When the Wall Street Journal reported in a front-page lead story that the Department of Energy had concluded the COVID-19 pandemic resulted from a leak from China's Wuhan laboratory, you might have argued it was old news. The FBI had already, it turns out, come to the same conclusion and with a higher degree of confidence (moderate) than the Energy Department (low).
Jimmy Carter, the 39th and the longest-living U.S. president, has chosen to enter hospice care at age 98. This is a good time to try to place his presidency in history.
How many people believe, really believe, in freedom of speech? Or, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, not just "free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate"?
For a president who proclaimed proudly in his annual speech that his policies have made the state of the union good, Joe Biden betrayed a certain insecurity when, just two days before, he caused the Democratic National Committee to change its presidential primary schedule for 2024.
The ordinarily fluent and unperturbed Justice Elena Kagan seemed, judging from the transcript, to be sputtering a bit in the oral argument of the Supreme Court's case challenging the racial quotas and preferences used in admissions by the University of North Carolina.
How did it come to pass that public employee unions, which scarcely existed 60 years ago, have come to run public schools and myriad state and local government agencies?
What are "the major problems this country faces"? Writing in The Atlantic, New York Times columnist David Brooks leads off his list with "inequality, political polarization, social mistrust" before concluding with the inevitable "climate change." Today's "inequality," he notes, is as "savage" as the inequality in the 1890s.
America has just exited a biennium of Democratic trifecta -- control by the nation's and the world's oldest political party of the White House and majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives. It is only the third such biennium in the last 40 years, since 1993-95 and 2009-11, the first two years of the Clinton and Obama administrations.
From all those lists of best books of 2022, here's one with the potential to change public policy debate and discourse for the better.
2022 was a year full of surprises. Important things didn't work out as many people had expected on just about every point on the political spectrum.
Will Silicon Valley go down in history the way of the robber barons? There's been plenty of raw material in the headlines for a sharp downgrading of the San Francisco Bay area tech industry's reputation these last few weeks.
When John Quincy Adams was informed by a committee that he was elected president by the House of Representatives, for the first and only time through the procedure set by the 12th Amendment of the Constitution, he responded in writing.
Are we living in an era of political contentment? Most Americans would answer that question with a bellowing "No!" But there's a case to be made that American voters, for all their negative talk, actually don't want a set of public policies markedly different from what we have today.
Note that that seems to be the practical result of the 2022 midterm elections last month.
Unsure of what to be thankful for this Thanksgiving season? Here's a suggestion of something to be thankful for: the Northwest Ordinance.
One of the puzzles in this year's surprising and unpredicted (including by me) off-year election results is why the Republicans' 51% to 47% win in the popular vote for House of Representatives did not produce a majority bigger than the apparent 221-214 result. (All numbers here are subject to revision in line with final returns.)
One way to look at this election is as a repudiation of Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
When you look around at the political scene, less than a week from the 2022 midterm elections, what do you see?
What issues are the candidates and the parties not talking about? It's worth asking, because sometimes these issues turn out to be important.
If Democrats take a drubbing in the off-year elections -- and it seems increasingly likely, but not certain, that they will -- it will be because they lost their moorings when the country seemed to go crazy with excessive COVID closedowns and irrational obsessions about systemic racism.
Human beings differ in how much risk they will accept. Thus, as an analyst I quoted in a recent column concluded, Russian President Vladimir Putin "was too risk-acceptant" in invading Ukraine and Chinese leader Xi Jinping "has been too risk-averse" in imposing "zero-COVID" lockdowns.
