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Endless, unsolicited Trump rants in Canada

I’ve been back on Canada’s west coast for roughly five minutes, and already I’m trapped in the same boomer-induced fever dream that haunts American airports and Whole Foods checkout lines. It’s just endless, unsolicited Trump rants. How many times do innocent people minding their own business while standing within your general vicinity while out in public have to overhear you howling to your buddy about how you’re “totally not going to your timeshare on Florida/Arizona/Hawaii this year” because you’re taking a stand against Trump. They’re also talking like Trump is ...

Will Republicans own brewing budget calamity?

The federal budget remains a disaster, and for all the splashy talk of cost-cutting and tariff-driven revenue, Americans know it. Especially galling is that the latest fiscal wreckage is being overseen by an administration that promised business acumen and conservative restraint. Republicans are delivering the opposite: a self-inflicted destruction of wealth, rising interest rates, creeping inflation fears and an abandonment of even their usual pretense of fiscal discipline. The Cato Institute’s new national fiscal policy survey results confirm that Americans don’t trust ...

What taking Easter seriously recognizes

"That God, which ever lives and loves, One God, one law, one element, And one far-off divine event To which the whole creation moves.” — Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) When American colonists were oppressed by British monarchs, the word most frequently uttered in pamphlets, editorials and sermons was not “safety” or “taxes”; it was “freedom.” Yet, two intolerable acts of Parliament so assaulted personal freedom that they broke the bonds with the mother country. The first was the Stamp Act of 1765, which required colonists to have government stamps on all ...

Why truth matters in age of hate

April 18 is National Columnists Day. Because of this, I want to hold space for the writer in all of us. Don’t believe we are all writers? Just look at social media. Gone are the days when opinions were sequestered to dinner tables or written in letters to the editor. Public opinions are no longer reserved for professional newspaper columnists and television pundits. Now, everyday community members can write or record their opinions, thoughts and feelings in a blog, for a podcast or on social media. We are all commentators. Last weekend for the virtual Erma Bombeck Writers’ ...

Are we moving back to constitutional order?

It has been hard this past week, of tariffs applied worldwide on April 2 to tariffs suspended except for China on April 9, to avoid reflecting on how much trouble could have been avoided if economists, instead of talking about countries’ trade surpluses and trade deficits, had devised different words — say, “buyer-dominant” countries and “seller-dominant” countries. Perhaps in that case, President Donald Trump would not have been obsessed for the last 40 years by the notion that the United States is impoverished when it buys more from some country than that country buys ...

On Whitmer’s Oval Office visit

Kudos to Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. She managed to generate the most negatively iconic photo of a Democrat since Michael Dukakis wore a helmet atop a tank. Whitmer, long considered a promising presidential prospect by Democratic insiders, was at the White House to discuss state business. But when President Trump’s aides whisked her into the Oval Office, it was not for the planned one-on-one with the president, but for a photo op during which Trump signed (outrageous) executive orders targeting two perceived political enemies for criminal investigation. Realizing that she was in ...