Breaking News

Trump v the Pope

As far as showdowns between popes and secular leaders go, President Trump versus Pope LEO hardly rates. LEO hasn't forced Trump to come see him and stand for three days in the snow, the way Pope Gregory VII did to Henry IV, the Holy Roman Emperor, in 1077. Nor has he issued an interdict, a ...

Trump is turning Iran into an anti-globalist superpower

If Team Trump has dragged itself to the negotiating table with Iran, it's not because the U.S. is winning this war. One side of these talks features top Iranian brass. The other, two real estate agents (Steve Witkoff and Jared "Gaza Riviera" Kushner), Vice President JD Vance who's fresh off ...

Subsidies keep America on top

That $7,500 tax credit to buy an electric vehicle, now gone, was a "grotesque misallocation of federal spending." It was a form of "rent-seeking," whereby companies seek "to dominate the bureaucracy instead of the marketplace." Thus wrote Kyle Smith in a Wall Street Journal column titled ...

Pope vs. President is a fight everyone loses

President Trump and Pope Leo are in a war of words right now -- when they should be allies, not enemies. Both want peace, but the president intends to get it by winning a war against Iran, while the pope thinks the war isn't worth fighting. "I don't want a Pope who thinks it's OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon," Trump said Sunday on his Truth social-media network, in a post blasting the pontiff as "weak on crime and terrible for foreign policy." With midterm elections just seven months away, Catholic voters suddenly find themselves in the crossfire between the Vatican and the ...

How to reverse societal decline

Retail stores locking up items is the symptom of a much larger problem. I recently went to Walmart and had ibuprofen on my shopping list. I went to the medicine section and -- groan -- saw this $5 item locked behind glass. There were a couple of other people already waiting, so I looked around for a call button. That's when one of the people waiting said an employee was already helping them, but needed to get more boxes. I was utterly confused. One of the waiting customers remarked that he was from Florida and that stores there didn't have items behind locked glass. What a ...

San Francisco’s latest radical experiment

San Francisco, a city long associated with exotic ideas, has been experimenting with a radical notion -- cracking down on car thieves. Unlike some of the city's other adventures, this one is actually working out. Car break-ins are down 85% from 2023, and are down 50% the first three ...