Articles

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she…

You may have heard that a Google software engineer anonymously circulated a memo about “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber.” The tech blog Motherboard reports that the memo went viral within the company. In it, the engineer argues that Google has created a “politically correct monoculture” in which honest discussion of its hiring practices is impossible. The author avows several times that…

Conservative efforts at health-care reform are, for the moment, a shambles. Conservative efforts at tax reform are foundering as well, though their prospects may be sunnier, given the habitual Republican appetite for tax cuts of almost any description, including irresponsible ones. Both the tax-reform project and the health-care project have run into trouble because of a lack of intellectual and…

The Senate GOP’s health failure is a political debacle that will compound for years, and the first predictable fallout is already here: Republicans in Congress are under pressure to bail out the Obama Care exchanges, even as Donald Trump threatens to let them collapse. The GOP needs to get at least some reform in return if it’s going to save…

On August 6, will you and your folks be observing American Family Day around a dinner table, at a neighborhood pool, or on a walk in the park? If so, what will you talk about? How you survived the July heat wave? What you expect from your favorite team in the coming football season? Celebrated on the first Sunday in…

Remember President Trump’s “terrible” budget cuts? “Promises Little but Pain,” warned The New York Times. “Harsh and shortsighted,” cried The Washington Post. Then Congress passed a budget. President Trump signed it. Do you notice the “pain”? I follow the news closely, but until I researched this column, I didn’t know that Congress actually raised spending on the very agencies Trump…

In 1994, after 40 years in the wilderness, Republicans swept both houses of Congress, running on Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America,” in which the GOP promised to hold votes on 10 popular policies in the first 100 days. They won, fulfilled the contract, and went on to control the House for more than a decade. More recently, the country gave…

“The present is getting better. The future, not at all.” So begins a recent New York Times article about a Pew study that shows the public adopting a rather dim outlook. “Even as more Americans say the economy is improving, a clear majority remain fearful about their children’s financial prospects,” it continues. The Pew study isn’t exactly bucking a trend,…

Senator James Lankford (R-OK) sent a letter to the president of ABC News, James Goldston, Monday expressing “serious concern” over an ABC article that labeled the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a nonprofit legal organization dedicated to protecting religious freedom, a “hate group.” “The July article covering Attorney General Sessions’ speech, classified a religious liberty non-profit, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF),…

Trump bans transgender troops President Trump announced that transgender troops would not be allowed to serve in the military on July 26, reversing the Pentagon’s 2016 decision to lift the ban.(Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post) President Trump said he will ban transgender people from serving in the military in any capacity, a reversal of the Obama administration decision that would have…

Lawmakers and their staff should have to buy insurance on the exchanges—the way the law requires. If President Trump is serious about repealing ObamaCare—about delivering a better policy with more choice and lower costs—there’s a simple move he could make that wouldn’t require congressional approval. It would align the interests of lawmakers and their staffers with the interests of voters….