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Politician names on public works are free ads

When workers scraped Donald Trump’s name off the Donald Trump and John F. Kennedy Performing Arts Center, they should have kept going. They should have taken Kennedy’s name off as well and restored the building to its original, simple title, the National Culture Center. After President Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, Congress renamed the center after him. The New York International Airport, charmingly referred to as Idlewild, suddenly became the John F. Kennedy International Airport. And hundreds of schools across the country plastered “John F. Kennedy” on their ...

It’s a requiem for privacy

When President Donald Trump appointed an obviously unqualified friend, a home builder executive, to be acting director of national intelligence, he inadvertently triggered attention to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The director of national intelligence is the head of the umbrella agency that gathers intelligence from the 17 federal spying agencies and from that data prepares and delivers the president’s daily briefing. Sec. 702, which permits warrantless spying, expires this month. Trump prefers to receive his briefings directly from the CIA and its foreign ...

Anthony’s race doesn’t matter

The system failed Karmelo Anthony — he stabbed someone to death and is going to jail for it. If this doesn’t strike you as an injustice, you haven’t been paying attention to the voices defending the 19-year-old who was just sentenced to 35 years in prison for murdering another teenager at a high school track meet in Texas two years ago. The case has garnered national attention entirely for its racial angle. Anthony is black, and his victim, Austin Metcalf, was white. But there is no evidence that race played a role in the incident, and if both young men had been white or both ...

Platner’s populist challenge excites Dems — cautiously

When I heard President Donald Trump go ballistic over Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner, it made me want to hear more about Graham Platner. After Platner won Maine’s Democratic primary last week, Trump trolled Platner as “thug” and called the Democratic Party hypocritical for lining up behind someone with so many questions about his past personal conduct and treatment of women. “He’s worse than any human being that’s ever run for office probably,” the president said. Well, if anyone should know about questions on past conduct and treatment of women, it ...

Men no longer need to suffer alone in silence

While we have traditionally celebrated Father’s Day in June, this month has also been set aside to highlight awareness of men’s struggles with mental health and depression. The National Alliance on Mental Illness continues to advocate for breaking the cultural stigma that men have to “tough it out” on their own while wrestling with internal issues. Current statistics show what many mental health professionals are calling a “silent crisis.” Many men do not like to talk about how they are weighed down emotionally, and this suppressed affliction often leads to anxiety, stress ...

Trump’s nonvictory is a terrible failure

Trump again claims victory in Iran. He’s claimed victory before, but now he has a so-called “agreement” with Iran. That agreement, which appears to be no more than a memo of understanding — that is, a set of principles to which Iran and the United States have agreed — stops the fighting and reopens the Strait of Hormuz but it does not deal with the issue that caused Trump to initiate the conflict: Iran’s nuclear program. Keep that in mind as you hear various renditions of what’s been decided. Recall that the Strait of Hormuz was open before Trump began bombing Iran. At ...