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The stock market may be tanking, but investors—make that, major investors—are doing great nonetheless. How, you may ask, is this possible? It’s because corporations have showered them with heretofore unimaginable dividends and share buybacks. According to a front-page story in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, “companies in the S&P 500 have spent nearly $421 billion on […]

Poor Prime Minister May. She has not been able to get her Conservative Party to agree on a Brexit formula, members of the cabinet are deserting her left and right (mostly right), and now she gets sucker-punched by Donald Trump. May, braving broad hostility to Trump throughout Britain, went out of her way to host […]

From what we’re now learning about Brett Kavanaugh, it’s clear he thinks indicting a sitting conservative president would be a disaster. Whether he feels that way about a sitting liberal pope—in this case, Francis—isn’t so clear. President Trump’s pick to succeed Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court has written a great deal about how our […]

Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in Ohio by more than 450,000 votes in 2016. Yet Ohio could well lead the blue wave in 2018. Senator Sherrod Brown, a progressive who was once a key target of Republicans, is up by 13 to 17 points in his re-election campaign, depending on which poll you follow. Former […]

Question for today: What exactly is the difference between the way Poland’s autocratic rulers have disabled its Supreme Court and the way the Republicans have taken over the U.S. courts? Poland, where the governing party has an absolute majority in parliament, is in trouble with the leaders of the European Union and many of its […]