There’s a disconnect between the Republican Party leadership, President Trump, conservatives in the House, practical dealmakers in the Senate and those hard-core working-class voters who supported Trump’s election chiefly based on their hatred for President Obama.　　In fact, there are so many disconnections that Republicans’ plans to dismantle the Affordable Care Act are starting to be reminiscent of a shade-tree mechanic who boasts as he takes apart a motor -- and then has no idea how to put it

Among the memorabilia in US Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein’s office is a fragment of the Wright brothers’ first airplane. But the most intriguing items may be two small plastic satellites on sticks that can be maneuvered to simulate a dogfight in space.　　Space is now a potential battle zone, Goldfein explains in an interview. The US Air Force wants to ensure “space superiority,” which he says means “freedom from attack and freedom to maneuver.”　　If you think cyberwar raises some tr

Last week’s “A Day Without a Woman” truly bothered me, as did last month’s “A Day Without Immigrants,” but I could not place why.　But as I pondered my new role as “The Grinch Who Stole ‘A Day Without’” on the train, a realization was knocked loose from the back of my mind: I really take issue with just one word: “without.”　　For so many of our boardrooms and operating rooms, battalions and bylines, every day is a day without women. And immigrants. And people of color. And so many other groups who

When I was a student at Amherst College, I had a chance to see President John F. Kennedy on the college campus on Oct. 26, 1963. He came to our college to participate in the groundbreaking ceremony for the Robert Frost Library and deliver his famous “power and poetry” speech. Less than a month later, he was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. 　I was so excited to see him personally and so impressed by his speech and behavior. The Cuban Missile Crisis occurred just a year before. He looked so young an

Former Russian domestic intelligence officer Dmitry Dokuchaev won’t appear in a US court to face charges related to the mass 2014 hacking of the Yahoo user database. That’s because he already sits in a Moscow jail, accused of treason. Dokuchaev’s rare achievement in being wanted by both the US and Russian authorities sheds light on what is widely said in the West to be “state-sponsored Russian hacking,” but would more accurately be described as a combination of freelance theft and a concept know

President Donald Trump is a populist, a mix of conservative and liberal, and while the conservative side of him is already making the economy sparkle, the liberal side threatens its future. How things play out is anyone’s guess, but right now we can all celebrate a great February jobs report on top of high consumer confidence and zooming stocks.　　The heartening jobs data -- 235,000 new ways for Americans to earn a living -- was accompanied by a slight fall in unemployment rates and a slight budg

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte on Wednesday claimed a dominating parliamentary election victory over anti-Islam lawmaker Geert Wilders, who failed the year’s first litmus test for populism in Europe.　Provisional results with over half the votes counted suggested Rutte’s party won 32 seats in the 150-member legislature, 13 more than Wilders’ party, which took only third place with 19 seats. The surging Christian Democratic Appeal claimed 20.　Following Britain’s vote to leave the European Union a

Maybe the CIA is spying on you through your television set after all.Documents released by WikiLeaks allege a CIA surveillance program that targets everyday gadgets ranging from smart TVs to smartphones to cars. Such snooping, WikiLeaks said, could turn some of these devices into recorders of everyday conversations -- and could also circumvent data-scrambling encryption on communications apps such as Facebook's WhatsApp.　 WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange speaks from the balcony of the Ecuadorean

President Donald Trump on Saturday accused Barack Obama of tapping his phones during last year’s White House campaign, charges that his predecessor denied as “simply false.”　“I’d bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election!” Trump wrote on Twitter, without providing evidence of the explosive charge.　 US President Donald Trump (left) and former President Barack Obama EPA/AP-Yonhap“How low has President Oba

At a meeting with small-business leaders last week, President Donald Trump pledged to do “a big number” on the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, which he blamed for cutting off the bank lending needed for growth. “It’s almost impossible now to start a small business and it’s virtually impossible to expand your existing business,” he said.　Trump is wrong about small-business starts. Since early 2010, new business creation has rebounded.　But he’s right, albeit with a whiff of exaggeration, that it’s harder to

My Jan. 9 article addressed the anti-human inanity a preventive (aka preemptive) strike on northern nuclear facilities would represent. Synopsis: the scheme should be deemed a nonstarter as intelligence on the North’s weapons isn’t authoritative, qualifying nuclear retaliation via unexposed arsenals as a credible outcome. Such a move may breach international law, and wouldn’t be considered valid by China -- thus setting the stage for another war.　Former US Secretary of Defense William Perry warn

Democrats trust only Democratic-approved media sources, and Republicans trust only Republican-approved media sources. Perhaps the only medium that both Democrats and Republicans will accept as a valid source of information is … the stock market.　With the stock market, there is a price at which one can buy or sell. And that’s that. No alleging that Fox News peddles “alternative facts,” or MSNBC spins.　Additionally, for anyone with their wealth in financial assets, movement in the stock market aff

President Donald Trump’s unwarranted anti-Muslim ban imposed on refugees, immigrants and visitors from seven mostly impoverished and war-torn countries contained an extraordinary clause exempting Christians from these same countries from its draconian sway.　Trump then doubled-down with a tweet the following day: “Christians in the Middle-East have been executed in large numbers. We cannot allow this horror to continue!”　The cynical executive order is not only blatantly discriminatory, but it pla

Social scientists have always been fascinated by crowds. From guessing the weight of a cow to identifying which company built the faulty part in the space shuttle Challenger disaster, the many have often been able to outguess the expert few. Crowd wisdom is often cited as the justification for the idea of efficient asset markets -- many investors, each weighing in with their buying and selling decisions, should combine to produce the optimal forecast of what a stock or a bond is really worth. Or

Do humans act largely rationally, or can stories and rumors throw an entire economy off course? Lately, economists are increasingly recognizing that narratives matter.In the early 1920s, the US suffered a brutally sharp economic contraction, in which inflation turned rapidly to deflation and stock price-to-earnings ratios dropped to 50-year lows. The economists Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz, in their book “Monetary History of the United States,” blamed an inexperienced Federal Reserve, which

Recent clashes between President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump over US policies toward Israel and Russia provide a vivid reminder that successors often affect a president’s historical standing.　Fears that massive deficits would cloud Ronald Reagan’s legacy vanished after George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton reduced them. On the other hand, Clinton’s ability to work with a Republican Congress to improve the long-term fiscal picture looked even better after George W. Bush squandered h

If 2016 was the year of reckless populism, then 2017 must be the year of clear-eyed patriotism. The surest way to confront demagogues like Donald Trump, and to manage ordeals like Brexit, is by appealing not only to reason but also to common purpose and duty.　The first step in containing irrational politics, and even turning them back, is to stop whining about what’s happened and start trying to understand it. The whining is understandable, to be sure: Populism is dangerous because it demands si

One would not think it would be necessary to remind ourselves occasionally of the awesome destructive potential of nuclear weapons. How could we forget?　But citizens of a certain age remember when the possibility of sudden destruction and death, delivered via intercontinental ballistic missile, occupied a worrisome share of our national and individual psyches. Private citizens built bomb shelters, public schools developed courses on how to radiation-proof a home and municipalities designated the

The outgoing Obama administration apparently isn’t quite finished politicizing intelligence for the purpose of propaganda.　With his final term coming to an end, US President Barack Obama has signed an executive order to address a “national emergency with respect to significant malicious cyber-enabled activities.” The order sanctions Russia’s military and foreign intelligence agencies and their senior officials, three Russian technology companies, and two alleged hackers of Russian and Latvian ci

A school event in Taiwan came to the forefront of international media last week. A group of students from a private high school wore self-fashioned Nazi uniforms and wielded swastika banners at their school’s “Christmas and Thanksgiving Costume Parade” on Dec. 23. Photos taken at the parade served as fodder for a heated debate on PTT, Taiwan’s largest online forum. When one netizen forwarded the photos to the Israeli representative office in Taipei, the debate escalated into a diplomatic affair.