When I was a little girl, Halloween was a holiday exclusively for children. It was simple: You dressed up on the night of Halloween and walked around your neighborhood with a pillowcase collecting candy. Depending on the school you went to, there may or may not have been a Halloween costume ...
Imagine a day when hardly anyone is able to get away with murder. Think about that. If there were a way to almost guarantee a killer would be discovered and punished, wouldn’t the murder rate go into freefall decline? Frivolous thinking, you say? Well, consider the forensic crime-fighting ...
The standard measuring stick for determining the human cost of the drug abuse crisis tends to be the number of lives claimed by it – more than 70,000 annually in the United States. As we have pointed out, that exceeds the total number of U.S. deaths in the Vietnam War (58,220). But an ...
If allegations against the Department of Veterans Affairs are valid, Congress should take a hard look at the approximately $220 billion in taxpayer dollars the VA requested from this year’s budget. A department that cannot be trusted even to verify whether it is hiring people who are ...
The world’s oldest political party set an all-time record Tuesday night, with 12 presidential candidates on a single stage in Westerville, Ohio. That’s a suburb of Columbus, the fastest-growing big metro area in the Midwest, in Franklin County, which voted Republican in every presidential ...
WASHINGTON – “I am a classically trained engineer,” says Rep. Will Hurd, a Texas Republican, “and I firmly believe in regression to the mean.” Applying a concept from statistics to the randomness of today’s politics is problematic. In any case, Hurd, 42, is not waiting for the ...
Encouraging people in pain to use opioids for relief if effective alternatives exist is, in a word, insane. Yet the federal government does just that, according to two U.S. senators from states hit hard by the drug abuse epidemic. Sens. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., and Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, ...
Can poor oral health kill you? The answer: “Yes,” and, “It’s complicated.” In her landmark book Dying of Dirty Teeth – Why the lack of proper oral care is killing nursing home residents and how to prevent it, Angie Stone writes, “There are several causes of death that can be ...
What would you do or say if somebody came along and told you the secret to living 20 years longer? What if somebody told you they had the secret to reducing suicide risk by 1,200 percent? How about if they told you they knew how to reduce the likelihood of you becoming addicted to alcohol by ...
WASHINGTON – The dozen Democratic presidential candidates who spent nearly two hours trying to distinguish themselves from the pack Wednesday night succeeded in one thing. They essentially agreed that Donald Trump must go, while offering their own best alternatives for the post-Trump ...
If you want to run for office, political consultants will hammer away at one point: Tell stories. People respond to stories. We’ve been a storytelling species since our fur-clad ancestors gathered around campfires. Don’t cite statistics. No one can remember statistics. Make it human. Make ...
The standard measuring stick for determining the human cost of the drug abuse crisis tends to be the number of lives claimed by it – more than 70,000 annually in the United States. As we have pointed out, that exceeds the total number of U.S. deaths in the Vietnam War (58,220). But an ...
Democrats in the House of Representatives remind us of the old West judge who promised defendants he would give them a fair trial – then hang them. The “impeachment inquiry” engineered by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is no more than her attempt to pursue a vendetta. Our nation’s ...
Members of Congress who want to “overturn” President Donald Trump’s withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria are engaging in an absurd performance of political theater. Many lawmakers, both Republican and Democrat, have been critical of Trump’s decision to abandon Kurdish separatists in ...
Conventional wisdom – even its more intuitive cousin, common sense – sometimes needs to be tested scientifically. This year’s winners of the Nobel Prize in economics are living proof of that. Michael Kremer of Harvard University and Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo of the Massachusetts ...
WASHINGTON – The dozen 2020 Democratic presidential candidates debating on a single stage in Ohio tonight have a choice. Each of them can use the event to explain why he or she is best qualified to beat Donald Trump next year. Or they can focus on his illegal use of his presidential power to ...
If you need an accurate update on some of the madness at the nation’s institutions of higher learning, check out Minding the Campus, a nonprofit independent organization. John Leo, its editor in chief, says that the organization’s prime mission is dedicated to the revival of intellectual ...
Since America’s colonial days the press has been a target of those who believe journalists have a point of view that shapes their reporting. There have been numerous articles and studies revealing a journalistic predisposition to opinions and subjects that reinforce liberal points of ...
Say you invented something that became so popular more than a billion people around the globe used it. Wow! You’d be famous worldwide and one of the richest people on earth. But then, say you discovered some of your customers were criminals using your product in nefarious ways. Terrorists ...
It seems few days have gone by recently without some new revelation regarding the House of Representatives impeachment inquiry that targets President Donald Trump. Clearly, the president and some of his allies used their positions in efforts to advance Trump’s political prospects. Whether ...