News you can use
News you can use
Sorted by date Results 2108 - 2132 of 3191
By his own admission, President-elect Donald Trump is a guy who likes to build stuff: A golf course in Scotland. A hotel in Washington D.C. A great, big beautiful wall on the American border with Mexico. But when it comes to his most ambitious building project yet — a badly needed, $1 trillion upgrade of America’s roads, bridges, railways and airports, the nation’s incoming 45th chief executive is running into an challenge tougher than winning over even the crankiest of New York City code inspectors: Finding a way to pay f...
“The Emperor (of Lilliput) holds a stick in his hands, both ends parallel to the horizon, while the candidates, advancing one by one, sometimes leap over the stick, sometimes creep under it backwards and forwards several times ... whoever performs his part with most agility, and holds out longest in leaping and creeping, is rewarded with the blue-colored silk ... and you see very few persons about this court who are not adorned with one of these girdles.” — Jonathan Swift, “Gulliver’s Travels,” 1726 Never mind that president-...
WASHINGTON — For decades, foreign correspondents have covered countries where people are quite literally begging for true information. During the Cold War and under the worst dictatorships, Russians, Hungarians, Poles and many others would whisper to us in locked rooms or somewhere where the music was so loud the dictatorship couldn’t overhear you. Then they would tell us, often tearfully, about secretly listening to the clandestine broadcasts of Voice of America or Radio Free Europe or, more recently, Radio Free Asia. The...
Thanksgiving may officially be over, but Americans have much to be thankful for. To my liberal and Democratic Party friends (not always one and the same), please enjoy the freedom you have to protest and fear the unknown that is President-elect Trump. While Trump tweets and Vice-President-elect Mike Pence demonstrates calm maturity, political opponents from “Saturday Night Live” to MSNBC, from the Broadway stage to the streets of Portland all have the freedom to freak out, cry, pout and insult them in a variety of fas...
“The Best 25 Inventions of 2016” blares the cover of the Nov. 16 issue of “Time.” I don’t have the space to do injustice to all of them, but some of them just beg for comment. Of course you may wonder why “Time” feels compelled to release its list with more than a month left to go in the year. Isn’t it possible that someone could unveil some brilliant labor-saving device or cultural milestone during the twelfth month? OK, truthfully, Kickstarter startups do tend to get pushed aside by all the holiday hubbub and year-end in...
As hard as the campaign might have been and the transition is proving to be, Donald Trump’s challenges are really just beginning. Governing after a toxic election in which the results awarded him an ambiguous national mandate — his opponent, after all, got more votes — will require finesse, a clear-eyed view of his role in the world, and no small amount of luck. He will soon find that the commitments and promises made during the campaign are going to be very hard to carry out. The new president’s number one priority almost...
Historians all agree that the Pilgrims really did celebrate a first Thanksgiving, but they also agree that it was a one-time event. It wasn’t turned into a yearly celebration until Abraham Lincoln made it official during the middle of the Civil War, some 250 years later. New documents have come to light that may explain why. “Never again,” writes John Alden in a letter found in a newly discovered cache of papers composed by the original passengers of the Mayflower. “Six long hours we have spent looking at the hind end of...
Before year’s end, let’s have one sort of Kumbaya moment as we turn the page on words and expressions that have sort of worn out their welcomes in 2016. We can start with Kumbaya, the 1920s folk song kept alive by Pete Seeger, Joan Baez and dozens of other musicians through the decades until politicians and pundits appropriated the term (loosely, “come by you”) to mock fake, usually progressive, group merriment. Speaking of progressives — and we mean you, MSNBC pundits — find a linguistic crutch to replace “sort of.” If you h...
Have you ever had something in your life at which you were afraid to take an honest look? I’m not talking about major life-threatening things here. We generally face up to those after a short dip into denial. What I’m talking about is a niggling fear like that which I’ve avoided bringing under my personal surveillance spotlight for over a year. It terrifies me inordinately to even talk about it. So, here goes. My daughter had knee replacement surgery, second knee, about three weeks ago. She’s doing great, healing more qu...
And now a public service announcement for all you prodigal sons and daughters making the pilgrimage back home for the annual Turkey Day reunion. Prepare for some ultra ugliness out there, people. Expect extra enmity. You are entering enemy territory and should anticipate the landing area will be mined. We’re not talking about the normal stomach spasms associated with tryptophan poisoning by over sampling the turducken or Aunt Hoogalah’s dupamouche. Beware the bubbling casserole dish nowhere near any apparent heat source. This...
Editor, A huge thank you for everyone who participated in the Bobcat/Griz Food Drive. The Bobcats won the football game but the Griz fans certainly turned out when it came to the food and hygiene donations. A special thank-you goes to Sunnyside School that collected nearly 500 pounds of food, 300 pounds of which were for the Griz. Students and staff of Sunnyside, well done! At Havre High School, the Griz fans again won in the food collection against the Bobcat fans. The Key Club of Havre High School would like to say...
Thanksgiving may get ugly this year. God only knows what may happen when a progressive liberal Democrat discovers he’s sitting next to a cousin or uncle who is a conservative Republican. But there’s no need for mashed potatoes to fly. In 2009, Harry Stein, an author, columnist and contributing editor to the political magazine City Journal, offered me advice on how people of differing political opinions can navigate Thanksgiving dinner. Stein, an erstwhile ’60s radical who evolved into a conservative, faced a similar dilem...
TORONTO — Put aside your preconceptions about NAFTA for just a moment. And your assumptions about Canada, too. Look across the border and you’ll find that the Canadians want to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement also. Sure, Canada is skeptical of, if not downright hostile to, Donald J. Trump, who triggered a bitter belligerence in nearly every conversation here in the days following his election to the White House. But there’s nothing more important to this country than its trade with the United States, which...
We began our service in the Montana Legislature 46 years ago when political differences were as real and sharp as they are today, but when the practice of politics wasn’t as political. Then there were old New Dealers who represented a viewpoint not unlike Bernie Sanders, and there were Barry Goldwater Republicans whose philosophy of the rugged individual would resonate with some of the Tea Party true believers of today. The similarity, though, may end there. The two of us recently invited our fellow former state l...
When, chest puffed out with pride, my father told a law partner his first-born was accepted to Bryn Mawr College, this was the immediate response: “Isn’t that the place where they don’t shave their underarms and dance naked around the Maypole?” Daddy’s friend had it partly right: We danced around that blessed Maypole fully clothed. So when I saw this week that a bunch of Bryn Mawr students were joining forces with their Haverford counterparts and marching down Lancaster Avenue to protest the “white supremacist cops” in th...
We’re all so fixated on what’s happening right now in Washington — where Team Trump, shocked by its own victory, is scrambling to form a government with predictable incompetence — that it’s easy to ignore what’s happening in the states beyond the Beltway. That’s where the Democrats are getting their butts kicked in ways not seen since the 1920s. When the dust settles, they’ll control a mere 30 of the 98 partisan state legislative chambers. Their incessant losses at the grassroots level have put the Republicans ful...
For years, enforcement advocates have urged Congress to complete a wall along the shared U.S.-Mexico border. And for an equal number of years, the immigration lobby has asserted that it can’t be done, and insisted that no wall would stop illegal immigration. The popular argument is that a 20-foot high wall would only increase the sales of 21-foot high ladders. But since President-elect Donald Trump promised to build “a big, beautiful powerful wall” and made that pledge the cornerstone of his immigration enforcement platf...
When is a treaty not a treaty? According to the Obama administration, whenever the president says so. This claim is especially dubious with respect to the Paris agreement on global warming, which as Marlo Lewis of the Competitive Enterprise Institute has shown, is more ambitious than predecessor agreements that were universally accepted to be treaties. Surely if President Obama possesses an asserted authority to declare an agreement identical in form and more ambitious in substance than previous treaties to be a nontreaty...
Apparently we were too quick to take Donald Trump at his word during the campaign. After a visit to the White House, a tour of the Capitol and a heart-to-heart with Lesley Stahl, Trump is furiously issuing clarifications. He told Stahl that law-abiding undocumented immigrants are “terrific people,” that President Obama is “very smart and very nice,” and that Bill Clinton is “very, very, really, very nice.” More revisions are reportedly on the way, including: What he said: “(I’m) calling for a total and complete shutdown of Mu...
The liberal media has been in a frenzy all week. It thinks Donald Trump and his transition team are taking too long to announce his cabinet picks and other appointees. Let me check my calendar. Yep. It’s been less than 10 days since Trump shocked the world — and sickened the liberal media — by humiliating Hillary Clinton. And already the media are working as hard as they can to make Trump look like he doesn’t know what he’s doing — before he doesn’t even do anything. I understand the liberal media’s pain. I understand they fe...
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” — H.L. Mencken My most recent one-to-one conversation with Hillary Clinton took place in October 1991, and I’ve been laughing at myself ever since. It was an epochal day in Arkansas life. Only that morning, the Arkansas Gazette — the oldest newspaper west of the Mississippi, and one of the best — had ceased publication. Many friends had lost their livelihoods. We ran into the Clintons at a barbecue outside War Memoria...
I tried the holiday self-improved-shopper route this year, but it’s not even Thanksgiving yet and I’ve already managed to ruin Christmas. In my defense, though, I had help. I simply set things in motion, and they snowballed into ruination. In fact, the thing that I set into motion was my mom, the strongest force of nature known to mankind, a thing that cannot be controlled or contained, so I don’t know how I expected a positive outcome. And yes, for the record, I am saying that my mom stole Christmas. In a normal Chris...
I like to believe we are writing our story, a few words each day. I like to believe it is our love story. I like to believe we don’t have to choose sides, that there are no sides. No right. No wrong. No left. No right. Just we pilgrims, searching for our path, aching to love, sometimes lost along the way. I like to believe we are one huge dysfunctional family, a human soup, each scrap of humanity adding to the flavor, never losing character. A huge spicy, yummy soup, a perfect blend. “You is sooo-o naïve,” one friend tells...
When people are generally passionate about things, they sometimes exceed the bounds of reason. Donald Trump won the electoral vote in the dark hours of Wednesday morning, and the clocks stopped. This was followed by the Amazon River evaporating into the mists of the Brazilian jungle, Mount Aetna erupting and swallowing half of Sicily, the polar ice caps melting, and every resident of South Philadelphia finding a parking space within less than five minutes. A miracle, I tell you. Of course, it wasn’t a miracle to those who h...
My wife is crying. It is four days after the election and my wife is still crying. After four days she was finally able to explain to me why she was so upset. She is terrified that the election of Donald Trump means that all she has worked for, all her closest friends have worked for, cared about, and fought for to reduce intolerance and promote dignity and equality will be erased with the stroke of a pen. I met my spouse while working at a university in Nashville, Tennessee. She grew up in rural Tennessee about 40 miles nort...
