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Columns/Opinion

Is Klobuchar heartland moderate Democrats need?

Beats me why heartland Democrats running for president haven’t gained more traction. Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan just left the race despite his success in part of the industrial Midwest that delivered the presidency to Donald Trump. Montana Gov. Steve Bullock continues to just hang on, arguing that he’s the only Democrat who won statewide office in a very red state. That leaves Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Ind. They remain serious contenders even though most reputable polls show them stuck in the single digits. Both are running vigorous campaigns in ...

No more billionaires? But government’s a bad charity

He was the Bernie Sanders of his day. Charlie Chaplin, the iconic actor and at the time a well-known political leftist (some said communist), delivered a speech in San Francisco in 1941 prior to America’s entry into World War II. As recounted in the biography of her parents, actress Fay Wray and screenwriter Robert Riskin, Victoria Riskin quotes from a letter her father, who heard the speech, sent to her mother: “(Chaplin) plunged into a speech extolling the Russians — their ideology (by saying that if communism produces men of such heroic stature, he’ll take communism, ...

No federal funds for charters

Elizabeth Warren’s $800 billion plan to improve public education, like many of her plans, is admirable in its ambitions but misguided in its approach. If the federal government is going to spend more money on schools, then Americans should be allowed more choice about which schools their children attend. To her credit, Warren recognizes that competition for the best public schools increases residential segregation, leading not only to greater disparities in student performance, but also to runaway housing costs in preferred districts. The ideal solution would be to sever the link ...

Women not the ones who need fixing

Women are not the problem. There has always been something grotesque about the idea that they are. But to embrace that idea in the #MeToo era is not just grotesque, but clueless. It suggests that you slept through a reckoning that has shifted the Zeitgeist. So someone tell Ernst & Young to wake up and smell the 2019. The multinational business services firm has been struggling to contain the fallout of a story posted by HuffPost last week about a June 2018 training seminar at its office in Hoboken, N.J.,. “Power-Presence-Purpose,” conducted, according to the firm, by a ...

California set to create own public banks

When you pay state and local taxes, parking fees and other payments to your regional government, chances are those funds will almost immediately end up in a corporate bank. Until recently most of these payments to the city of Los Angeles were held by Wells Fargo, a bank that has routinely paid out millions in fines and settlements due to predatory lending, foreclosure abuses and defrauding investors. Although the Los Angeles City Council voted in December 2017 to divest from Wells Fargo, the city must still use the banking services of JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America. That’s in ...

Check your treats to avoid any tricks this Halloween

I’ll always remember the Halloween I went as a 7 Up can, based on a commercial that was popular at the time. My father fashioned a costume for me by rolling a giant piece of cardboard into a cylinder shape. With his mechanical drawing background, he meticulously sketched out and painted the bright green background and red and white logo. I’m not sure if it had eyes cut out for me to see or if a parental unit led me around as we trick-or-treated. My super cute go-go boots also probably were not ideal for walking, but I made it work. Then there were many Halloweens my sister and I ...