On This Distinctly American Holiday

POSTED BY MARTIN KICH (I’d like to forestall objections by Canadians by noting that Charles and Daniel Krauthammer, whose columns are the topic of this post, seem to interested very little in making an argument for the origins of the holiday and much more interested in exploring what its meaning is for Americans.) Daniel Krauthammer,…

How Do You Spell S-T-U-N-T?

POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This news announcement is from Politico: The Pentagon is set to begin a drawdown of its 5,800 troops from the Southwest border as early as this week, the Army commander overseeing the mission told POLITICO — even as the approaching caravan of refugees prompted U.S. customs officers to close a port…

Silent Sam at UNC: Sign of the Times

BY MICHAEL C. BEHRENT, ALTHA CRAVEY, AND JAY M. SMITH Nearly three months after the Confederate statue was toppled by activists, “Silent Sam” continues to roil the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Despite the controversy’s campus-specific particularities, the questions it raises are emblematic of the issues confronting many campuses in our age of…

C’mon, Man!

POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Presidents should be required to have a minimum of self-awareness. I don’t think that this expectation should require a constitutional amendment or even a great deal of perception on the part of voters. Critics of President Trump focus on his ineptitude as a diplomat, his apparent ignorance of and even disinterest…

The Cost of Protecting Betsy DeVos

POSTED BY MARTIN KICH These are the opening paragraphs of an article written by Alexandra Hutzler for Newsweek: Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s security detail, one of the most extensive in the Trump administration, will cost U.S. taxpayers nearly $20 million through the fall of 2019. DeVos began receiving nonstop security from the U.S. Marshals Service…

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The Assault on Gender and Gender Studies

BY RANA JALEEL AND HANK REICHMAN In October, we learned that the Trump administration is considering a new legal definition of gender under Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in federally funded education programs. Gender would be narrowly defined “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable” as…

Even before the Latest Outbreak of Fires in California

POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The image is from Popular Science [https://www.popsci.com/science/]. The current home page features an article on the current fires, “California’s Forest Management Isn’t the Problem” [https://www.popsci.com/forest-management-california-fires].   Writing for the Washington Post, Susan Svrluga has reported on the controversy surrounding a shelter-in-place order at Pepperdine University: Pepperdine University’s 3,600 undergraduates were ordered…