Rough and tumble. Hammer and tongs. In the race for this year's Republican nomination, Donald Trump has not hesitated to attack and ridicule many of his opponents, and some of them have teed up attacks on him, only to hold back when they seemed to help rather than hurt him.
For Xi Jinping, it has been a rough week.
Panicked flight from China's currency twice caused a plunge of 7 percent in her stock market, forcing a suspension of trading.
The CW on New Year's Day Has Often Been Wrong
Want to know who the next president will be?
On Thursday, CNN will host a town hall with President Obama as part of his "final-year push to make gun control part of his legacy." In addition to sitting down with liberal anchor Anderson Cooper, the network says Obama will "take questions from the audience."
Those who have been marveling at Donald Trump's political showmanship were given a reminder of who is the top showman of them all, when President Barack Obama went on television to make a pitch for his unilateral actions to restrict gun sales and make a more general case for tighter gun control laws.
When all the hectoring is finished, the professorial lecturing is done, all the political posturing is over, all that is left are tears. And crocodile tears at that.
Even for those of us long tired of the false hopes and outright lies from this White House, President Obama’s crude gunplay Tuesday was pretty shocking.
Battening down the hatches. That's what America and much of the rest of the world seem to be doing today, in an eerie re-enactment, though to much less of a degree, of what America and the world did in the 1930s. The result then wasn't very pretty. The result now is unknown.
The New Year's execution by Saudi Arabia of the Shiite cleric Sheikh Nimr Baqir al-Nimr was a deliberate provocation.
Engineers who design computerized products and services seem to have an almost fanatical determination to avoid using plain English.
It is understandable when complicated processes require complicated operations. But when the very simplest things are designed with needless complications or murky instructions, that is something else.
One thing that's striking about the presidential race, which, finally, officially begins soon, is how much the race has been shaped by Barack Obama. The course of the contests for both the Republican and Democratic nominations would be inconceivable absent the course of the Obama presidency.
Each year, "The McLaughlin Group," the longest-running panel show on national TV, which began in 1982, announces its awards for the winners and losers and the best and the worst of the year.
Rereading my list of 39 awardees suggests something about how our world is changing.
Remember 5-year-old Sophie Cruz?
He has been her meal ticket into national politics. He has been the sex predator in the White House whom she ruthlessly covered for. He has been her own personal dog in heat.
How shall we remember 2015? Or shall we try to forget it?
On Jan. 1, 2002, the day that euro coins and banknotes entered into circulation, my column, "Say Goodbye to the Mother Continent," contained this pessimistic prognosis:
Fifty-one years ago the Supreme Court handed down its one-person-one-vote decision, requiring that within each state congressional and legislative districts must have equal populations.
Simple maps can teach a lot. Presidential election maps show at a glance where the nation was at four-year intervals beginning in 1824, when popular voting (of a very restricted sort) became established. John Quincy Adams lost that vote but won the White House anyway in the House of Representatives.
Historians and archivists call our times the "digital dark ages." The name evokes the medieval period that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire, which led to a radical decline in the recorded history of the West for 1000 years. But don't blame the Visigoths or the Vandals. The culprit is the ephemeral nature of digital recording devices. Remember all the stuff you stored on floppy discs, now lost forever? Over the last 25 years, we've seen big 8-inch floppies replaced by 5.25-inch medium replaced by little 3.5-inch floppies, Zip discs and CD-ROMs, external hard drives and now the Cloud -- and let's not forget memory sticks and also-rans like the DAT and Minidisc.
