It’s that time of year when news outlets across the country admit they’ve had enough of it. They’ve run out of words. They’ve run out of gas. So they engage in what editors since time immemorial have called “filler” – with useless things like “top stories of the year,” “person of the year,” “sports person…
What does the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 have to do with who runs Venezuela? Everything. What does a fee by the International Maritime Organization have to do with the fate of the National Center for Atmospheric Research? Everything. Everything — that is — desired by oil, gas and coal interests from the man…
They stood in a starchy semicircle, posing, preening behind their role model. They — Republican bigwigs including Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy — awash with pride and affirmation as the man they admired most said some of the vilest things ever uttered in the Oval Office. It was…
In the craft of propaganda, one of the slyest techniques is euphemism — soft words for hammer blows. “Enhanced interrogation” for torture. “Downsized” for vaporized careers. “Alternative facts” for one who lies with each breath. Out in the Caribbean among the shards of an outboard-motor craft, make that several, we have “collateral damage” — another…
The immense irony about what this president has done with the economy is that only the Supreme Court can save him — from himself. He says a ruling by the Supremes against his willy-nilly, go-it-alone-meaning-by-me-myself-and-I tariffs would be “disaster for the economy.” Run that assertion past shoppers, retailers, importers, manufacturers, farmers and just about any…