In October 1950, as U.S. forces were reeling from hordes of Chinese troops who had intervened massively in the Korean War, a 5,000-man Turkish brigade arrived to halt an onslaught by six Chinese divisions.
Said supreme commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur: "The Turks are the hero of heroes. There is no impossibility for the Turkish Brigade."
GOP retains edge, but perhaps not as sharp of one as it had following 2010.
— The Supreme Court’s recent decision to stay out of adjudicating gerrymandering doesn’t necessarily change anything because the court had never put limits on partisan redistricting in the first place.
— Republicans are still slated to control the drawing of many more districts than Democrats following the 2020 census, although there are reasons to believe their power will not be as great as it was following the last census.
— How aggressively majority parties in a number of small-to-medium-sized states target incumbents of the minority party following 2020 may help tell us whether the Supreme Court’s decision will lead to more aggressive gerrymanders.
If you were shocked by the images of the Mexican flag flying over an Aurora, Colorado, immigration detention center this weekend, you'll be appalled at an even more disgusting spectacle:
It's official. President Donald Trump wants to index capital gains taxes for inflation. This would be a big stimulus boost for the U.S. economy immediately and over time and could get us back to 3% to 4% growth by liberating potentially hundreds of billions of dollars for new capital investment. My sources tell me that the president has told his White House team that if he can get his legal counsel to give him a ruling that he has the right to make this change administratively, he will do exactly that.
Recording events from public land shouldn't be a crime.
Yet when a woman in Utah, standing by a public road, filmed farmworkers pushing a cow with a bulldozer, the farmer drove up to her and said, "You cannot videotape my property."
President Donald Trump's playground taunt Sunday that "the Squad" of four new radical liberal House Democrats, all women of color, should "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came," dominated Monday morning's headlines.
Living as they do in a bipolar political world where politics consists of Democrats and Republicans and no other ideology is real, media corporations in the United States use "left," "liberal" and "Democrat" as synonyms. This is obviously wrong and clearly untrue -- Democrats are a party, leftism and liberalism are ideologies, and Democratic politics are frequently neither left nor liberal but far right -- but as Orwell observed, after you hear a lie repeated enough times, you begin to question what you know to be true rather than the untruth.
We are all, to some extent, prisoners of the past. Things that have already happened -- or that we remember as having happened -- constitute the world that we know. Anything else is a product of imagination.
When Sir Kim Darroch's secret cable to London was leaked to the Daily Mail, wherein he called the Trump administration "dysfunctional ... unpredictable ... faction-riven ... diplomatically clumsy and inept," the odds on his survival as U.K. ambassador plummeted.
Farewell Ross Perot; Senate races on the fringe of the competitive map; the curious case of Justin Amash.
— Ross Perot, who died earlier this week, provided something of a template for Donald Trump. He also was the best-performing third-party presidential candidate since Teddy Roosevelt in 1912.
— They are not top-tier races, but there have been noteworthy Senate developments on the outer fringes of the competitive map in Kansas, Kentucky, and Virginia.
— Justin Amash’s decision to leave the GOP creates another House swing seat.
Well, well, well. "Follow the facts," Democratic strategist Christine Pelosi now advises fellow liberals in the wake of billionaire and high-flying political financier Jeffrey Epstein's child sex trafficking indictment this week. Some of "our faves" could be implicated in the long-festering scandal, the Pelosi daughter warned, so it's time to "let the chips fall where they may."
The city of Dunedin, Florida, wants Jim Ficken's home.
Ficken's mom died, so he went to South Carolina to take care of her estate. He asked a friend to look after his house.
In the first Democratic presidential debates, Sen. Kamala Harris of California defended forced busing back in the 1970s as a civil rights triumph and criticized former Vice President Joe Biden for racial insensitivity for once opposing the policy.
Since the Democratic debates in June, the tide seems to have receded for the party and its presidential hopefuls.
In new polls, only Joe Biden leads President Donald Trump comfortably.
A century ago, newspapers employed more than 2,000 full-time editorial cartoonists. Today, there are fewer than 25. In the United States, political cartooning as we know it is dead. If you draw them for a living and you have any brains, you're working in a different field or looking for an exit.
"Partisan gerrymandering is nothing new," writes Chief Justice John Roberts near the beginning of his opinion in Rucho v. Common Cause. "Nor is frustration with it." The question is what, if anything, federal courts ought to do about it. The answer the chief justice and the four other Republican-appointed justices have endorsed, journalists have been reporting, is nothing.
I will not be in much of a celebratory mood this coming Independence Day.
Happy Fourth of July!
We have reason to celebrate.
The Fourth honors the founding of America. It's the anniversary of the day in 1776 that the Declaration of Independence was approved.
The Congressional Budget Office has just released its mid-year update on the federal fiscal situation, and it portends a debt avalanche. But don't bother to tell Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren that. They're busy advocating tens of trillions of dollars in new federal spending.
"The liberal idea has become obsolete. ... (Liberals) cannot simply dictate anything to anyone as they have been attempting to do over the recent decades."
