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What’s good for Navarro is good for Clinton

National Columnists

The walls are closing in — on Bill Clinton. The former president is on the verge of being held in contempt of Congress. This time, the Democrat party, which stuck with him during his scandal-plagued 1992 campaign and during his 1998 impeachment, isn’t rallying to him in unison. The Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee just voted 34-8 to hold Bill Clinton in contempt for ignoring a congressional subpoena regarding the Epstein scandal, with 9 Democrats voting in favor, 8 voting against and 2 abstaining. In other words, fascinatingly, only a minority of the ...

Sports betting can, should be controlled

National Columnists

It wasn’t that long ago when sports betting was illegal. Then suddenly it was as though profit, rather than controlling this vice, became paramount. It was inevitable, given human nature, that bad things would follow legalization. Recently, The Wall Street Journal carried a front-page story that reported “one of the most sprawling gambling cases in the history of American sports: a national and international conspiracy to allegedly rig dozens of games that reached from U.S. college basketball to the top professional league in China.” There was a time in America when laws ...

Cutting state income tax helps dying states

National Columnists

Across the nation, states are fiercely competing for companies and population by slashing taxes. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is dooming her state to be the loser. In 2026, eight states are cutting their income taxes, and four others are reducing corporate tax rates. South Carolina is pushing ahead on legislation to phase out its income tax entirely over the next few years, joining nine other income-tax-free states. That’s bad news for New York. Saddled with a spendaholic governor and state legislature, New York is becoming increasingly unattractive to newcomers and businesses ...

President’s negotiation style gets results

National Columnists

Think about it. Heads of government do not normally reveal the texts of private communications from other heads of state. Yet that is what Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store of Norway did on the first weekend of the World Economic Forum in Davos. You could think of this as a hostile act of a statesman appalled that the American head of government does not know that the government of Norway does not decide who gets the Nobel Peace Prize. It is probably better to think of it as an intervention, by a sympathetic observer who has noticed that Donald Trump backs down from untenable ...

Children should be banned from social media

National Columnists

The debate over children and social media is often framed as a question of parental control or technological inevitability. It should not be. At its core, this is a moral question about what kind of society we are shaping, what we choose to protect, and what we are willing to sacrifice in the name of convenience, profit and false notions of freedom. Children under the age of 13 should not be on social media. Not because technology is evil, but because childhood is fragile and social media is not built for moral development. At this stage of life, children are still forming their ...

There comes time to choose sides

National Columnists

Sunday night I went to the local cinema to catch the 83-year-old film “Casablanca” starring screen legends Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. I’ve seen it many times, but on this occasion, it seemed to be sending me a message across the decades. The movie opens with a random roundup of the “usual suspects” in Casablanca, Morocco. Someone runs. The armed authorities shoot him in the back. It’s as though what happens in an African city in 1941 foreshadows moments we are seeing in American cities today: armed authority, fear and the casual use of violence. The film’s ...