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Trump toys with Supreme Court

President Trump downplayed Chief Justice John Roberts’s statement Tuesday in defense of the judiciary, but the President had better be careful. The White House strategy of bashing judges and jamming the Supreme Court could backfire in spectacular fashion. Guessing the thinking at the High Court is a fraught exercise. But if there’s one thing we’ve learned about the Chief Justice in his nearly two decades at the Court it’s that he hates being dragged into political fights. He prizes the reputation of the Court as a neutral arbiter of the law and protector of the ...

Education then versus now

How did I, my parents, grandparents and ancestors going back to the founding of the nation manage to get a decent education before the federal Department of Education (DOE) was created by Jimmy Carter and a Democratic Congress? Quite well, thank you. I went to a public school where the basics were taught - math, reading, U.S. history and science without a political agenda - and I graduated from college without help from the government. I paid back my small (by today’s standards) student loan. Tuition was cheaper then because government had not become involved in education to the ...

Bernie Sanders: good show, dicey politics

Bernie Sanders can draw a crowd. No doubt about it. And as Democrats continue to feel their way out of the Trumpian swamps, you can’t blame them for wanting to vent in large groups. Sanders has amassed them in Nebraska, Iowa and Arizona and has said things ripe for the political moment. Addressing President Donald Trump: “I’m not going to allow you and your friend Mr. Musk and the other billionaires to wreak havoc on the working families of this country.” Democrats can enjoy these words passionately spoken and in plain English, but they take real risks in making this ...

America being pushed off a cliff

Since it’s been over 70 years since Sen. Joseph McCarthy used his power as chairman of a Senate investigative committee to bully and crush citizens at his whim, the closest younger Americans can come to visualizing the truly thuggish abuse of power to destroy dissenters may come, of all places, from a popular musical. “Wicked,” which opened on Broadway in 2003 and has generated a vast new audience with a recent movie version, features a character named Dr. Dillamond, a teacher at Oz’s Shiz University. Dillamond, a goat, is arrested and taken away for warning that under the Wizard ...

Engaging in high-stakes temper tantrum

Last week, audience members loudly booed Vice President JD Vance and his wife, Usha, at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The crowd was telling the Second Couple: You don’t belong on our turf. Ah, but there’s a new sheriff at the opera. President Donald Trump is now chairman of the Kennedy Center board. Monday, he took a walk through America’s culture center and shared his thoughts on the institution’s faults and future with reporters. Let’s just say that Trump was not love-struck with the iconic cultural center, which first opened in 1971. It looks ...

European allies try to retrieve their money from USAID

WASHINGTON (AP) — Three European allies provided millions of dollars that the United States was supposed to spend for low-income countries. Then the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s government-cutters arrived. Government officials from Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands told the Associated Press that a combined $15 million they contributed for joint development work overseas has been parked at the U.S. Agency for International Development for months. After the Republican administration and Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency cut USAID’s funding and the bulk of its ...