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.
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.”
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.
On Feb. 1, the Democratic National Committee will gather in suburban Maryland to elect a new chair.
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.
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.
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.
President-elect Donald Trump was sentenced last week in the bookkeeping case brought against him by Alvin Bragg, the elected Democratic district attorney of Manhattan.
Joe Biden was 26 then, fresh out of law school with the Delaware bar exam behind him, and a Michel Legrand song began playing on the radio of his Corvette Stingray roadster. It was called “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” and even for a young man with a capacious ambition, he couldn’t have imagined the course his life would take.
Two are men, one a woman.