Is alcohol really “the most dangerous drug”? That’s what Governing magazine said on a cover, adding, “Cheap, legal and more deadly than opioids.” This assertion is problematic. One could say that biking is quite dangerous if you ride 5,200 miles a year at night along poorly lit busy roads. If you ride 800 miles a […]

Republicans and Democrats both battle over party doctrine and control. The difference with the Democrats is that their discontents often don’t stop fighting after the results are in. They continue the hostilities rather than unite in common cause with fellow Democrats whom they disdainfully call “the establishment.” Case in point is the campaign by Democratic […]

The recent election suggested — and subsequent polls showed — that a public happy with the economy under Donald Trump is nevertheless very unhappy with the man himself. It took a massive amount of discontent with the president’s character and conduct for voters to punish his party at a time of low unemployment, rising wages […]

Nancy Pelosi will probably return as speaker of the House and should. A proven master at running the legislature, she’s plug-and-play ready and able to steer Democrats through these chaotic times. That Pelosi is a woman is not why she should be speaker. That she is relatively old, at 78, is not why she should […]

When Amazon chose a Queens neighborhood across from Manhattan for one of its new headquarters, James Corden remarked on “The Late Late Show,” “I gotta say, I really think this could be the thing that finally puts New York on the map.” That was a joke. New York is already the capital of finance, media, […]

If there was one place where the moderate Republican could make a brave last stand, it was at the Metropolitan Republican Club on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. New York County (Manhattan) was one of the few counties outside Ohio to prefer John Kasich over Trump in the 2016 primaries. The club was home base for […]

In recent months, the political leadership of two neighboring countries with large immigration programs issued very different messages. They would be the United States and Canada. In the United States, President Trump and his Republican allies vilified the “caravan” of Central Americans making their way toward the border. They are a gang of diseased criminals […]

After a long absence, another “Stock Market up” tweet was issued Wednesday by Donald Trump. He’d been the troubadour singing his own praises when the Dow Jones industrial average hit new highs, but when falling stock prices wiped out most of the gains for 2018, the music stopped. He was back even though the Dow […]

President Trump’s plan for lowering Medicare drug costs is good, even cutting-edge. As Democrats successfully campaign on health care, Trump has come back with a proposal that could save Medicare patients and taxpayers $17.2 billion over five years. Too bad its chances of happening are close to nil. We’ve seen this talkie before. As Election […]

What Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, former Attorney General Eric Holder, CNN and George Soros have in common is that each looms large in the right wing’s pantheon of liberal demons. And each has been sent a pipe bomb. So much for Donald Trump’s fantasies of left-wing mobs fomenting violence. This is the real thing. Investigations […]