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What is going on with our economy?

National Columnists

The fate of the Trump administration — and perhaps Republicans in Congress — is tethered to how Americans feel about the economy. And right now, it’s hard to find anyone who can say with confidence what is going on. Thursday offered a fresh reminder of the chaos. As The Wall Street Journal noted, “Stocks surrendered gains and closed sharply lower after a whirlwind day of trading that began after Nvidia posted strong results. The Nasdaq composite led indexes lower after being up on the day more than 2%. It closed 2.2% lower. Nvidia gave up an even bigger gain and finished the ...

Europe has made itself an afterthought

National Columnists

In the contention over the U.S. peace plan for Ukraine, the Europeans are in their accustomed role — carping from the sidelines. Not only can the once-great European powers no longer dictate the fate of far-flung parts of the world, they can’t even dictate the end of a war involving a European country whose fate they deem crucial to their own future. We’re a long way from the British controlling about a quarter of the globe’s territory in the early 20th century; a long way from British and French diplomats, Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot respectively, drawing the ...

Leaked ‘wish list’ hardly ‘America First’

National Columnists

Last week, a 28-point “peace plan” for the Russia-Ukraine war surfaced. It was apparently fleshed out in Miami over cocktails by President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and Witkoff’s Russian counterpart Kirill Dmitriev. Many critics immediately derided it as a “Russian wish-list.” In a closed-door session with senators, Secretary of State Marco Rubio even described it as a “wish-list for the Russians” and “not the administration’s plan.” On his way to Geneva for peace talks, Rubio scrambled to deny he ever said that. ...

Beware housing bills with socialist goals

National Columnists

The Democrats’ lurch to the extreme left is accelerating at warp speed – and Connecticut is the latest victim. The state legislature’s Democratic supermajority last week rammed through a bill, HB 8002, that’s a thinly disguised socialist wishlist. Cynically couched as a remedy for the affordable housing crisis, its real purpose is ideological: forcing Connecticut’s 169 towns to achieve what the bill calls “economic diversity.” Translation: If you’ve worked hard to own a home in a leafy suburb with quiet streets, you can’t live there unless everybody can – ...

What Founders feared crept into US

National Columnists

“The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.” – James Madison (1751-1836) America today would terrify the Founding Fathers. Armed troops roam the streets of major cities, masked government agents arrest people without probable cause and disrupt the public speech that the president hates and fears, and the president kills foreigners on the high seas whom he says might commit crimes should their small speedboats miraculously make it 1,500 miles to the United States. Here is the backstory. Shortly after the Constitution was ...

Does ChatGPT write me better than I do?

National Columnists

I wonder what those 15th-century monks who slaved away copying the Holy Scriptures by hand thought when they saw the first Bible produced on Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press. They had believed themselves to be irreplaceable in spreading the gospel. Now there was a cheaper, faster, more efficient way. I empathize. I just read an academic paper published by Columbia University titled “Readers Prefer Outputs of AI Trained on Copyrighted Books over Expert Human Writers.” The authors of the paper asked expert writers from American universities to imitate the style of 50 major ...