When urban myths about stranger danger spread far and wide, we come to believe that the world is too dangerous to let our kids out into it. So this week’s reality check is about a woman who got into an Uber at the Tampa International Airport and proceeded to write this harrowing Facebook acc…
“The Green New Deal is the only way to save the earth from utter extinction. If you keep standing in the way, troglodytes, we are doomed.”
Eventually, someone who writes on public policy comes up against the limits of words. There are only so many times you can urge, condemn, cajole, wheedle, praise, remind, prod, propose and coax before your vocabulary and patience both give out. This is not to say that public argumentation makes no difference. But for a columnist, that influence consists mainly of throwing 750 words over a high wall and hoping they land with a pleasing thud on some doer or decider.
Before the 2016 presidential race, Bernie Sanders exuded some charm as an unapologetic lefty with a Brooklyn accent. But when his campaign gained traction, the authoritarian took over. Unwilling to concede that Democratic primary voters preferred Hillary Clinton to him—she had amassed nearly…
There's identity -- and then there's identity politics. The difference between them may well be the crux of our next presidential election.
“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”—John F. Kennedy, 1962
Now that the inevitable moment of truth has finally arrived—with Donald Trump in banana republic mode, concocting a phony national emergency, flouting the will of Congress and trampling its constitutional spending power—we will soon learn whether he has fatally infuriated the Fellowship of t…
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's now infamous talking points on the Green New Deal are the most unintentionally honest explanation of the neo-socialism now gripping the Democratic Party. Too honest, apparently. After her office sent the "FAQ" to NPR, The Washington Post and other news organizations, and posted a similar version on her congressional website, they were met with withering criticism -- prompting Ocasio-Cortez to furiously backtrack, seeking to disown and discredit documents her office had produced, posted and distributed. Sorry, you don't get to do that. Ocasio-Cortez told us what is really behind her Green New Deal. Now she, and the Democrats who endorsed her plan, have to live with it.
So Amazon chose Valentine’s Day to announce its breakup with New York City. No, it will not build a new headquarters in Queens as planned. Who is to blame for the split, the tech behemoth or grouchy New Yorkers? If one must choose, I’d say Amazon.
There’s one more important Capitol budget debate coming between Democratic Gov. Tony Evans and Republicans who control the Legislature: Should 45 percent of all state tax collections—not counting transportation revenues—go for K-12 public schools in two years?
I keep hearing that I have an obligation to “bring us together.”
By the Republican response to the three most-famous Democratic freshmen in Congress -- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (or AOC) of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan -- you'd think these women were Shakespeare's Three Witches rather than the three amigas seen chumming and laughing in countless photographs.
Until Feb. 10, I never heard of Walter Jones from Farmville, North Carolina. Jones, a Republican, served 13 terms in the U.S. House of Representatives beginning in 1995. My information on Jones comes from a Politico article written shortly after his death. Politico is one of three major dail…
It might be time to redefine “public service.” As the local scandals across Rock County organizations increase, I have arrived at a conclusion. There is another social movement underfoot that we’ve yet to assign a hashtag to: #onlyme. The group emerging into this movement is stricken by a si…
First they came for your wallet. Now Democrats want your car and your hamburgers—making summer cookouts a thing of the past.
In the past few weeks, prominent Democrats have endorsed infanticide; admitted to dressing in blackface; called for an end to fossil fuels, airplanes and farting cows; and trafficked in open anti-Semitism. None of this is a serious problem for many in the media. For members of the media, the real story is that Republicans keep pouncing.
It's official. We just had the longest government shutdown in history over nothing. Democrats have agreed to fund $1.375 billion for 55 miles of physical barrier along the border, which is only a little more than what Trump would have gotten under a continuing resolution that funded the government at current levels -- and far less than the $5.7 billion Trump demanded to build 230 miles of barriers that experts and the Department of Homeland Security said they need to secure the border.
There are many metrics for what makes a good president, but being able to deliver a speech in falling snow and mid-teen temperatures without hat or gloves for nearly a half hour isn’t one of them.
A British researcher knighted for his 30 years of work on childhood leukemia has come up with what sounds like an amazing breakthrough—and an amazing metaphor.
Your assignment, Mr. and Ms. Wisconsin Driver, is to decide how to raise an additional $500 million by mid-2021 to maintain highways and streets you have watched break down.
Editor's note: In this abridged excerpt from “The Last Thing You Surrender,” columnist Leonard Pitts Jr.'s new book, elements of the all-black 761st Tank Battalion make a grisly discovery and Pvt. Luther Hayes, whose parents were murdered before his eyes by a white mob when he was a boy of nine, learns a lesson about humanity’s true capacity for cruelty.
It is said that the best lies have a grain of truth in them. That's the ideal way to characterize President Trump's assertion in the State of the Union address that "African-American, Hispanic-American and Asian-American unemployment have all reached their lowest levels ever recorded."
The most dangerous place for black people to live is in white people’s imagination.
“Great nations do not fight endless wars,” President Trump declared in his State of the Union address. It was a line that could have been delivered by President Barack Obama, who in 2015 memorably said, “I do not support the idea of endless war.”
For decades (yes, going back to the 1980s), a solution to highway funding has loomed over endless and fruitless debates about the gas tax, registration fees, borrowing and federal transportation revenue.
If you watched President Donald Trump deliver his annual State of the Union address this week, you can see why the left and its mouthpieces in media lob nonstop insults against him and trash-talk his administration. It’s to create a lot of noise and political theater to distract voters from …
Democrats will protect American children from the evils of trans fats and gay conversion therapy, but not from doctors who will kill them through negligent homicide in the first few hours of their lives. This is the ugly reality of the contemporary abortion debate. It’s why most advocates wi…
With Democrats embracing neo-socialist policies to eliminate private health insurance and fossil fuels, America's political center is up for grabs. In his State of the Union address Tuesday night, President Trump made a concerted -- if belated -- play for it.
Americans don’t usually think of technical professionals as “guest workers,” yet at any one time, there are more than a half-million foreigners holding tech jobs in the U.S. They are here thanks to the H-1B visa program. H-1B, so the official spiel goes, addresses an alleged shortage of “hig…
Last week, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam was hit with a shocking blast from the past: a photo on his medical school yearbook page of a man in blackface and another man in a Ku Klux Klan outfit. Northam quickly apologized for the photo, then said he wasn’t in the photo and then admitted he had …
At the White House celebration of a planned new factory in Wisconsin—“the size of three Pentagons”—the Great Negotiator was all smiles. That would be Terry Gou, CEO of the Taiwanese electronics giant Foxconn.
Professor Jonathan Haidt, co-author of “The Coddling of the American Mind” and one of the three people who joined me in founding Let Grow, tweeted last week, “Today, my 9 year old daughter walked to school by herself, for the first time. A half-mile, in NYC. She’s been asking to do this for …
It’s a new literary genre—books by former staff members and aides who now want to dish about the awfulness of Donald Trump or his White House. Last month, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie debuted the latest book in that field, “Let Me Finish: Trump, the Kushners, Bannon, New Jersey and …
Maybe it was the frigid temps, but it seemed as if I had been sent to Crazy Town last week.
CNN’s “Town Hall” Monday night, featuring fast-rising Senator Kamala Harris, was moderately helpful in assessing the California freshman’s presidential candidacy, but far more useful in evaluating what television must do in the critically important 2020 race.
Democrats are furious at former Starbucks chief executive Howard Schultz for announcing that he may launch an independent campaign for president. They fear he will split the anti-Trump opposition and help reelect the president. But what angers them even more is that Schultz is calling Democrats out for how radical their party has become.
For the first time in Wisconsin history, a majority of those working in the governor’s office are women.
It’s morning in America. Air traffic controllers will get paid again to ensure our safety. Food inspectors will get paid again to stop the spread of disease. And the economy will stop hemorrhaging money (the shutdown tab was $11 billion). Hopefully, this detestable episode—assuming it’s not …
Over the last few years, I’ve heard many accounts and stories. At the grocery store, library and even at the dog park, friends shared with me the news that their YMCA of Northern Rock County memberships had been terminated. Their stories were identical to those shared in the pages of The Gaz…
Saturday is Groundhog Day. It is the day when many eyes will turn to Gobbler’s Knob, a wooded hill a couple of miles outside Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. A man in a top hat will pull a hibernating groundhog out of a simulated tree trunk. If the rodent sees his shadow, then we’ll have six more…
President Trump is deeply unpopular. According to RealClearPolitics, his favorability ratings now stand at just 41 percent—near-historic lows. This means that Democrats have the upper hand heading into 2020. All they have to do is not be radically insane.
The news that Donald Trump's approval rating is near historical lows brings some relief that the laws of political gravity still apply. When the president is doing a spectacularly bad job, a majority of our fellow citizens -- or at least a clear majority of people contacted for the Washington Post-ABC News poll -- think Trump is doing badly.
How Democratic Gov. Tony Evers answered a question on legal marijuana use may have given Republican legislators afraid of “pot on every corner” reasons to take no action on legalizing medical marijuana.
