Syndicated columns

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.

When President Obama announced nine months ago that the United States was going to war against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, Congress reached an unusual near-consensus on two big points: Entering the fight was a good idea, but it was also important that the legislative branch formally authorize the campaign. Republicans and Democrats disagreed on the details: Should the authorization be open-ended or come with an expiration date? Should it limit Obama’s freedom to use ground forces or give him free rein? Should it approve military action only in Iraq and Syria or extend it to other countries if Islamic State expands?

Before Mike Huckabee took the stage at the launch of his presidential campaign Tuesday, crooner Tony Orlando warmed up the crowd with his 1970s hit, “Tie a Yellow Ribbon.” It was a fitting prelude, because Huckabee’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination is also a throwback: The former Arkansas governor is the candidate of the little guy at a time when big money is ascendant in politics.

The trouble with our trade debates is that people assume they’re only about economics. Since World War II, U.S. trade policy has also been a pillar of U.S. foreign policy. In the early postwar decades, America encouraged trade with Europe and Japan – allowing more of their exports into the United States – as a way of achieving our political goals. Trade would build their prosperity, and their prosperity would promote democracy over communism. “There was a confluence of security and economic considerations,” says Harvard political scientist Jeffry Frieden. American officials recognized that “giving (our allies) access to the American market was a lot cheaper than foreign aid.” Besides, U.S. economic superiority was taken for granted. Before the war, American and German chemical companies had been rivals. “By 1945, we didn’t have to worry about the German chemical industry,” he says.

On the Thursday before Baltimore burned, Mr. Lee went to Washington. He didn’t have far to go. The Rev. Tony Lee is the 46-year-old pastor of Community of Hope, an AME church housed in a shopping mall in Hillcrest Heights, Maryland, just minutes from the D.C. line. Under the auspices of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, a Washington-based advocacy group, he led a delegation of 200 African-American men to Capitol Hill. They went to their capital to talk to their legislators about issues that impact their lives: racially stratified policing, education reform, voting rights and more.

The life of the wife of a presidential candidate can sometimes be like the government. Taxing. You wake up and blink through that first cup of coffee, trying to register that the Politico headline blaring “How Rand Paul blew it on Baltimore” is about your husband.

From The Marx Brothers’ movie “The Cocoanuts”: Hotel manager: “Wages? Do you want to be wage slaves? Answer me that!”