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Billionaires playing a game they can’t win

The frenzy of the gift-giving season is over. Children have received their toys. Billionaires, too. Do you remember that old bumper sticker that said, “He who dies with the most toys wins. More money, more things is winning at the Game of Life”? Topping the Forbes list of billionaires, the ones who can afford the most toys, are Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison. And how have they shown their holiday spirit over the years? Musk threatened to leave Tesla unless the board granted him a pay package potentially worth over $1 trillion, roughly the annual GDP ...

Still pampering Pelosi

Nancy Pelosi may be retiring from Congress, but no one should expect the DNC media to stop treating her as a most glorious political figure. She draws deep bows wherever she goes. She’s always the Best Ever. On CBS’s “Sunday Morning” in early 2024, substitute host Tracy Smith announced Pelosi “has a new book out, ‘The Art of Power’ — an art which Nancy Pelosi is something of a master.” After Pelosi bizarrely suggested Joe Biden could go on Mount Rushmore, Stahl just had to follow up with flattery: “If there were a Mount Rushmore for Speakers of the House, Nancy ...

Politics in 2026

To project onto the New Year, political prognostications are always hazardous. Unless one has a crystal ball handy, one can never be sure what will develop. However, you can speculate based on past events about what might happen in Congress and at the White House. Donald Trump faces a critical period, particularly in the first quarter of 2026. Before Christmas, he received good news in that the economy grew at a healthy 4.3%. But at the exact moment, the Supreme Court ruled that he acted unconstitutionally when he dispatched National Guard troops to Chicago. Additionally, the ...

Going back to the future

By the end of this week, we will all travel forward to the future, to the year 2026, and we will have moved past the first quarter of the 21st century. It wasn’t until last week putting together my roundup of top West Virginia statehouse stories that I stopped to think about us getting through the past 25 years. It seems like yesterday that I was part of the Class of 2000 preparing for all of the computers to crash. I was born in 1982, so it’s weird to think that I have lived longer in the 21st century than I had in the 20th century. Yet, still no flying cars, still no ...

Monuments now, dust later

With only three years left in his presidency, Donald J. Trump does not want to be forgotten, not ever. Like an emperor of olden days or a 20th-century tyrant, he is engraving his name on both old and new monuments wherever he can. At the beginning of December, he had his name carved on the headquarters of the United States Institute of Peace to render it the Donald J. Trump United States Institute of Peace. Clearly, the current administration has no sense of the absurd. According to a federal judge, Trump’s team ousted the staff of the institute using “the force of guns and ...

USS Liberty incident wasn’t Israeli treachery

For elements of the anti-Israel right, it’s a time when everything old is becoming new again. So, a half-century-old theory that the Jewish state deliberately attacked the USS Liberty during the Six-Day War has renewed currency. Conspiratorial-minded influencers hostile to Israel like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens have promoted the notion, and it was a topic of discussion at the recent TPUSA conference. One speaker said that the official explanation “doesn’t feel like it’s good enough,” and floated his own wild speculation (involving the complicity of LBJ). The fact ...