During these uncertain times it can feel like just about the most we can do is keep placing one foot in front of the other. Jobs are dwindling, money is tight, people are sick. With the ever-mounting problems of the present, small wonder few of us are in the mood to consider the future.
Americans want to get back to work. What's stopping them is unclear. President Donald J. Trump says he has the ultimate authority to restart the economy but the self-quarantine orders, travel restrictions and other limitations on mobility have all come from the governors and local elected officials.
The president, too many governors and more than a few local officials have apparently decided that they have the power to order the rest of us to do pretty much anything that strikes their fancy in the name of fighting the coronavirus. Some of their contradictory orders make sense and some don't. Few would argue about the need for what we now call "social distancing," but why can that be used to justify arresting a man for playing catch with his daughter in an empty park in Colorado or two men who dared to play a round of golf in Rhode Island to keep them or the rest of us safe?
The coronavirus is a once-in-a-lifetime catastrophe. As the pandemic continues to savage the nation, government is sparing no effort to minimize the tragic toll in lost lives. When the fog of the war on disease finally lifts, Americans should ask for a clear-eyed review of the battle. One common-sense reform is worth consideration: Making federal disaster designation a more precise response to differing conditions on the ground rather than a bureaucratic rubber stamp.
Linda Tripp died last week at the age of 70. Perhaps second only to President Clinton, she remains the most polarizing figure of the 1998 impeachment investigation -- proceedings that would not have unfolded with such explosivity save for her surreptitious recording of White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
The fights this week at the Wisconsin state Supreme Court and at the U.S. Supreme Court ahead of the April 7 Wisconsin primary are prime examples of what can best be described as the "outcome-based adjudication" favored by liberal judicial activists. (It's not to be confused with outcome-based education.)
Epochal events don't come around often, thank goodness. One has turned up, uninvited, in 2020, and it is stretching the social fabric to the limit. As if the coronavirus weren't challenging enough, some deep thinkers read the sudden tumult that deadly contagion has wrought as proof that the world needs an overhaul. Rather than a wholesale overhaul, the world needs a simpler fix: A life-saving vaccine.
In Wisconsin at least, the show went on Tuesday, coronavirus or no coronavirus.
Health care workers are the heroes of the coronavirus crisis. They're the ones "running into the burning buildings instead of out," as just about everyone said regarding firefighters in the aftermath of 9/11. The doctors and nurses and orderlies who show up every day, work double- and triple-shifts treating the sick and searching for a cure deserve our thoughts and prayers and gratitude.
A drop in the price of life's necessities is a surprise boon for consumers, but it can mean a bust for producers. The global oil market has gone over a precipice -- partly owing to the effects of the coronavirus pandemic and partly due to a price war -- and the U.S. oil industry is caught in the crossfire. Unless the disruptions subside, and quickly, President Trump should not hesitate to take steps to ensure the health of an enterprise that isn't simply vital to the American economy, but its national security.
The murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002 was a sadistic, disgusting, bigoted act. Pearl, on assignment in Pakistan, was abducted and held for several days, before being beheaded. The act was filmed and distributed widely on the Internet.
It went largely unreported by most of the media, eclipsed by the "all-coronavirus-all-the-time" reportage, but the Democrats recently kicked someone out of their quickly shrinking "big tent."
The job numbers are in and they don't look good. Nearly 7 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits last week, a total exceeding most projections and setting sad historic records. The week before more than 3 million had. As the coronavirus increases its havoc across the country -- medical consensus has it that we have yet to reach "peak" infection -- the economy will continue to crater in ways we haven't witnessed since the Great Depression.
Liquor sales have risen 55 percent since the onset of the coronavirus crisis. This does not mean, as some have suggested, that Americans are getting tanked more -- at least not necessarily. It's more likely that the same impulse that pushed Americans to stock up on hand sanitizer and toilet paper has transferred to booze as well. If you're not going to want to leave the house for weeks or even months on end, you might as well stock up.
The world has been upended by disease, and leadership has become a matter of life and death. Coronavirus infections globally have skyrocketed in recent days, and the United States now bears the largest reported share, though it's likely that China's are grimmer still.
Talk about being all dressed up with nowhere to go. Oil prices have collapsed worldwide as demand has cratered and Saudi Arabia has refused to curtail production. The upshot? Gas cheaper than it's been in years: In the nation's capital, never a particularly affordable area, local outlets are now offering regular unleaded at below $2 a gallon.
Public health officials and puritans of every stripe have long had to contend with one basic fact of human nature: We like drinking and smoking. Indeed, humans have been distilling alcohol since, quite literally, the beginning of recorded history. (Those slaves who built the pyramids of Egypt, while having a tough go of it, at least got to lubricate their labors with copious amounts of beer.)
You could almost hear world leaders saying, "not now, we're busy!" Even as the coronavirus crisis intensifies around the world, North Korea's Stalinist regime continues its belligerent antics.
Americans are an independent lot by nature, and they instinctively resist unbridled expansion of government power -- except in times of crisis. The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, gave birth to the Department of Homeland Security, which citizens rightly welcomed to the fight against terrorism. Now a different sort of enemy threatens the nation in the form of the coronavirus, which is filling up morgues with its victims. Strategies for containing the pandemic are going, well, viral, bringing the colossal power of U.S. brains and brawn to bear against the peril. With them, though, come edicts that suddenly weaken constitutional liberties in a manner that would never be acceptable in normal times. Americans must demand their liberty back when the danger subsides.
One of the unexpected consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic has been, for all practical purposes, suspension of the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.
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