Opinion

When WikiLeaks published an email last October revealing different passages from the notorious paid speeches that Hillary Clinton gave to various Wall Street firms between 2013 and 2014 - including Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley - Donald Trump and his supporters were quick to use the transcripts as evidence that Clinton was thoroughly corrupt…

TRENTON -- Gov. Chris Christie is tied for the second-most disliked politician currently holding office in America, according to E-Poll Market Research. The Encino, Calif.-based E-Poll collects data on almost 9,000 celebrities and more than 100 nationally known politicians to measure whether Americans know and like them. There are a good number of U.S. political figures…

Donald Trump’s presidency is ushering in a new era in American politics, and with it a new era in political satire: the age of post-truth. With Trump railing against the press on a seemingly daily basis (and tweeting his own facts), satire is poised to play an important role during his presidency, but what will post-truth satire look like in Trump’s America?

Donald Trump issued the following tweet on the last day of 2016: “Happy New Year to all, including to my many enemies and those who have fought me and lost so badly they just don’t know what to do. Love!”

From the Bolshevik revolution on, Republicans have invariably been the most vehemently anti-Soviet party, with Democrats at least open to the possibility that the revolutionary movement which overthrew Czarist despotism might have some redeeming qualities. Republican presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover all refused to tender diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union. Franklin Roosevelt finally did so in 1933. Early relations with the USSR were nonetheless rocky, reaching a nadir during the short life of the German-Soviet pact of 1939-41. The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June, 1941, brought about a dramatic reversal. It made Russia a key ally in the emerging World War II Grand Alliance to defeat Hitler and, before the successful development of the atomic bomb, a much sought-after partner for the Pacific war against Japan.

The Christie administration's attempts to keep public records out of our view has cost taxpayers more than $900,000, according to a recent report in The Record. About half of that is just over the last two years. This amount counts only the cases they lost, after wrongly denying the public release of public records. And it…

President-elect Donald Trump had the most perfect New Year’s tweet. And by perfect, we mean perfectly awful. Say what you will, the man has an uncanny ability to compress his entire sick personality into a mere 140 characters.

For those readers concerned with the deteriorating global order, a toxic presidential race, or the sputtering world economy, the fact that yoga has now been added to the ever-lengthening list of cultural appropriations may not seem worthy of even a second glance. But news it was, the story broken by the Ottawa Sun last Fall that students at the University of Ottawa’s Centre for Students with Disabilities nixed the practice due to concerns over its potential for cultural appropriation. (The classes later resumed.)

I vowed to create a Trump-free space on Christmas day, to nurture the holiday spirit and to get out from under the toxic presence of everything associated with the President-elect. In this regard I found I was at least partly aligned with most Americans, who according to the pollsters at Rasmussen were overwhelmingly ready for a joyous Christmas. There was a time when I dismissed Rasmussen’s findings—their data widely understood to be skewed toward Republicans and therefore not fair and balanced. But that bias paid off for them in November, as Rasmussen along with a poll attributed to the Los Angeles Times were among the few that accurately predicted the election results, so reluctantly they are back on my radar.

There’s a joke among insurers that there are two things that health insurance companies hate to do – take risks and pay claims. But, of course, these are the essence of their business!

Trump campaign official Carl Paladino recently made headlines for being a disgustingly racist pig of a human being. The former GOP gubernatorial candidate, who managed to get himself elected to the Buffalo, New York, school board, responded to a survey about his New Year's wishes by attacking the Obamas in the most baldly ugly and racist way imaginable, including wishing for Michelle Obama to be “let loose” in Africa so she could live with apes. He also repeated the racist alt-right meme of her being a man, and said he hoped President Obama “catches mad cow disease” and then “dies before his trial and is buried in a cow pasture next to Valerie Jarret, who died weeks prior, after being convicted of sedition and treason, when a Jihady cell mate mistook her for being a nice person and decapitated her.”

As early as January, when David Bowie departed the scene, some were already looking dubiously at 2016. Bowie was an icon of the 1970s, the era when what is now the dominant section of the population in most Western societies in terms of spending power – the post-war baby boomers – came to maturity. As more cultural legends from that age also died – many without the last burst of creativity that made Bowie’s death so poignant – 2016 began to feel like the end of an era.

History warns us to be very, very careful when using the phrase "white working class." The reason has nothing to do with political correctness. Rather, it concerns the changing historical definitions of who is "white."