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Columns/Opinion

Go ahead, you write a speech for president

In Washington, the National Mall has gone quiet. The Blue Angels have flown back to base, the Abrams tanks have been returned to Fort Stewart, Ga., and President Trump’s 4th of July speech has been debunked by fact-checkers and even panned by Russian state-run TV. The memes it inspired might prove more enduring than the speech itself. Even in conservative circles, I suspect, the speech will not be long remembered. It is too muddled, nondescript and full of errors to be recited on future Independence Day speeches. Not to worry: Trump has promised to stage the whole spectacle again ...

More for some, less for others

If you’re thinking of raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, you need maximum compassion, and liberals don’t have it. Promises of more money for lots of people can make voters ridiculously happy if they don’t understand that more for some always means less for others. So the liberals get elected and ruin lives of the poorest and most disadvantaged of our fellow citizens. Here’s a big issue just underlined in a report by the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office. It says increasing the current $7.25 minimum wage by that much could fatten the wallets of 17 million ...

Cannabis? Weed? Pot? Dope? What do you call that stuff?

I was talking with a colleague the other day about the advent of legal recreational marijuana in Illinois when out of my mouth came words that horrified me the minute they emerged. “I’ve never really liked dope,” I said. I wasn’t horrified to admit I don’t like dope — I’m not embarrassed to say I prefer other paths to an altered state — but I cringed to hear myself call it that. I mean, dope? Did saying “dope” make me look old? The minute I said it, I knew it did. It was like wearing a halter top, flowered bell-bottoms, a string of love beads and a middle part in ...

GOP’s nightmare playing out in its Obamacare lawsuit

The 2020 election is shaping up to be yet another referendum on health care, thanks to a long-shot lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act that has somehow stayed alive in the courts. A three-judge panel of the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans took up the case of Texas vs. Azar on Tuesday, with two of the three jurists suggesting strongly that a now-neutered provision of the law — the mandate that adult Americans obtain insurance coverage — was unconstitutional. So much for the hope that a more senior appeals panel would summarily reject the bizarre lower-court ...

What true abuse looks like

A few years ago, I wrote a column about Malala Yousafzi, around the time that the young Pakistani activist was shot in the head by the Taliban. She was targeted for death simply because she wanted to help give girls the same educational opportunities as boys. Instead, Malala survived. She became a symbol of fierce and principled defiance in the face of a true patriarchy. That column garnered a lot of criticism, because my central point was that women in this country did not understand what true persecution looked like. It even got me a spot on The Atlantic’s list of 50 Worst Columns ...

Dangers of political tribalism

I have a tricky relationship with my in-laws. We get along just fine, but we disagree on politics. They are Republicans; I am a Democrat. They voted for Trump; I voted for Hillary. For much of the past two years, I have found it increasingly difficult to view my in-laws through anything other than the prism of partisanship. “How could such good, honest people support Trump?” I’ve often wondered. Sometimes it’s even made me angry. No matter that my in-laws are wonderful grandparents and regular volunteers for the less fortunate. Their politics trumped everything (pun ...