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No winning collegiate arms race

Erin M. Carr The Baltimore Sun Like many institutions we implicitly trust, our higher education system is assumed to be an engine of social good. Collectively, we get those squishy, feel-good reactions in reflecting upon such notable historical moments as the passage of the GI Bill (which conveniently omitted veterans of color) and the expansion of educational access (which was late coming and still excludes large numbers of talented students). Although the U.S. higher education system has never been a model of equity, making it such remains a worthy aspirational goal. But a ...

Old-school Democrats set to face primary challenges

PITTSBURGH Jerry Dickinson is the Democrats’ perfect House candidate — and not just on paper. Yes, he’s young, accomplished, academic and a charismatic liberal outsider who supports the ideals of the Green New Deal, the impeachment of the president and can self-raise an impressive amount of cash for his candidacy. He is all of those things and more. His only handicap is that he’s running against a Democratic incumbent. That, however, is far less of an obstacle in this new era, when incumbency may not hold the weight among Democratic primary voters that it used to. Once ...

Pelosi and the power of restraint on impeachment

For a long time, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi held a stop sign before vocal Democrats’ revving demands to get President Donald Trump’s impeachment on the road. Now her sign reads, “proceed with caution.” Pelosi knows what she’s doing. The speaker wouldn’t launch an impeachment inquiry back then because she knows that impeachments are fraught with risks. Polls show a public tired of Trump’s civic decrepitude but also weary of more political strife. Impeachment proceedings sometimes backfire on the party that launches them. And in any case, an election is planned for just ...

Ukraine: Political rerun to unseat Trump

Back when reruns were a staple of summer programming, television networks aired repeats of their programs, giving viewers another opportunity to see what they had already seen. Democratic politicians are now conducting their own version of reruns. The same bunch who brought us the failed Russian “collusion” story, the sliming of Justice Brett Kavanaugh and charges that President Trump is a racist (which also failed, given the spectacular increase in minority employment), are now rerunning the same show with different characters. According to a still anonymous ...

Another pawn in adult crusades

Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager who has become the face of the climate wars, reminds me of another child I saw dominate international debate: Elián González. Years ago, I watched as that little boy got sucked into political posturing. On one side, which initially included me, were the people who thought this child who had almost drowned in a desperate attempt to come to America should be reunited with his father, a Castro loyalist. On the other side, to which I ultimately gravitated, there were those who wanted this child to live in freedom. As we all know, González was ...

Trump makes Capt. Queeg look like Kirk

Only the ball bearings were missing. The reference, for those who don’t know, is to Humphrey Bogart’s performance as the emotionally unstable Captain Queeg in the 1954 film “The Caine Mutiny.” In a pivotal scene, Bogart vividly etches the captain’s mental disintegration, rambling on the witness stand about strawberries and tow lines and the supposed lies of his subordinates. All the while he toys, ceaselessly, unconsciously obsessively, with a handful of ball bearings. The scene is called to mind by Donald Trump’s Wednesday news conference at the United Nations. ...