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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 ...

How to get rid of ‘Citizens United’

National Columnists

Several of you responded to my “Sunday thought” by saying that the first step out of the mess we’re in is to get rid of the Supreme Court’s bonkers Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision of 2010, which held that corporations are people – entitled to the same First Amendment protection as the rest of us. Corporate political spending was growing before Citizens United, but the decision opened the floodgates to the unlimited super PAC spending and undisclosed dark money we suffer from today. Between 2008 and 2024, reported “independent” expenditures by ...

Cheney remembered as always unintimidated

National Columnists

The word that best describes how former Vice President Dick Cheney, who wielded the responsibilities he undertook in public affairs over a long career, is “unintimidated.” Cheney, who died early this month, was unintimidated by his rise to become White House chief of staff at age 34 in 1975, after flunking out of Yale University and not finishing his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin. Still in his 30s, Cheney remained unintimidated by the travails of his patrons and his country – the forced resignation of Nixon in August 1974, the evacuation of U.S. troops from the embassy ...

Holiday drama got you down? Take tourist route

National Columnists

A friend recently told me they were dreading the holidays. I get it. Holidays can be stressful. The idea of socializing with relatives you don’t see all the time or don’t always get along with can feel a bit daunting. Whether it’s because of political disagreements, a divorce or another hardship that’s all your own, the holidays can be just plain hard. Consider this your reminder to hold space for yourself. There is no right or wrong way to do the holidays and there should be no expectations. You do not have to endure anyone else’s emotional projection or deflections. If ...