History illuminates the present. I've been reading Stephen Kotkin's widely and justly praised multivolume biography of Joseph Stalin and have encountered many passages that illuminate the present. I learned, for example, that Stalin met the exiled Vladimir Lenin more than a decade before ...
As the 25th anniversary of 9/11 nears, the biggest disgrace is that the attack's evil mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, has not been tried and sentenced to death. Blame the American Civil Liberties Union, in large part, for this injustice. The ACLU intervened at the start, insisting that ...
The trial of Lindsay Clancy forces us to confront a tragedy almost beyond human comprehension: A mother killed her three young children -- 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson and 8-month-old Callan -- inside their Massachusetts home. We must begin with those children. They were innocent, ...
It's midterms crunch time, so we are hearing endless political promises from all candidates. My hope is that with so much talk about affordability and economic growth, a voter or two would raise their hand and ask about price controls and credit card caps. These might seem such minuscule ...
Democrats are in a quandary over the Supreme Court. Every four years, they've warned their voters that electing a Republican president will lead to more conservative Supreme Court justices. And yet since Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 through today, they've lost more presidential elections ...
ARTHURDALE, West Virginia -- The road into this quiet Preston County community gives little warning that it was once the setting for one of the New Deal's most ambitious, and most debated, experiments. Ninety-three years ago, Arthurdale became the first experimental community established ...
One of the unfortunate realities of getting older is finding that the people you like begin to die. There are some, maybe, who are taken before their time and others who go at the end of a complete life, but either way the obituaries pile up. When Dolly Parton died the other day, I felt the ...
It was a day of deep thinking and heroic typing, my brain so fried I could hardly call out for pizza. Then the news and social media feeds exploded with reports that Harry and Meghan plan to leave California and move back to England. What was that to me? I don't care that the royals moved away ...
The U.S. national debt just crossed the $40 trillion threshold, doubling in less than a decade. Washington politicians have responded with their favorite fiscal game: blaming the other party. Democrats say Republican tax cuts are the culprit. Republicans say Democratic spending is the root ...
There is a point in the decline of republics when the problem is no longer that government breaks its own laws. Governments will always behave unlawfully. The deeper problem comes when the constitutional machinery designed to prevent those acts stops functioning -- when spending becomes ...
