Year: 2016

Last week’s column on my lung surgery struck a nerve. Many of you wished me well. Others said I deserve to die. “He likes free markets?” sneered one Internet commenter. “In a truly free market, society wouldn’t subsidize the cost of his smoking. In a truly free market, he’d be dead.” No, I wouldn’t be […]

Last month, I celebrated the beginning of my 81st year of life. For nearly half that time, I have been writing a nationally syndicated column on many topics generating reader responses that go from supportive to quite ugly. So I thought a column making my vision, values and views explicit might settle some of the […]

Thinks look bleak right now for Ted Cruz. And for Donald Trump. Both will have to pass through a narrow needle to thread their way to the nomination. But one of them will do it. There will be no white knight, and John Kasich’s fantasies of a third or fourth ballot nomination are just that, […]

Middle-aged people laid off and unable to find work are taking another way out. They’re killing themselves. Suicide rates are soaring, according to federal data released last week. Especially in economically depressed states and job-starved regions like upstate New York. People in need of work are twice as likely to take their own lives as […]

PARIS — There’s a sense among the silent majority in nations around the world that immigration is virtually unstoppable. When people feel hopeless in a democracy, it means that something is broken. One need only look at the demographic petri dish known as France to see immigration-related dysfunction. Nations farther away from the front lines […]

Having devoured the meanings of the words “establishment” and “conservative” with some fava beans and a nice chianti, Donald Trump has spent the last several weeks cannibalizing yet another word that used to have meaning: democratic. Trump says that the delegate system is undemocratic; he says that caucuses that do not swing his way are […]

Someone slap a photo of Mike Pence on a milk carton. The Indiana governor may not have been abducted, but he’s certainly missing in action on the central question facing the Republican Party: Are you with Trump, or against him? Pence is hardly alone on the sidelines, of course. But the crowd of wet-fingered politicians […]