12 NEWS Best columns: The U.S.
APQAlarmed neighbors called
police when a Utah boy set
up a sidewalk stand with a
sign that read “ICE COLD
BEER.” When the cops
arrived, Seth Parker, 11,
showed them he was selling
root beer, and had written
“root” in very fine letter-
ing above “beer.” Parker
called his marketing ploy a
“wisecrack,” and the stand
has been a roaring commer-
cial success, drawing some
60 customers a day. “We’re
loving people stopping
by and just having a good
laugh,” said Seth’s mom,
Alexis Parker. “It is a joy all
the way around.”
QA Japanese team
known as Giga
Body Metal
has claimed
victory in the
first-ever Heavy
Metal Knitting World
Championship in Finland.
The five-member squad
featured a kimono-clad
Manabu Kaneko furiously
stitching while dancing to the
slashing guitars and pound-
ing drums of heavy metal
music. The inaugural contest
drew 200 competitors from
nine nations to the city of
Joensuu, including tea ms
with names such as Wool-
fumes, Bunny Bandit, and
Nine Inch Needles. “When I
saw there was a combination
of heavy metal and knitting,
I thought, ‘That’s my niche,’”
said Heather McLaren, who
traveled from Scotland for
her shot at the world title.
QA British design student
has engineered a chair to dis-
courage “manspreading”—
the male tendency to sit with
legs wide apart in a display
of relaxed dominance. Laila
Laurel, 23, of the University
of Brighton, said her inspira-
tion “came from my own ex-
periences of men infringing
on my space in public.” The
chair has a seat shaped like
an isosceles trapezoid that
tapers outward, forcing men
to sit with their legs close
together. Laurel’s chair won a
major design award.It must be true...
I read it in the tabloidsCongress and President Trump just put “the final nail in the Tea Party
coffin,” said Brian Riedl. The president has endorsed a new budget deal
between congressional Republicans and Democrats that will run up a
$1 trillion annual deficit this year, next year, and every year into the
foreseeable future. The new budget increases spending by $300 million
this year, and essentially repeals the final two years of the 2011 Budget
Control Act—“the crown jewel of the 2011 Tea Party Congress.” The
Tea Party movement arose in the aftermath of the Great Recession,
when Presidents Bush and Obama bailed out the banks and Obama
pushed through a $1 trillion “stimulus” bill—raising the country’s an-
nual deficit to more than $1 trillion for the first time. Trump’s election,
however, ended the Tea Party movement, ushering in an era of “big-
government conservatism” in which any attempt to rein in escalating
Social Security and Medicare costs was off limits. When Republicans
passed a $2 trillion tax cut in 2017, they “did not even attempt to
offset the new cost with spending cuts.” With both social and defense
spending now soaring, the GOP’s credibility on fiscal responsibility is
gone. “With Republicans like these, who needs Democrats?”“Is the swamp drained yet?” asked Paul Waldman. Actually, it’s dirtier
than ever, as President Trump has appointed a legion of industry lobby-
ists to run the federal government. After Gen. James Mattis resigned in
protest as head of the Defense Department, Trump installed employees
of military contractors to run the Pentagon; the latest is Mark Esper,
a longtime lobbyist for Raytheon. At Esper’s confirmation hearing last
week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren brought up the inconvenient fact that
Esper is still being paid a golden parachute of $1 million by Raytheon.
But Esper refused to recuse himself from any Pentagon decision to buy
Raytheon products, indignantly saying it’s wrong to assume that “any-
body that comes from the business or corporate world is corrupt.” Sim-
ilar conflicts of interest abound: The Labor Department is now being
led by Patrick Pizzella, a former lobbyist who helped industry groups
fight wage increases and workers’ rights laws. Coal industry lobbyist
Andrew Wheeler is “hard at work gutting America’s environmental reg-
ulations” at the Environmental Protection Agency. Secretary of the In-
terior David Bernhardt is a former oil company lobbyist. On and on it
goes, at every level of these agencies. “We don’t treat it as scandalous,”
because everyone’s so worn down. And so Trump gets away with it.Fifty years ago last week, said Jeff Jacoby, Mary Jo Kopechne died
in a submerged car that Sen. Edward Kennedy had driven off a small
wooden bridge on Chappaquiddick Island in Massachusetts. A panicked
Kennedy freed himself from the car, swam to safety, and left Kopechne,
28, to die; officials later determined she survived for some time by
breathing an air pocket in the car until the oxygen ran out. Kennedy
never could explain why he failed to summon help, or report the crash
to police until the next day—after he had made 16 long-distance calls to
aides and advisers. The next day a Kennedy aide swooped in and flew
Kopechne’s body out of Massachusetts, beyond the jurisdiction of local
and state law enforcement, before an autopsy could be conducted. An
inquest later found that Kennedy had engaged in “criminal conduct”
that led to Kopechne’s death, but Kennedy was never prosecuted. The
Democrat was re-elected to the Senate the following year, and another
six times afterward. When Richard Nixon was pardoned in 1974, an in-
dignant Kennedy dared to ask, “Is there one system for the average citi-
zen and another for the high and mighty?” He already knew the answer.Learning
to love
deficits
Brian Riedl
NationalReview.comTed Ken nedy’s
escape
from justice
Jeff Jacoby
BostonGlobe.comWhen lobbyists
are our
watchdogs
Paul Waldman
The Washington Post“Once people have been the subject of gaslighting, it is difficult—but not
impossible—to ungaslight them. The term has come a long way from its ori-
gins in the 1944 movie Gaslight, in which a scheming husband tries to drive his puzzled wife mad by
convincing her that she is imagining very real things. The gaslighted person loses confidence in his
ability to see what’s right in front of him. [This is why] partisans report being especially confident in
their mistaken beliefs. Politicians lie. Gaslighters build alternative realities.”
Eric Beerbohm and Ryan Davis in The Washington PostViewpoint