Trump Has Gotten Bored With Venezuela
This is a helluva headline: It doesn’t say that Trump has “changed his strategy” or “lost faith in the opposition” or anything like that. It just says that he figured it would be easy peasy to get everyone to cave in to his bluster, and it wasn’t—so he doesn’t care anymore. And of course he…
Why Is Donald Trump Hellbent on Dismantling OPM?
Last year the Trump administration unveiled its plan to reorganize government. I think every president puts together a plan like this, and it was the usual collection of good ideas, bad ideas, and fantasies that would never get through Congress. One of the proposals was to reorganize the Office of Personnel Management. Part of this…
Raw Data: Here’s What the Trump Tariffs Are Costing You
Here are quarterly tariff receipts over the past few years: Tariffs normally run about $40 billion per quarter. In the latest quarter, thanks to Trump’s tariffs, that was $35 billion higher. This amounts to $140 billion per year. These tariffs are paid by US companies that import goods and are then passed along to consumers…
Joe Biden’s White Privilege
Michael Brochstein/ZUMA On Tuesday night, former Vice President Joe Biden told a room full of wealthy New York donors about the good old days. When he first arrived in the Senate in the 1970s, Biden recalled, he joined a Democratic caucus that included staunch segregationists, such as Herman Talmadge of Georgia and James Eastland of…
How Is California Doing? Really?
Typhus is on the rise in California, and this has prompted Victor Davis Hanson to conclude that California is now a third-world country: If someone predicted half a century ago that a Los Angeles police station or indeed L.A. City Hall would be in danger of periodic, flea-borne infectious typhus outbreaks, he would have been…
There Is No Such Thing as Clean Coal
The final version of President Trump’s jihad against clean power has been released: Under Trump, the Environmental Protection Agency has branded the rewrite as the Affordable Clean Energy rule and designed it to fulfill the president’s campaign promise to bring back the coal industry. This kind of Orwellian branding has been around for a long…