The Red Line

Nike and The New York Times are modern-day war profiteers. Nike’s new Colin Kaepernick marketing campaign is designed to stoke polarization — and coin money. Ditto The New York Times and its recent anti-Trump op-ed by "anonymous," the “high official” inside the Trump administration.

The irony is rich. Nike as provocateur and the Times as enabler of a self-confessed subversive at the heart of government are engaging in the very divisiveness of which they accuse President Trump.

Another profession has closed ranks around a few bad actors. Despite the protestations of almost 200 former intelligence officials, common sense suggests that there was good reason to revoke John Brennan’s security clearance.

Few would think of Donald Trump’s foreign policy as Nixonian or Reaganesque, but it sounds like the president is playing their sheet music. In 1972, Nixon went to China to engineer the Sino-Soviet split, fracturing communist unity in classic divide-and-conquer diplomacy. In the 1980s, Reagan launched an arms race that the Soviet Union could not afford, leading to Soviet collapse and U.S. victory in the Cold War.

One of the worst public-sector union scams is about to end. “Partial public employee” unions represent in-home health aides, paid by states with Medicaid money to care for disabled beneficiaries—often the aides’ own children or elderly parents.

In recent decades, PPEs have typically come into existence when Democratic governors order union-certification elections with loose rules, usually including a participation rate of only 10%. Many workers are unaware that they have become union members. They remain ignorant, as the state deducts union dues and fees before sending payments. Such payments are usually made through direct deposit and often without an itemized pay stub.

During the euro crisis in 2012, a Greek exit from the euro was the fear. Today, an Italian exit is the worry.

All along, contrarians have called for Germany to leave the eurozone, observing that the currency union’s central problem is a severe imbalance, with Germany so much larger, so much more robust economically and so much more export-driven than all others. Remove it and the zone’s problems would disappear.

Today, this contrarian idea is even more compelling.

Republicans and Democrats are convening to nominate candidates for statewide offices in Connecticut’s most consequential election ever.

Democrats have had absolute control of the state for eight years, with disastrous consequences. The state has run budget deficits every year, taxes and bonded debt have increased markedly, and corporations have taken flight. Post-recession economic growth has been the weakest of the 50 states, with the economy actually shrinking over the past two years.