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Affordability issues continue to dominate

The Nov. 4 election results are a reality check for the Trump administration. Democrats didn’t just run up the score in deep-blue enclaves. With power prices soaring, they flipped two Georgia utility-regulator seats in rare statewide victories. In New York City, more than half of voters told exit pollsters that their top worry is the cost of living. Seven in 10 Americans say their grocery bills have gone up this past year. Six in 10 say their utility costs have increased. So, yes, the affordability issues that dominated the 2024 election remain central. But President Donald Trump ...

Don’t Be Cruel: Administration Ignores Elvis’ Plea

The rock musical “Hair,” a huge hit in the ‘60s, is scarcely remembered today. Still, the first line of the play’s showstopper song, “Easy to Be Hard,” keeps running through my head: “How can people be so heartless?” Each day that’s what I ask myself. The Democrats never had a chance in the congressional standoff over the budget. Violating precedent and judicial orders, the Trump administration cut off the food aid provided to about 42 million Americans by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. A senior White House official promised, “We’re going to ...

When compromise dies, democracy follows

In a recent interview, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared in unequivocal terms that President Donald Trump was “the worst thing on the face of the Earth.” You heard that right. Not a threat to democracy, not a danger to civility, the worst thing on the face of the Earth. It was a statement so hyperbolic that it felt less like political commentary and more like a sermon from a zealot who has mistaken politics for theology. Such rhetoric isn’t harmless. It corrodes the political imagination of a people already steeped in outrage. It plants in the public mind a simple but ...

Both parties failed us on shutdown

The longest federal government shutdown is over. The question the pundits are now asking is: Who won and who lost? For starters I believe that both the GOP and Democrats have punked Americans. They used the American people much like pimps use women or like Jeffrey Epstein and his associates abused underage women, all for their own personal satisfaction. Our founding fathers, trust me, never in their wildest imagination, thought that elected officials from across the country would repeatedly “use” the American people for their political gamesmanship. Our politicians in Washington ...

Ending shutdown prevented negative outcomes

In 1940, Winston Churchill ordered the evacuation of 338,000 troops facing annihilation on the beaches of Dunkirk. Churchill called the successful operation “a miracle of deliverance.” Historians portray it as a perfect example of victory in defeat. Democrats raging at eight members of their caucus for ending the government shutdown might take a few lessons from the master of morale and strategy. What some hotheads framed as “capitulation” is, in the long run, the wisest plan. Right after Dunkirk, Churchill famously said, “Wars are not won by evacuations.” That is so, ...

Trump needs to focus on state of economy

Time is short for the Trump administration. Last week’s elections were a setback, but not a devastating one: New Jersey is still a blue state, and while Virginia went red four years ago, it’s been trending Democratic for more than a decade. Republicans also fared poorly in Pennsylvania, however, an all-important presidential battleground. Democrats even made inroads deep into the South, taking two state senate seats in Mississippi — ending a GOP supermajority — and picking up city council spots in South Carolina and Florida. With results like these, the Republicans’ ...