coming revolution in artificial intelligence was a good Election-Day measure of the challenges ahead to maintain the U.S. competitive edge. Corporate and government leaders agree that China’s ...
The midterm elections proved one thing definitively: We are a deeply divided country. Though the Democrats’ victory in flipping the House of Representatives was significant, it might have been even bigger had President Donald Trump not been able to use the caravan of Central American migrants ...
“The fact that a man is a newspaper reporter is evidence of some flaw in character.” — Lyndon Johnson “They are a sort of assassins...” — John Quincy Adams “I look forward to these confrontations with the press to kind of balance up the nice and pleasant things that come to me ...
Washington — In the previous 50 years, the state of Mississippi has validated Lord Tennyson’s belief that “men may rise on stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things.” Now the state has asked the U.S. Supreme Court for 20 more days to provide the court with a defense of the ...
Washington — In the spirit of the political season, I want to claim credit for the most STUPENDOUS, INSIGHTFUL and POWERFUL political strategy since Pericles bound the DELIAN LEAGUE into an empire to resist THE PERSIANS. I urged voters to support reasonable Republican candidates in the ...
We are about to find out whether Democrats meant it when they lamented the loss of civility in Washington. Having won the majority in the House of Representatives in Tuesday’s election, will they cooperate with Republicans and “reach across the aisle,” or will they pander to their base, ...
Washington — What would the ghosts of 1918 — not just the soldiers who were slaughtered in the trenches of World War I, but the statesmen who failed to make a durable peace afterward — tell politicians a century later about the perilous world we inhabit today? Ruminations about past and ...
You can’t always get what you want. So said the philosopher Mick Jagger. He said it in 1969, so obviously, he didn’t intend it as a comment on the 2018 midterms. But progressives might be forgiven for thinking otherwise. After all, they wanted Andrew Gillum to become Florida’s first ...
Washington — America’s body politic has recently been scarred by excruciating political shingles, and 2018 campaigning was equivalent to acid reflux. But Tuesday’s elections indicated that some political antibodies are strengthening the nation’s immune system. Tuesday was, on balance, ...
George Mitchell, a former federal judge and Senate majority leader, was the chief negotiator of the Good Friday Agreement, which brought to a peaceable end 30 years of civil war in Northern Ireland. He was a kid from Waterville, Maine, whose father was the orphaned son of Irish immigrants and ...
In the days following the murder rampage at the Tree of Life synagogue, I received several expressions of grief from friends who are committed Christians. One included in her note a verse from John Donne: “No man is an island entire of itself ... any man’s death diminishes me, because I ...
Every student who knocks on my office door on Kent State’s campus has likely noticed the illustrated bumper sticker affixed right above the door handle. The drawing depicts an older white man of a certain age wearing a suit and glasses and holding a lit pipe. He looks to be of an earlier ...
“What are these politicians going to do for us?” A guy in Texas asked that question a few weeks back on “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee,” by way of explaining why he won’t be voting in the most important midterm election in modern American history. His words have been playing on an ...
Washington — Until last week it seemed that the Division 1 college basketball industry could produce nothing more risible than its pieties about cherishing the amateurism of the “student-athletes” who generate, but get mere crumbs of, the industry’s billions. Last week, however, a New ...
Washington — When President Trump issues an election-time order to send up to 15,000 troops to confront what many experts say is a nonexistent threat on the U.S.-Mexico border, what should Defense Secretary Jim Mattis do about it? Mattis’ answer, so far, has been to support the president ...
Rob Rogers is an editorial cartoonist who was fired in June after 25 years with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. His departure, he said, came after weeks of tension with a publisher who wanted a more pro-Trump stance. “We’re living in a very dark time,” Rogers told the local NPR station, ...