Issues

Tariffs are controversial – people disagree over whether they do good or harm.  I don’t know who’s right or wrong. But the way Trump saw it Canada was sapping our economy, so after he was reelected he put tariffs on Canada to fix the problem. An odd thing happened. Canada ran a TV ad in…

During Prohibition, Al Capone was the most notorious New York tough guy. He didn’t grasp fame until after he moved to Chicago. But in those days no one matched him. In the 1950’s, during the Army–McCarthy hearings, another New York tough guy, a lawyer, Roy Cohn, sitting beside Fightin’ Joe McCarthy pilloried witnesses. McCarthy fumbled.…

Kristi Noem’s spending $172 million to buy two small, luxury private jets. For Noem and her department heads to fly around in. Stop a moment, mull that over: We’re drowning in debt – $37.8 trillion in debt. And adding more debt – $1.8 trillion more – each year. But we’re spending $172 million to buy…

Hard face, narrow eyes, Tom Homan looks tough. The day Trump took office he gave Homan a nickname: The ‘Border Czar,’ put him in charge of ICE. A cloud floated over the horizon. Down the street from the White House, in the Justice Department, Trump Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove found out the FBI was…

Growing up in Brooklyn, after college she worked two years in New York City, then went to law school – working for Ken Starr during the Clinton scandal she deposed Monica Lewinsky. She married, settling in Portland – George Bush made her a U.S. Attorney. Dark-haired, practical, leading prosecutors, sitting in courtrooms she made it…

An old man sitting at home in his apartment at night heard explosions, voices shouting in the hallway; soldiers wearing combat fatigues broke down his door, surrounded him, handcuffed him using zip-ties – only it turned out they weren’t soldiers they were ICE agents. He told them he was an American citizen – puzzled, asked…

‘There is nothing new under the sun.’ Was Solomon right when he said that? Does history repeat itself? After ruling Washington for a generation, from the Civil War through the Gilded Age, in 1884 Republicans ran James Blaine – the epitome of a Washington insider – for President. Democrat Grover Cleveland grabbed an issue he…

It came as a surprise. Followed by another surprise. Saturday, Trump posted on Truth Social the FBI had placed 274 agents in the crowd on January 6 who were ‘probably acting as agitators and insurrectionists’ – laying the blame for the riot on the FBI. What happened next was a bigger surprise: The same day,…