Columns, pieces and posts
Presidential inaugurations are rare and notable events, coming only once every four years since April 30, 1789, when George Washington raised his right hand and took the oath on the second-floor balcony of New York’s Federal Hall. It’s a big day with all its pomp and ceremony, and among its purposes is this: to encourage […]
I’ve been thinking about Jack Lew’s famous signature, which looks like the squiggles on the top of a Hostess cupcake. A series of O’s is an odd way to write the words Jack and Lew, and I actually hope some good-natured senator asks him about it, good-naturedly, at the end of his confirmation hearings. Maybe […]
It’s official. Congress is now less popular than cockroaches and colonoscopies, though more popular than the ebola virus and gonorrhea. Really. The numbers came, this week, from a Public Policy Polling survey. The House and Senate have an approval rating of 9%. GOP governors are the party’s most esteemed leaders, but they’re not in Washington. […]
We’re all talking about Republicans on the Hill and their manifold failures. So here are some things President Obama didn’t do during the fiscal cliff impasse and some conjecture as to why. He won but he did not triumph. His victory didn’t resolve or ease anything and heralds nothing but more congressional war to come. […]
Here I will tell a story that I suppose is rather personal but what the heck, today’s not a bad day for the personal. Yesterday I went to St. Patrick’s for confession and mass, to start the year off on the right foot. Walking through the cathedral—it was jammed with tourists taking pictures of statues […]
A great scholar of Yale’s history department writes to a friend this morning of the failure of the current generation of Washington political leaders to fully apprehend “how awful” America’s longer-term fiscal situation is. America would, he notes, be in an even worse mess if it weren’t for the problems we see in China, India […]
This week’s column was about the past year’s observations and predictions. The big story of 2013? Broadly: A Republican party that slowly, awkwardly, begins to come to terms with the changing facts of the nation it wishes to lead. A president set on a course – higher spending, higher taxes, a broader regulatory presence — […]
This week’s column was about the past year’s observations and predictions. The big story of 2013? Broadly: A Republican party that slowly, awkwardly, begins to come to terms with the changing facts of the nation it wishes to lead. A president set on a course – higher spending, higher taxes, a broader regulatory presence — that will put […]
This was a great election year, and every political writer in the country was one way or another in the fray. “South Carolina just may go Santorum,” they’d say, or “From the turnout at the rallies it looks like Gingrich has a good chance.” Columnists, bloggers—they’re all trying to understand what’s happening pretty much in […]
What I keep thinking when the subject turns to Newtown is that childhood is often remembered as a time of joy and innocence, but it’s a time of terrible fears and great frights, too. The young are darkly imaginative. I knew a 5-year-old girl who was so afraid of ET that when she saw a […]