You may trust that Evan Halper is in his own personal hell right now. It’s a place to which all good journalists go when they make mistakes. Which is to say, it’s a place to which all good journalists eventually go. If the error is relatively small, one may spend a day there. If one makes ...

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has impressive credentials: He graduated third in his class from Los Amigos High School in California’s Orange County before winning an appointment from his congressman — “B-1 Bob” Dornan, a conservative remembered for his unstinting support for the ...

We don’t care. You can check Pew or Gallup or any other polling company. We are running deficits that ought to make us nauseated with worry — the federal deficit passed $1 trillion in September — but we’re not interested. Well, a majority of us anyway. About 48% of those polled by Pew ...

It’s time for the annual congressional fight over the Renewable Fuel Standard, or RFS. In one corner sit corn farmers and their representatives, who fight tenaciously not just to preserve the RFS but to expand it. In the other sits, well, just about everyone else. Whether you are a refiner, a ...

I’m here to offer you an action list. With last week’s balloting behind us, we now have just less than a year before one of the most momentous elections in American history. As voters in 1860 had to decide between Union and secession, we face a stark choice of our own: America or Trump. ...

“Every generation blames the one before.” — Mike + The Mechanics So I guess “OK Boomer” is a thing now. And I gather I’m supposed to be offended by it. Certainly, some people seem to be. The saying — a dismissive eye roll from Generation Z to their elders — is suddenly all ...

Here’s a parlor trick: How many people can you name who were in favor of impeaching William J. Clinton and also favor impeaching Donald J. Trump? Or flip it: How many opposed Clinton’s impeachment at the time and now also oppose Trump’s? Of the 14 House impeachment managers in the ...

It may be too much. And also too little. Meaning last week’s announcement by Twitter that it is banning all political advertising over concerns that the medium gives politicians too much reach, too much power to deceive. News of the ban, which takes effect later this month, comes as that ...

Last Sunday, former Vice President Joe Biden attended 9 a.m. Mass at Saint Anthony Catholic Church in Florence, S.C. He was in the state for his presidential campaign, but this early morning visit was reportedly intended as personal time, without journalists in tow. It didn’t remain private ...

They let Donald Trump out of his bubble Sunday. It did not go well. Granted, every president lives in a bubble, due to security concerns. But Trump lives in a bubble within a bubble, one that has less to do with protecting him from assassins than with protecting him from reality. That’s why ...

Washington — In the rush of the passing seasons, sports memories fade like photographs left in sunlight. But before memories of the 2019 World Series are bleached by time, let us hope that one episode from Tuesday’s sixth game will be indelible. A nation that now more than ever needs a ...

The 1994 funeral of former Speaker of the House Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill was truly memorable. To the same North Cambridge, Mass., church, St. John the Evangelist — where O’Neill was baptized as an infant and had married his beloved Millie — came two former U.S. presidents, George ...

Washington — Making predictions about the Middle East is probably a fool’s game, but consider this possibility: The hyper-radicalism represented by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi may have crested. His brutal effort to build a caliphate has left behind only a pile of ashes, and many young Muslims seem ...

Washington — It has always struck me as strange that a narrative about genocide — Noah and the ark — should be employed as a children’s story. As the other boys and girls in Sunday school focused on the cuteness of the rescued animals, I remember thinking about the mass of humanity ...

During the last impeachment, the Latin expression coitus interruptus got a workout. This time, it’s quid pro quo. Republicans lashed themselves to this mast when the White House’s own rough transcript of the Donald Trump/Volodymyr Zelensky call was disclosed. That document, so damaging that ...

Washington — As the 2020 election comes into sharper focus, one issue that seems to animate both sides — the Supreme Court — is once again taking center stage. In 2016, Republicans swept Donald Trump into office largely on the promise of nominating conservative-originalist justices. Exit ...

Women are not the problem. There has always been something grotesque about the idea that they are. But to embrace that idea in the #MeToo era is not just grotesque, but clueless. It suggests that you slept through a reckoning that has shifted the Zeitgeist. So somebody please tell Ernst & ...

Washington — There are political moments, and this might be one, in which worse is better. Moments, that is, when a society’s per capita quantity of conspicuous stupidity is so high and public manners are so low that a critical mass of people are jolted into saying “enough, already.” ...

Washington — Sometimes idiocy is a form of confession. With the storming of a secure hearing room, Donald Trump’s strongest supporters in the House essentially admitted their cupboard of personal dignity and rational arguments to be bare. What remains is cheap theatricality and a ...

Washington — It’s heretical to say so, but Russia has earned its current success in the Middle East. It’s using the same mix of military and diplomatic tools that made the United States dominant in the region for so many decades. America didn’t lose this battle for influence; it ...