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TAGGED : richard robbins

UFOs, Greenland and Donald Trump

At Tuesday night's State of the Union address, President Trump, speaking of the Democratic lawmakers in the House chamber, proclaimed, "These people are crazy. I'm telling you, they're crazy." Not so fast, Mr. President. Here are two examples of real crazy. Both originate with the president ...

A look back at Obama-Romney

When David Simas left Washington in 2011 and set out for Chicago and the Obama re-election campaign, things "looked bleak" for the incumbent president. For one thing, unemployment remained high in the messy aftermath of the Great Recession, a result of the housing market bust that occurred in ...

Great grandma was one of a kind

This is personal. At my father's funeral in 1991 a man introduced himself to me with a surprising revelation: "I knew your great grandmother." As a youngster, Bill Calhoun, my dad's chum, delivered the Connellsville Courier. One of his stops was the Soisson Theater. The Crawford Street ...

Democracy’s future not assured

By the time the writer Thomas Mann left Germany in 1933, democracy in that country was a bygone thing. When he reached the United States in 1938, after years of exile in Europe, the world was on the brink of World War II, pushed there by German nationalism gone crazy under the direction of its ...

ICE’s purposeful, cruel blunders

Many of the searing political moments of our time prompt stick-in-the-mind photographs, like the image from the early days of the Civil Rights Movement, of Black residents of Birmingham, Ala., being sprayed by powerful fire hoses. Or the image of the young girl kneeling next to the body of one ...

Trump’s insecurities imperil the U.S.

So far details of a settlement of the Greenland affair are scant to non-existent. Hours after his blistering speech attacking western European democracies and the global balance of law, President Trump announced a "framework of a future deal" for the "piece of ice," his own labeling of ...