Syndicated columns

Evan Young was the valedictorian of this year’s graduating class at Twin Peaks Charter Academy High School, in Longmont, Colorado. On May 16, at his graduation ceremony, Evan planned to give his valedictory address. Earlier in the week, he submitted the text of his speech to the principal, as required. Just before the ceremony, Principal B.J. Buchmann told Evan he was not allowed to give his speech. Evan was shocked. He had been practicing for days. He had planned to come out as gay in the speech for the first time, to his own family, to his classmates and to the whole school community. But Principal B.J. Buchmann would never give him the chance. He called Evan’s father after reading the draft and told him that Evan was gay. Evan told me on the “Democracy Now!” news hour: “If there’s anything that upset me the most about this whole situation, it was probably that. And I guess what it showed is that the principal had very little respect or understanding for someone who is in my position.” A statement released by the charter school’s board of directors read in part: “The draft speech ... included references to personal matters of a sexual nature. None of these topics are ever appropriate for a speech at a graduation ceremony.”

Mike Lee of Utah is part of a vanishing breed – Republican senators who are NOT running for president – and in this role he rose on the Senate floor Tuesday morning pleading for his ambitious colleagues to stop embarrassing the party. “The American people deserve better than this,” he said, after an intraparty squabble between GOP presidential candidate Rand Paul and the Senate Republican leadership caused various counterterrorism efforts to cease. “Vital national security programs ... should not be subject to cynical, government-by-cliff brinkmanship. If members of Congress, particularly Republican members of Congress, ever want to improve their standing among the American people, then we must abandon this habit of political gamesmanship.” Good luck with that.

The minimum wage – long relegated to the sidelines in the war against poverty and inequality – is back in the game. Los Angeles has just decreed that by 2020 the city’s minimum should rise in steps to $15 an hour, a 67 percent increase over California’s minimum of $9. Previously, San Francisco and Seattle had approved $15. Although the federal minimum of $7.25 isn’t likely to be raised soon, other localities are considering steep increases. The stampede toward higher local minimums seems based on the notion that it’s both good politics and good economics. You get to advocate for the poor. Countless millions of low-paid workers would see huge increases in take-home pay. That’s the good politics. As for economics, the conventional wisdom has been upended. It was once widely believed that businesses would react to higher minimums by cutting jobs. But scholarly research concludes – with some dissent – that recent increases exacted little employment penalty.

This story is not new. On March 6, Matthew Kenny, a police officer in Madison, Wisconsin, shot and killed an unarmed 19-year-old black man named Anthony Robinson Jr., who, he said, had attacked him. The shooting triggered days of peaceful protests. An autopsy found a cocktail of illicit drugs in Robinson’s system. Last month, Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne, who is black, cleared Kenny of wrongdoing.

One can understand why the Weekly Standard’s William Kristol would try to nullify Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy, but smearing all baby boomers in the process seems a stretch of veracity in the service of a blank page. In the June 1 issue of the conservative magazine he co-founded, Kristol writes that we’ve had enough already with boomer presidents. They’re all a bunch of losers, he says in so many words, causing exactly no one to lose sleep.

About a decade ago, a doctor friend was lamenting the increasingly frustrating conditions of clinical practice. “How did you know to get out of medicine in 1978?” he asked with a smile. “I didn’t,” I replied. “I had no idea what was coming. I just felt I’d chosen the wrong vocation.”

How many politicians, aides, lobbyists, lawyers, insurance moguls, professional groups and interns – both the political and medical kind – agonized over the details in the Affordable Care Act? The number is big. But despite thousands of hands in the kitchen, the final product included four words that cast doubt on a cornerstone of the reforms – subsidies for those buying coverage on federal health insurance exchanges. Unbelievable.

Tucked away on a side street in one of London’s toniest neighborhoods, just across the street from the sprawling department store Harrods, sits a brick, Victorian-era apartment building that houses the Ecuadorean Embassy. Julian Assange, the founder and editor of the whistleblower website WikiLeaks, walked into this embassy on June 19, 2012, and hasn’t stepped foot outside since. Ecuador granted him political asylum, but the United Kingdom refuses to grant him safe passage to leave the country. Instead, the U.K. wants to extradite him to Sweden to answer questions about allegations of sexual misconduct, although charges have never been filed. For close to three years, he has remained a prisoner in the embassy, denied even the hour of sunlight daily that most prisoners are guaranteed. For two years before that, he was either jailed or under strict house arrest in England, all without charge.

Rand Paul took a left turn on his journey to the Republican nomination, and now his hopes seem to be headed south. The libertarian Kentucky senator’s new book, “Taking a Stand,” came out Tuesday, and it is chock-full of lines that would position Paul well – if he were running against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination.

It’s time to worry about China. On any list of calamities threatening the world economy, a China crash ranks at or near the top. Just what would constitute a “crash” is murky. Already, China’s sizzling rate of economic growth has declined from 10 percent annually – the average from the late 1970s until 2011 – to 7 percent, which is still high by historical standards. The question is whether the deceleration continues and growth goes much lower.

Before he tried marijuana, he thought of trying suicide. Heavy drinking hadn’t helped. Nor had various pills prescribed by Veterans Affairs doctors. He was still angry, still depressed, still could not sleep.

Because so many Republicans want to be president – or at least pretend they do – debate organizers have decided to eliminate the least popular from the stage based on how they rank in the latest national polls. Fox News, which is hosting the first televised debate on Aug. 6, and CNN, host of the second on Sept. 16, have come up with a way to limit the field. Basically, it’s the popularity contest presidential elections have always been, only this time there’s no attempt to masquerade it as something loftier.

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.