From the first day Donald Trump started running for president, he has raged against America's large and persistent trade deficit. His tariff policies are designed to try to reduce these trade imbalances. It is the metric he uses to gage whether other nations are playing by the rules of our trade deals. As a pure economic accounting measure, the U.S. GDP goes down when we import and goes up when we export.
Friday, deep into the 17th year of America's longest war, Taliban forces overran Ghazni, a provincial capital that sits on the highway from Kabul to Kandahar.
When 28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez upset a 10-term incumbent congressman in New York -- in a set of Democratic primaries that saw self-proclaimed democratic socialists in the Bernie Sanders mold pick up seats across the country -- The New York Times (which, true to its institutional establishmentarianism, didn't bother to cover her campaign) predicted that her victory would "reverberate across the party and the country."
Is it any of Canada's business whether Saudi women have the right to drive?
Well, Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland just made it her business.
We're heading into the home stretch in America's unusually lengthy (six months and nine days) primary election season. Some three-quarters of Americans have had a chance to vote for Democratic and Republican candidates for Congress, and state and local offices.
The Kansas Republican primary for governor remains too close to call. As of Wednesday afternoon, Gov. Jeff Colyer (R-KS) trailed Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R) 40.6%-40.5% — a raw margin of just 191 votes — but thousands of provisional ballots still have to be counted, which could alter the outcome. However, if Colyer’s deficit holds, it would be notable because it would mark the first primary loss for an incumbent governor in 2018. Granted, Colyer is a “successor incumbent,” having moved from the lieutenant governorship to the governorship.
"Frontier justice" costs too many citizens of all races, creeds, and backgrounds their freedom and their lives. In the old days of the Wild West, vigilantes worked outside the judicial system to punish rivals regardless of their guilt or innocence. Today, outlaws operate inside the bureaucracy to secure criminal convictions at all costs.
A few years ago, I spoke at my son's fifth-grade class about all of the wonderful things that we have today in our great country that weren't around 100 years ago, including inventions like cars. A ponytailed girl in the front of the room raised her hand and, with a solemn look on her face, scolded me: "Cars are bad. They cause pollution." Wow. These were 11-year-olds! It was one of my first encounters with the green indoctrination that goes on in public schools starting in the first grade.
On meeting with the EU's Jean-Claude Juncker last month, Donald Trump tweeted: "Both the U.S. and the E.U. drop all Tariffs, Barriers and Subsidies! That would finally be Free Market and Fair Trade."
A war with Iran would define, consume and potentially destroy the Trump presidency, but exhilarate the neocon never-Trumpers who most despise the man.
Why, then, is President Donald Trump toying with such an idea?
Why is it considered "liberal" to compel others to say or fund things they don't believe? That's a question raised by three Supreme Court decisions this year. And it's a puzzling development for those of us old enough to remember when liberals championed free speech -- even advocacy of sedition or sodomy -- and conservatives wanted government to restrain or limit it.
From 1914 to 2016, presidential cycles featured a higher rate of straight-ticket outcomes than midterm elections, with 74% of presidential-Senate results going for the same party in presidential years. Midterm cycles showed more splits, with just 61% of presidential-Senate results won by the same party. In 21 of 25 midterm cycles that followed a presidential election in the 1913-2016 period, the share of split-ticket presidential-Senate results increased compared to the share in the previous presidential cycle.
"If it wasn't for my artwork and God, there's no way we'd be having this conversation right now."
Union protestors and celebrity advocates have decided that waiters' tips aren't big enough.
The media and other Trump haters can't seem to let themselves admit it, but President Donald Trump scored a big victory for the American economy on trade last week. Trump and the European Union reached a handshake deal that is designed to lower tariffs on both sides of the Atlantic. They agreed to shoot for zero tariffs. Sounds like freer and fairer trade to me.
On July 19, the Knesset voted to change the nation's Basic Law.
The Democrat-led anti-Trump "Resistance" and its numerous media mouthpieces have been promoting their "Russia hacked the election" narrative for two years. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi fired the biggest recent salvo in this campaign after Trump invited Russian President Vladimir Putin to visit Washington.
"Make America Great Again!" will, given the astonishing victory it produced for Donald Trump, be recorded among the most successful slogans in political history.
Sometimes a society's values change sharply with almost no one noticing, much less anticipating the consequences. In 1968, according to a Gallup survey, 70 percent of American adults said that a family of three or more children was "ideal" -- about the same number as Gallup surveys starting in 1938. That number helps explain the explosive baby boom after Americans were no longer constrained by depression and world war.
