Opinion

We usually lay blame at the feet of wardens and corrections officers for inmate recidivism. They didn’t offer enough treatment. The staff is abusive. Prisoners are discharged without education or job skills.

Whatever happens to Ben Carson as far as the Republican nomination goes, he stands on the verge of making linguistic history. On current form, the former brain surgeon will have committed idiomicide by Christmas. The phrase “It’s not brain surgery” will have died at his hand. A steady hand, yes – but the one that wielded the knife .

Ben Carson has now overtaken Donald Trump in the national polls as the GOP front-runner.

Ted Cruz is on a roll.

Oscar Handlin (1915-2011) assumed a consequential role in the drafting of immigration reform legislation, beginning in the late 1940s.

There’s a certain timeline of appropriate actions women are told to take if they are sexually attacked. Don’t shower; get help; call the police. That last one seems to be hardest – most rapes aren’t reported to law enforcement , and much of the mainstream advocacy against sexual assault is bent on changing that.

When Lester Maddox was governor of Georgia in the late 1960s, he insisted that the problem with the state’s prisons was “the poor quality of its inmates.”

It’s time to take Bill Clinton, his presidency, and his times seriously. Historians dithered before getting right with Reagan, letting their political and intellectual disdain discourage thoughtful scholarship for over two decades after his inauguration. Then, suddenly, there was a Reagan love-in, with even some liberal historians writing surprisingly admiring books about the man and his times. The media’s obsession with both Clintons’ character flaws, fed by Bill and Hillary Clinton’s characteristically Baby Boomer self-righteousness masking self-indulgence, have disappointed and distracted too many chroniclers. Hillary Clinton’s ongoing political saga has added more confusion. She simultaneously evades and embraces her husband’s tenure, let alone her own complicated track record in the 1990s. Approaching the twenty-fifth anniversary of Clinton’s campaign launch, with Hillary Clinton running yet again for president, with illuminating Clinton papers and oral histories now being released, it is time to examine Clinton clearly, seeing through the clouds of his own inconstancy and the constant media barrage, assessing his vision, his policies, his achievements, and his – and their -- synergy with the 1990s.

The tide is finally turning. In last night’s third Republican debates, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham and former New York Governor George Pataki both acknowledged the scientific consensus that climate change is real and linked to human activities.

In 1947 Michigan’s Senator Arthur Vandenberg advised the ill-equipped President Harry Truman on the eve of the Cold War that the best way to convince the public to support cold and hot wars was “scaring the hell out of Americans.”  Truman “did just that,” wrote Robert Mann in  his first-rate A Grand Delusion: America’s Descent into Vietnam, by “painting a picture of a world teetering toward communist domination.” With an ample supply of “enemies” readily available it’s been the Holy Grail since then, leading directly to our valiant victories over the military behemoths of Grenada and Panama, and then on to Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and many more to come.

When it comes to gun control, Americans seem doomed to make the same stupid mistakes. In 1966, America witnessed its first ever, recorded mass school shooting at the University of Texas at Austin. Next year, on the 50th anniversary of the shooting, a law in Texas goes into effect requiring the state’s public universities to allow handguns in dorms, classrooms and campus buildings. That’s a slap in the face of survivors – and a sign that we still haven’t learned our lesson.

Republican presidential candidates debated a range of economic issues in their third debate, from what to do about Medicare and Social Security to tax policy and even a brief exchange on daily fantasy sports. The moderators became part of the scrum, and Hillary Clinton and her fellow Democrats took a few bashes, as GOP contenders strove to stand out. Here’s an instant analysis from three scholars.