Syndicated columns

Maybe if you grow up in a certain culture, you just don’t know any better. You feel you’re entitled to things without really expending an honest effort. Hard work and merit become foreign concepts. You hate to judge people just on appearances, but you have to concede that most of them are white, well-dressed and from privileged backgrounds. It doesn’t help that the criminal justice system is so lenient. In some states you can serve 10 to 20 years for minor crimes if it’s your third offense. But if you steal from the comfort of a cubicle, there are no three-strikes laws, no mandatory minimums. Seems like the more you steal, the less apt you are to do time.

Ramadi falls. The Iraqi army flees. The great 60-nation anti-Islamic State coalition so grandly proclaimed by the Obama administration is nowhere to be seen. Instead, it’s the defense minister of Iran who flies into Baghdad, an unsubtle demonstration of who’s in charge – while the U.S. air campaign proves futile and America’s alleged strategy for combating the Islamic State is in freefall. It gets worse. The Gulf States’ top leaders, betrayed and bitter, ostentatiously boycott President Obama’s failed Camp David summit. “We were America’s best friend in the Arab world for 50 years,” laments Saudi Arabia’s former intelligence chief.

Count me among those mystified over the biker gang melee in Waco, Texas – a shootout that left nine dead. Why are these guys committing grown-up violence over the seemingly adolescent concern of who belongs to their group and who doesn’t? Who are they? For answers, I consulted James F. Quinn, a University of North Texas sociologist who has studied the Bandidos and other outlaw biker “clubs.”

There is a vast military complex deep in the hills of eastern Tennessee called “Y-12.” This is where all of the highly enriched uranium is produced and stored for the production of the U.S. nuclear-warhead arsenal. It is in Oak Ridge, the city that was created practically overnight during World War II, that produced the uranium for the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. Today, the facility, dubbed “The Fort Knox of Uranium,” holds enough of the radioactive element to make 10,000 nuclear bombs. It was there, in the pre-dawn hours of July 28, 2012, that three “Plowshares” peace activists, including an 82-year-old nun, penetrated the facility’s myriad security systems and got to the heart of the complex, the Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility, or HEUMF. They spray-painted messages of peace on the wall, poured blood, hammered on the concrete and were arrested. Earlier this month, a federal appeals court overturned their convictions for sabotage, setting them free after two years in prison. This was the first time convictions for sabotage for Plowshares activists have been reversed.

In a private meeting last week with 200 of the Democratic Party’s top financiers, Hillary Clinton drew vigorous applause when she said any of her nominees to the Supreme Court would have to share her desire to overturn the Citizens United decision. Clinton also, as reported by my Washington Post colleagues Matea Gold and Anne Gearan, put in a plug with the fundraisers (all of whom had hauled in at least $27,000 for her) for a constitutional amendment overturning the ruling, which allows unlimited spending by super PACs.

This is no time to get all worked up over China’s currency manipulation. To use it as an excuse to resist the Obama administration’s pro-trade posture is perverse. This opposition weakens America’s competitive position. All of Asia – the fastest growing part of the world economy – is watching the debate over the Trans-Pacific Partnership. If Congress derails Obama’s trade policies, these countries will rightly conclude that the United States is not a dependable partner. By default, they would be swept into a trading system dominated by China. To be clear: China’s currency manipulation has been real and harmful to U.S.-based firms and workers. By a variety of estimates, Chinese exports have probably cost two million or more American jobs since 2000. I have been a critic of the currency manipulation in the past and still am. In an ideal world, we would have moved energetically to eliminate it. But (surprise!) we do not live in an ideal world and, for many reasons, it’s less important now than it once was.

Luis Lang would like you to send him some money. He has taken to GoFundMe, the crowdfunding website, trying to raise $30,000. Lang, who is 49 and lives in Fort Mills, South Carolina, is slowly losing his eyesight to diabetes. Without surgery, he’ll go blind. Those grim facts notwithstanding, some may not find Lang the most sympathetic candidate for charity.

You know we’re off to the races when the first slip of the tongue by the presumed Republican presidential front-runner consumes the news for days and launches the primary race in earnest. Even if the presumed front-runner hasn’t officially announced his candidacy yet.

The Affordable Care Act covers 1.6 million Floridians. Florida Health Choices covers 80. The latter was pushed through the Florida Legislature in 2008 by then-House Speaker Marco Rubio. He told the Palm Beach Post back then, “It’s about competition, it’s about choice, and it’s about the marketplace.”

That free trade is advantageous to both sides is the rarest of political propositions – provable, indeed mathematically. David Ricardo did so in 1817. The Law of Comparative Advantage has held up nicely for 198 years. Nor is this abstract theory. We’ve lived it. The free-trade regime created after World War II precipitated the most astonishing advance of global welfare and prosperity the world has ever seen. And that regime was created, overseen, guaranteed and presided over by the United States.

The left’s success in denying President Barack Obama fast-track authority to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership is ugly to behold. The case put forth by a showboating Sen. Elizabeth Warren – that Obama cannot be trusted to make a deal in the interests of American workers – is almost worse than wrong. It is irrelevant. The Senate Democrats who turned on Obama are playing a 78 rpm record in the age of digital downloads.

“Pacifica Station Bombed Off Air,” read the Houston Chronicle’s banner headline on May 13, 1970. KPFT, Houston’s fledgling community radio station, had been on the air for just two months when its transmitter was blown to smithereens. “An explosion which demolished the transmitter of Houston station KPFT-FM (Pacifica Radio) was no accident and apparently the work of experts, authorities said today,” George Rosenblatt of the Chronicle wrote. “The blast occurred at 11 p.m. Tuesday. The station was playing ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ and at the precise moment of the explosion, Arlo Guthrie was singing, ‘Kill, kill, kill’ as he spoofed the draft.” The attack on KPFT was no spoof. Someone had placed dynamite and destroyed the transmitter. The KPFT staff and volunteers rebuilt the transmitter, and got the station back on the air – this time with a concrete-reinforced transmitter shack. But by October, this time with 15 sticks of dynamite instead of just one, the anonymous attackers again destroyed the transmitter. KPFT remains, to this day, thankfully, the only radio station in U.S. history to have been blown up.

Could this be the populist moment? A seemingly unstoppable coalition of the powerful assembled to advance the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade bill: a Democratic president aligned with the Republican majority in both chambers of Congress and the full lobbying might of Corporate America.

In 1975, the Brookings Institution – perhaps Washington’s best known think tank – published an elegant essay by Arthur Okun, who had been one of the leading economists of the Johnson administration. The essay was called “Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff.” Its premise, as the title suggests, was that government faced a choice in fashioning its economic and social policies. A bias toward more equality might weaken economic growth by dulling the incentives to work, save and invest; on the other hand, leaving matters to the market could worsen inequality by widening income and wealth gaps. We could balance equality and efficiency. Once stated, the logic seems impeccable. Only it isn’t.

Some folks thought it was “inflammatory.” Some said it was “irresponsible,” others “absurd,” still others, “disappointing.” Those are some of the words affronted conservatives used in emails last month to describe my column on the 20th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. In it, I noted how Timothy McVeigh’s act of domestic terrorism shed light on a movement of like-minded zealots motivated, as he was, by hatred of the federal government and rejection of its authority.

The recent spectacle of Pamela Geller, the erstwhile journalist who organized a provocative Prophet Muhammad cartoon-drawing contest in Texas, gives pause to even the most passionate defenders of the First Amendment. Not since Westboro Baptist Church’s “God Hates Fags” message – and Florida’s Quran-burning pastor Terry Jones – has the principle of free speech been so sullied and abused.

Jade Helm 15 is not cologne. It’s the name of upcoming military maneuvers in the Southwest, and Chuck Norris says it smells funny. “The U.S. government says, ‘It’s just a training exercise,’ ” writes the former star of “Walker, Texas Ranger” in a column for World Net Daily. “But I’m not sure the term ‘just’ has any reference to reality when the government uses it.”

We often wonder how people of the past, including the most revered and refined, could have universally engaged in conduct now considered unconscionable. Such as slavery. How could the Founders, so sublimely devoted to human liberty, have lived with – some participating in – human slavery? Or fourscore years later, how could the saintly Lincoln, an implacable opponent of slavery, have nevertheless spoken of and believed in African inferiority? While retrospective judgment tends to make us feel superior to our ancestors, it should really evoke humility. Surely some contemporary practices will be deemed equally abominable by succeeding generations. The only question is: Which ones?

It was not out of a sense of decency that the National Football League recently let go of its tax-exempt status. You see, as a tax-exempt organization, the NFL had to disclose Commissioner Roger Goodell’s compensation – $44.2 million in 2012. That seemed an excessive sum for the head of a “nonprofit” freed from having to pay any federal income tax. Now the NFL can keep it secret. Tax exemption is a subsidy. The taxes the NFL money machine didn’t have to pay, everyone else had to pay. Thanks go to former Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, and Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., for railing against such unsightly deals.