It's a stark reminder that athletes burn bright and flame out fast that Kobe Bryant was only 41 years old when he died in a helicopter crash on Sunday morning. It seems almost unbelievable that somebody so accomplished could have been so young.
Fittingly for a man leading a televised spectacle, Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff represents Hollywood. His Southern California district is the ne plus ultra in comprising entertainment royalty.
If every cloud has a silver lining, no one told the United Nations.
Backers of the federal Equal Rights Amendment in Virginia got their decades-long wish last week when the new Democrat-controlled General Assembly reflexively resurrected and ratified the moldering constitutional amendment.
America needs a nap. Everybody's biology is different -- both Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, for instance, barely sleep, as the president's late night and early morning tweets indicate -- but as a rule of thumb, most people should get about eight hours of shut-eye a night. But fewer and fewer people in our harried, busy country are hitting the target, or really even coming close.
Destroying is much easier than building. As his relentless adversaries file into the U.S. Senate Tuesday to judge articles of impeachment brought against President Trump, they open the door for irreparable damage to a system of justice founded on both the U.S. Constitution and American common sense. There can be no justice without fairness.
Recreation, meet taxation. States across the nation are rushing into the business of selling recreational marijuana alongside the already-legalized medical variety. For new customers, the draw of a doobie is access to a fresh form of self-entertainment. For government officials, it's a virgin market to tax. Sadly, the economic benefits of joining the pot parade might not outweigh the resulting human costs.
"Elections have consequences," President Obama reminded House Republican Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia in January 2009, just three days into his presidency, adding: "And at the end of the day, I won."
Milwaukee is about 375 miles northeast of Des Moines, Iowa (less as the crow flies), but they couldn't have been further apart in terms of the state of the economy and America's role in the world as articulated Tuesday night by President Trump in the former and the six Democrats who want his job in the latter.
There is a specter haunting the Democratic Party — the specter of socialism. The party looks poised to embrace the mantle going into elections season. Just weeks out from the crucial Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary, Vermont Sen. Bernard Sanders looks within striking distance of the nomination. He may even qualify as the frontrunner. Former Vice President Joe Biden, for months considered the favorite, looks wobbly.
It's the last play of a tied game, and an unstoppable force is about to meet an immovable object on the one-yard line. The puzzled play-caller is flagged for delay of game, then the pigskin is finally snapped as time expires. On a quarterback keeper, it's hard to tell if the nose of the ball crossed the goal line plane before it's snatched away and carried the length of the field into the opposite end zone. Someone just won, but who?
Pity poor Cory Booker. The Democratic senator from New Jersey and also-ran presidential candidate has palpably craved the presidency for some two decades. And he did all the right things: First, he attended Stanford University and won a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford. Next came the obligatory law degree from Yale Law School. And then he embarked on a frankly thankless job, serving as mayor of hardscrabble Newark, New Jersey for two terms.
On her presidential-campaign website, Sen. Elizabeth Warren says her plan for "gun-violence prevention" includes breaking what she calls the National Rifle Association's "stranglehold of Congress" by — among other things — "eliminating the filibuster."
Leading political luminaries contend each captain of the U.S. ship of state must have a doctrine guiding the nation's foreign policy. President Trump doesn't have one, they argue, and that's why he's gotten crossways with Iran. To the contrary, the president's strategy for dealing with the Islamic state's malevolent mullahs is as clear as it is simple: Maximum pressure. Judging from the most recent exchange of hostilities, it appears to be working.
It happens: A prized Christmas gift, buried under a mountain of torn wrapping paper, gets thrown away by mistake. Impeachment is like that. It's both the most momentous story of the just-concluded year and, owing to the bustle of the holidays, the most forgotten. As Americans take down the ornaments and look up the headlines they disregarded during the Yuletide season, the conscientious need to turn a wary eye toward the efforts to expel a U.S. president without the use of the ballot box.
Fortune has its price. The United States is blessed among the nations, but with prosperity has come responsibility, and the Middle East has a way of exacting that obligation. Until such time that the world no longer needs the region's oil riches as the lifeblood of progress, the red, white and blue must remain visible from every angle. Always-angry Iran may gnash its teeth and live-and-let-live Americans may cringe, but there really is no alternative.
President Donald Trump once waxed poetic about keeping "bad hombres" out of the United States. Qassem Soleimani was one such bad hombre.
The beginning of a new year is a time to take stock in ourselves, to revise our goals and plans for the future, and to hope against hope the coming year will be better than the last.
The '20s are back, having come full circle to a new century. These will not be your great-grandfather's Roaring '20s. The third decade of the 21st century has launched with the same brash spirit as that latter-day era, but is raised to the next exponential power by the frenetic pace of human progress. If the promise of the fresh decade is to avoid the crash that befell that tumultuous period a hundred years ago, Americans will need to reinforce their soaring aspiration with heightened appreciation of prudence.
Twenty years ago on New Year's Eve 1999, Boris Yeltsin shocked the world by resigning the Russian presidency. Replacing him was a largely unknown former FSB agent named Vladimir Putin.
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