‘Freeze on foreign aid will hurt America’

In 2017, when now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio was a senator from Florida, he posted this on social media about the United States Agency for International Development: “Foreign Aid is not charity. We must make sure it is well spent, but it is less than 1% of budget & critical to our national security.”

An alarmingly narrow house majority

It’s a truism that it is extremely difficult to govern with a tiny majority in the House of Representatives. When there are no vacancies, there are 435 members; if everybody shows up, it takes a bare majority, 218 votes, to pass a bill. In practical terms, a majority party needs well over 218 seats to ensure it can win party-line votes. There will always be members who don’t show up or take the other side, and the majority needs enough to win the vote even while losing a few on its own side.

After nightfall on Jan. 24, President Trump summarily dismissed as many as 17 of the most important guardians of integrity in the federal government — the inspectors general who search for fraud and abuse in each major executive department, who assure taxpayers that their money is being properly spent, and whose rigor reduces the temptation of corruption. Mr. Trump’s action was in overt defiance of a law requiring that Congress get 30 days’ notice when an inspector general is fired, along with the detailed reasons for the termination, but it was very much in keeping with the president’s imperious resistance to any form of accountability, oversight or sharing of power.

Trump brings out his inner ‘madman’

He wanted his aides to tell diplomats, “I’m sorry ... he is out of control ... you don’t know the man,” or that he’s a “dramatically disjointed personality ... capable of barbaric cruelty ... more than a little paranoid.”

Getting older has its certain quirks

If you’ve turned to this page wanting to see another editorial about Clinton Regional Hospital and the City of Clinton, then I’m afraid you will be sorely disappointed. I just didn’t have it in me this time. So, enjoy the reprieve because I know you and I need one from that subject right about now.

Missing the companionship of cows

When the weather gets really awful, as it normally does in January around here, I find myself yearning for the companionship of cows. “Around here” is Arkansas, where my wife and I lived on a cattle farm in Perry County for nine years until her eyesight went bad and we had to move back to town.

Jack Smith did the same thing Trump did

President Donald Trump has thrown the Justice Department’s Jan. 6 Capitol riot prosecutions out the window. But a week before Trump became president, the Department essentially did the same to its own investigation of Trump. The Department’s hand-picked Trump prosecutor, Jack Smith, quit and released a report on the investigation that resulted in the indictment of Trump on four counts involving the 2020 election and Jan. 6. The report did not have a lot of new information in it – Smith has poured out his evidence in filing after filing for more than a year – but it did contain Smith’s assessment that he could have convicted Trump had Trump not won the presidency and is thus no longer subject to federal prosecution.

The misinformation superhighway

Notice how you never hear anybody talk about “the information superhighway” anymore? The creation of the internet marked a big advance in human ingenuity, yes. As a lifelong reader who feels claustrophobic in libraries, it’s been an enormous boon to my existence. I spend hours online every day.

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