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All of Trump’s men: Don’t blame them

WASHINGTON — Once upon a time, a theory made waves in political science courses that it didn't matter who the president was because the U.S. government was so mighty that it would run itself without any one person in charge. That's ridiculous. I hope that professor lived to see what hell we're burning in now. His grade: F. One man has changed everything and is still coming for you, your neighbors, your city, the air you breathe, the water you drink, and the affordable golf course here in Washington. He just chopped down hundreds of trees, which were on public land, under cover of a ...

France’s warning to the west

Rioting is part of the political furniture in France. It's just what they do. But beyond the core of these latest riots — ostensibly over education policy, albeit expressed through the looting of stores, the ransacking of businesses and proud displays of the Palestinian flag — there's a deeper warning for not only France, but for the West: Eventually, you will run out of money. For decades, France has offered the rest of the Western world a masterclass in political cowardice, demonstrating what happens when governments respond to public outrage and mass riots by throwing taxpayer ...

Why the death penalty can be pro-life

The value of something is reflected by the punishment given for destroying it. Two very different death penalty cases have been in the news recently. Each raises a different objection to capital punishment. At the end of last month, Tennessee officials gave Christa Pike what was supposed to be a lethal injection. Pike survived. She has left the hospital and is back in prison. What went wrong and whether Tennessee will execute her — again — is unclear. This case is an example of the logistical objections to the death penalty. Some object to the cost of executing an inmate and ...

Medicare for nobody, courtesy of Democrats

Political pros will remember that a dozen or so years ago, the Democrats produced a famous (or infamous) TV ad showing a man wheeling an elderly lady in a wheelchair up a path to an overlook on a mountain. At the end of the ad, the man pushes the woman out of her chair and off the cliff. The person pushing the wheelchair was a lookalike of Paul Ryan, the then-Republican speaker of the House. The idea of the ad was that congressional Republicans had a secret plan to take away Medicare from elderly Americans dependent on the program. There was never any such doomsday plan, just a series ...

Beware the charm of our rising chatbots

Leave it to a comedian with a national TV platform to express what troubles a lot of us, even if we hesitate to talk about it — for fear of being ridiculed as backward-looking worry warts. "When the people who are making AI are scared of AI, it's time to shut the whole thing down until we can figure out what the hell is going on," Bill Maher declared on his HBO program, "Real Time With Bill Maher," back in April. He was responding to various speculations, in many cases erroneously attributed to leaders of the frontier artificial intelligence labs, assigning percentage likelihoods of ...

Guilfoyle never mastered the art of the shakedown

About three weeks before Republicans expect an electoral beating, Donald Trump had to get rid of Kimberly Guilfoyle, his ambassador to Greece. He simply had to. Trump's money-grabbing corruption was wearing thin even on devoted fans, but the president knew how to wrap his mob-like patter in foggy euphemisms and double meanings. Guilfoyle was not good at it. Not at all. The mob rarely threatens reluctant targets outright. It says things like: "Nice place you've got here. Shame if something happened to it." Or "Do me a favor," as in Trump's 2019 call seeking dirt on Joe Biden from ...