Time Magazine recently ran an article headlined, “Abdul El-Sayed Wins Michigan Senate Primary, Delivering Progressives a Major Battleground Victory.”

Progressives?

Who says so?

A basic tenet of journalism holds that politicians should be described in neutral terms in news articles.

“Progressive” is not neutral. We all believe in progress.

“Regressive” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

Call him “left-wing” if you want. That’ not so flattering, but it’s accurate.

But the internet is filled with supposedly objective articles using this subjective language.

As usual, the Brits do a better job of it.

The Telegraph reported that “it was a stressful experience for fans who expected a Left-wing juggernaut to plough through the party establishment with ease.”

The reporter added, “Some supporters blanched and fled to the theatre’s bar, where they found the drinks, much like the candidate himself, were alcohol-free.”

Or in other words, the candidate is a regressive. He wants us to return to the Prohibition era.

No thanks.

But thanks for the warning.

I was talking about Donald Trump and how he has sabotaged one good Republican candidate after another.

The Donald has a nasty habit of helping Democrats defeat Republicans by interfering in House and Senate elections.

The worst such instance occurred in Georgia in 2020.

Georgia has a system of holding runoff elections in the event no candidate has a majority.

That was the case in the races for two U.S. Senate seats. Republicans got majorities, but neither got 50 percent.

It was expected that both would get majorities in the general election races, which are head-to-head contests with no spoilers.

But then the Donald stepped in. His minions told Republican voters to abstain from voting to protest his own loss in the presidential race that year.

The Democrats won both seats and control of the Senate.

Here’s one account: “At a Stop the Steal rally in Georgia on Wednesday, attorney Lin Wood encouraged supporters of President Donald Trump not to vote for Republican Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue in the state’s upcoming runoff elections.”

You might think that after the boondoggle, Republican party leaders would have prevailed on the Donald to keep his nose out of the party’s primaries.

Closer to home, no one is better situated to diagnose the problems of the party in the Donald Trump era than David H. McCormick.

That could be “Pennsylvania Senator David H. McCormick” if a certain Republican president had thrown his weight behind him in the primary

Instead Trump supported a fellow TV star, one who has closer ties to the Garden State than the Keystone State.

“Doctor Oz” - as Mehmet Oz is known – is a Turkish-born physician and reality-TV star who appealed to the reality TV-star now in the White House.

He didn’t appeal to the voters of Pennsylvania, however, but he got the endorsement of the presidential candidate who values personal loyalty over loyalty to the country.

That’s the Donald, of course.

That endorsement got Dr. Oz through the Pennsylvania Republican primary over a Republican with far better qualifications

That’s David H. McCormick. That would be “Senator David H. McCormick” if Trump hadn’t sabotaged his campaign in favor of Oz.

McCormick had it all: West Point grad, Army combat vet, Ph.D from Princeton and so forth.

Best of all, he is from the heartland of Pennsylvania. This is the most insular state in the union.

The Democratic nominee. John Fetterman, also hailed from the heartland. He would have walked all over a carpetbagger like Oz.

But Doctor Oz lost to Fetterman, who ran the race in a hoodie and still wears one on the Senate floor.

“All politics is local,” as the saying goes – and nowhere is it more than in Pennsylvania.

Trump campaigned as if a TV doctor from Bergen County would spark the rubes into voting Republican.

They didn’t – and there went another easily winnable Senate seat.

The weird thing is that Republican leaders didn’t object to Trump’s antics. They were afraid of The Donald’s threat to run candidates against them.

But that threat is becoming emptier by the minute.

If you doubt that, just ask Jeanine Pirro.

No, I’m not talking about Vladimir Putin or Benjamin Netanyahu.

I’m talking about Donald Trump.

The Donald has a nasty habit of helping Democrats defeat Republicans by interfering in House and Senate elections.

The first such instance occurred in Georgia in 2020.

Georgia has a system of holding runoff elections in the event no candidate has a majority.

That was the case in the races for two open U.S. Senate seats. Republicans got majorities, but neither got 50 percent.

It was expected that both would get majorities in the general election races, which are head-to-head contests with no spoilers.

But then the Donald stepped in. His minions told Republican voters to abstain from voting to protest his loss in the presidential race.

In case you’re wondering why they call the Republican Party “the stupid party,” wonder no more.

The Republicans lost both seats and control of the Senate.

One Democrat, Jon Ossoff, retains his seat to this day. He frequently represents the tie-breaking vote on key issues.

At a Trump rally at the time, one speaker proclaimed, “This is Georgia. We ain’t dumb!”

You ain’t?

You could have fooled me.

Neither did the late Lindsey Graham.

Here’s a column I wrote in 2022 making that point.

It was headlined

“On abortion, another gaffe from Graham”

When I wrote the other day about aging politicians and the need for term limits, I wasn’t thinking of Lindsey Graham. But last week the 67-year-old South Carolina senator offered a textbook example of the risks of letting a politician loiter too long in office.

If the nation had adopted the term limits suggested by Newt Gingrich in the 1994 Contract with America, Graham would have reached his two-term limit and gone into retirement in January of 2015.

Instead he hung around long enough to offer the Democrats some of their best talking points in the upcoming midterm elections.

One such gaffe was his statement that Republicans might riot in the streets if Donald Trump is indicted.

Then there’s the abortion issue, Democrats would like nothing more than to be able to convince pro-choice voters that the Supreme Court’s decision to reverse Roe. v. Wade will lead to a national ban.

The decision in the Dobbs case does nothing of the sort. The justices simply said the issue is properly left up to the states.

The idea of states’ rights is a pillar of Republican governance. It’s also very convenient. Republicans can run against abortion in red states and ignore the issue in blue states.

At least they could until Tuesday.

That was when Graham opened his big mouth and proposed a national law banning abortion after the 15^th week of pregnancy.

“Thank you, Senator Lindsey Graham,” said Ray Lesniak. “This is nothing but help for the Democrats.”

Lesniak, no believer in term limits, was a Democratic state senator for 35 years. Now he watches the political scene from his home in Elizabeth.

“The Democrats were trying to make an issue that if the Republicans have control of both houses they are going to impose a national ban on abortion,” Lesniak said. “Now Lindsey Graham has made the case for them.”

The three Democratic Congressional candidates most likely to benefit are incumbents Tom Malinowski, Mikie Sherrill and Josh Gottheimer, he said.

All three hold seats in the northern/northwestern parts of the state that were held by Republicans until a few years ago. Swing districts like these can easily swing on the abortion issue. A lot of pro-choice women in the suburbs were energized by the court decision. The last thing the GOP needed was to energize them any more.

“A national abortion ban basically assures a Democratic wave in New Jersey in the midterm elections,” said Lesniak.

He predicted the Republicans will win only the two Congressional seats in South Jersey they already hold. One of the two, Chris Smith, has been a leading opponent of abortion in the House since 1978 and it hasn’t kept him from getting re-elected. The other, Jeff Van Drew, was given what looks like a safe seat in the recent redistricting.

But Graham’s gaffe will hurt a lot of other Republicans in the blue states. Mitch McConnell quickly reacted to Graham’s proposal by reiterating the Republican position in favor of state rather than federal power.

“Most of the members of my conference prefer that this be dealt with at the state level,” the Senate Republican leader told reporters Tuesday.

Graham seemed unaware that he had trampled on the traditional GOP view of states’ rights. Perhaps he needs to read the dissenting opinions in the 1973 Roe v. Wade case.

Justice Byron White wrote, “This issue, for the most part, should be left with the people and to the political processes the people have devised to govern their affairs.”

The other dissenter, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, looked at the history of the law in question and wrote, “The only conclusion possible from this history is that the drafters did not intend to have the Fourteenth Amendment withdraw from the States the power to legislate with respect to this matter.”

Many conservative legal scholars argue that a federal law banning abortion would also be unconstitutional. That’s another argument that seems to have eluded Graham.

Malinowski’s Republican opponent, former state Senate minority leader Tom Kean Jr., released a statement in response to Graham’s proposed bill saying, “Tom Kean Jr. believes this is an issue best governed at the state level and as such he would not support a federal ban.”

On Malinowski’s website, however, he says, “Republican leaders have promised to pass a nationwide ban on abortion if they regain control of Congress, which would overturn our state law.”

In reality, most Republican leaders agree with Kean and McConnell that this is an issue best left to the states.

But Graham left a large opening for Democrats to exploit. You can hardly blame them for exploiting it.

Apparently the senator wasn’t thinking beyond the borders of South Carolina, which returns him to Senate reliably every six years despite his penchant for putting his loafers between his lips.

Graham might not have made a good argument on abortion.

But he made a heck of an argument for term limits.

I agree, but for a different reason than those critics state.

He’s not losing the ability to run the country?

No. It’s something far worse.

He’s lost his sense of humor.

Being serious is easy

It’s being funny that’s hard.

Back in 2016, when he ran against the humorless Hillary Clinton, Trump was an anything-for-a-laugh kind of guy. He had the comic timing of a stand-up comedian in the mold of the Borscht Belt comics from his native New York.

The Democrats cried foul when he made up funny names for his opponents, like “Pocahontas” the name he gave to another humorless prig in the Democratic Party.

But that joke had a point. It lampooned Elizabeth Warren’s effort to market herself to voters as an American Indian eligible for affirmative action.

The Democrats’ only defense was to argue that politicians should not bring up race at all.

But race is the Democrats’ primary weapon.

So that tactic worked for The Donald.

But now he has descended to the level of the internet commenter.

For years, I’ve been cringing at the nicknames that internet posters give to their political targets.

“T-rump” is not funny even the first time you hear it. Yet Trump-haters hurl it as if it were the most cutting remark they’ve encountered – which it may well be.

But lately Trump competes with them to see who can achieve the lamest insult in politics.

The Donald has decided that from now on he will refer to the Democrats as “Dumocrats.”

Get the joke?

No, you don’t. There is no joke. That and its variant “Democrap” have been around for years without inspiring even a suppressed giggle.

That didn’t stop Trump from polling his Truth Social followers on whether they prefer the nickname “Dumocrat” or “Dumbocrat” for the opposition party/

That’s not funny. And it won’t work for the Republicans in the November elections.

It’s not that nicknames and witticisms don’t work in politics.

Consider the late, unlamented ARC tunnel project – also called “The Tunnel to Macy’s Basement.”

Environmentalist Jeff Tittel thought that label up as a means of lampooning the rerouting of the project.

It was originally intended to connect New Jersey’s rail lines to Grand Central station, from which trains could connect to Connecticut and points north.

But the New Yorkers didn’t want lowly New Jerseyans using their sacred station, even though it has lots of capacity. So our politicians buckled under New York’s pressure and promised to build a new station so far underground that it could only be accessed by a massive new system of elevators and escalators.

But our new governor, Chris Christie, told the New Yorkers they could stick the tunnels where the sun don’t shine. He took the federal aid and spent it on projects on this side of the river.

So Tittel’s witticism worked while Trump’s jokes fall flat,

Tittel told me why.

“It’s okay to be nasty but you have to be funny at the same time,” he said. “When a term is funny it works, but nasty alone doesn’t work.”

Trump’s finding that out concerning his thwarted plan to acquire Greenland.

Being nasty to the Danes, who control Greenland, made them pledge not to sell it to us at any price.

Trump’s bullying tactics just hardened their resolve to hold on to a piece of land that is twice the size of Texas but has a mere 50,000 inhabitants.

Does the Donald know any good Eskimo jokes?

If so, now’s the time to trot them out.

But seriously folks, it’s going to be a long two years after the Midterms.

Whose name springs to mind when you think of a three-time presidential candidate who was described as “a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest.”

Another clue: When things didn’t go this guy’s way, “malicious animal magnetism seemed to radiate from him like heat from a hot stove.’’

And another: “Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.”

If you answered “Donald Trump,” you’ve got the wrong party and the wrong century.

The answer is William Jennings Bryan.

He’s the guy who cut the template for all the populists since, Trump included.

The great H.L. Mencken covered the “Scopes Monkey Trial” in which Bryan acted as the prosecutor in the case against a teacher in Tennessee who had violated a law banning the teaching of evolution.

This was at the end of Bryan’s career, during which he had served as secretary of state in addition to his three runs for president.

His most trenchant bit of oratory was the “Cross of Gold Speech” in which he argued for the Fed to print more money.

He didn’t say “I like the inflation.” But the similarity was what sent me to Mencken’s coverage.

I was not disappointed. The parallels were many. Like Trump, Bryan was a strong proponent of fundamentalism. Also like Trump, he was a teetotaler.

Again like Trump, he was an opponent of militarism – and again like Trump he supported war when it was convenient.

In an editorial the other day, the Wall Street Journal condemned Trump’s cash-grabbing:

“Trump reported about $2.2 billion in income last year,. including $1.2 billion from his crypto businesses alone,” the editorial stated.

The editorial board criticized Trump and his family for “profiting off the presidency in ways that demean the office.”

As for Bryan, he died just five days after the Scopes trial ended.

“Well, we killed the son of a bitch,” Mencken was reported as saying.

Bryan was a mere 65 years old when he died. Trump has made it to 80. And while Bryan did his damage to the Democratic Party, Trump is doing his best to destroy the Republican Party.

“Americans tell pollsters they don’t think they are getting ahead financially,” the Journal stated.

But “The Trump clan is cashing in on the Presidency in big and sketchy ways,” the editorial stated.

When he was younger and had a sense of humor, Trump could mask his greed with humor. But at age 80, he’s channeling the decline of Bryan as described by Mencken.

“He came into life a hero, a Galahad, in bright and shining armor. Now he was passing out a pathetic fool,” Mencken wrote.

Couldn’t have said it better myself

But then nobody could.

The Donald and I go back a long ways.

I’ve been covering him since the speech that marked his entry into politics.

That was in 2011 at the annual meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Customarily, all the presidential hopefuls in the Republican Party make speeches at CPAC, as it’s known, in the year before an election.

The Donald decided to try his luck.

Even back then, he had his basic spiel down pat.

The United States was “the laughing stock of the world,” he said, because of the way we let other nations push us around.

We needed a successful businessman to lead us, but rich guys don’t want to run for president

“Successful people don’t want to be scrutinized and abused,” he said.

That’s a shame because, when it comes to high oil prices, “We have nobody who calls up OPEC and says these prices are coming down.”

Somali pirates?

“Give me one good admiral and blast them out of the water.”

We needed an entrepreneur in the White House, he saud, but “Successful people don’t want to be scrutinized and abused.”

Obamacare was too expensive, but “We’ll replace Obamacare with something better.”

In fact, the inventor of Obamacare ended up on the 2012 Republican ticket.

Barack Obama?

Nope. Mitt Romney.

The idea of a mandatory fee for a private health care plan was pioneered by the then-governor of Massachusetts.

The Obama plan was a carbon copy of Romneycare.

How can you beat the guy who implemented Obamacare by nominating the guy who invented it?

You can’t, as the GOP soon found out.

My Republican friends were of the opinion that voters’ dislike for Obama was so strong that even a stiff like Romney could win.

I recall speaking at a Republican event in Morristown on a panel with Kellyanne Conway.

We were asked our predictions. Conway and another Republican activist predicted an early night for Romney.

I pointed out that the polls showed Obama leading in the swing states.

And that’s how it turned out.

When I think back on it, Trump was thinking the same way when he ran in 2016.

The polls showed the swing states were up for grabs.

Hillary Clinton was too busy planning her victory party to notice.

That’s how we got President Trump.

But his victory came too late. If had entered the race in 2012 he could have served two terms while he was relatively young.

But now he’s just too old.

Having predicted his rise, I’m now stuck observing his fall.

If a Democrat like Obama had pulled some of the self-enriching scams that Trump is pulling, Republicans would have called him the equivalent of a mob boss.

When the Donald was younger, he could have wisecracked his way through these scandals.

But now he’s lost the thing he used to rely on – his sense of humor.

He’s still funny – buy now the joke’s on him.

Hawaii is an expensive place to live. Ever surfer needs a side hustle.

Mine was enrolling in the University of Hawaii and living off my student loan.

But I spent my free time in the ocean.

I didn’t see Chris Butler out there. By that time in 1970, he was busy building his racket.

It was an offshoot of the Hare Krishna movement, which at the time sent armies of chanting supporters onto the sidewalks of Waikiki.

The guru, who also went by the name of Sai, would recruit great numbers of cute haole girls to panhandle from the tourists. Every Sunday evening Sai would have a vegetarian feast at a local Unitarian church. He would recruit more devotees at these feasts.

He would also attract surfers. My fellow watermen and I would listen patiently to Sai’s spiel.

When he was winding down, we’d be the first in line for the food.

I. wish I could recall what he said. But after 12 years of Catholic school, I had developed a talent for shifting my mind into neutral during oratory of any sort.

But it was harmless stuff, every bit as formulaic as the output of the Washington Post editorial board.

So I was a bit taken aback the other day when I read the latest installment in the Post’s jihad against Tulsi Gabbard. It was headlined “Tulsi Gabbard and the mysterious messages that helped shape her career.”

The messages were no mystery to me. The guru formerly known as Sai was promoting the “Hare Krishna” movement, which is an offshoot of the Hindu religion. It was the same stuff I’d heard at Sai’s vegetarian feasts more than 50 years prior.

The mystery is not with Gabbard but with the Post editors.

Why do all these liberals hate Gabbard so much?

During her tenure as Director of National Intelligence, Gabbard was among the loudest voices backing Donald Trump’s position against wars to promote nation-building.

Once elected to a second term, however, Trump began to channel his inner “neo” conservative. Gabbard became a speed bump on the highway to liberal interventionism.

So Trump pushed her out. Instead he took the advice of radical neocons like Laura Loomer.

On her X site Loomer wrote, “All of our enemies love Tulsi Gabbard. She talks a nice talk with the military schtick, but you have to wonder why Russia and Iran love @TulsiGabbard. Disgraceful. No wonder why all of President Trump’s intel reports have been trash. She prepared them. As a Hindu, she should know better.”

As a Jew, Loomer should know better than to tell a Hindu how to behave. It’s the height of rudeness to tell a person how to follow their own religion, especially when that religion has more than a billion adherents.

But Loomer is one of those wannabe right-wingers that we old-time conservatives like to call “Trotskyites.” These characters like to engage in the type of tactics popularized by the commies back before old Leon got the ax.

In Loomer’s case, that meant disrupting a live production of the Shakespeare play “Julius Caesar.”

“This is violence against Donald Trump!” she shrieked as she was being hauled offstage.

“Stop the normalization of political violence against the right! This is unacceptable!”

What’s unacceptable is the idea that such left-wing gutter-dwellers can claim to be conservatives. The media love to term them “ultra-rightists” but they’re lefties at heart.

But why are they so in love with war? Gabbard, who’s seen a lot of it up close in her service career, is solidly antiwar.

I can see why that would upset factions of the GOP. But why do so many Democrats buy into the notion that there is some sort of danger in her views.

The only danger is that we might not get involved in more pointless wars.

And that’s no danger at all.

The rest of the journalists just accepted the administration line: That deal was fatally flawed because it would have lasted only 15 years.

That may have been true. But 15 years is more than zero years.

That’s what the Donald proposed.

And that’s what got him in the mess he’s in today.

If he truly believed starting a war with Iran was the best way to guarantee they’d never get nukes, then why didn’t he invade Iran in his first term?

Instead he left the problem to his successor.

Joe Biden did what he does best – nothing.

If Trump hadn’t trashed the JCPOA he would not now be thrashing around trying to open the Strait of Hormuz. It would already be open.

As for Iran’s stock of highly enriched uranium, that would have been open to international inspection.

Frank von Hippel is a retired physicist from Princeton who worked on crafting the JCPOA. I consulted with him back when Trump was trashing it.

“This may have been popular,” he said when I phoned him the other day. “But I don’t think people understood the benefits of the JCPOA. We managed to prevent a war with Iran.”

Of course, that’s only a benefit if you don’t want a war.

A lot of Americans did want a war – including Trump.

Now he’d be happy to get back to where he was when the US was a signatory to the JCPOA.

He argued at the time that there were problems with compliance by the Iranians under the old deal.

“But Iran was compliant,” von Hippel said. “They were boxed in for 15 years.”

Trump decided to open the box.

That was a big mistake for Pandora.

And an even bigger mistake for Trump.

At a panel in 2012, Bari Weiss said she “got involved in journalism through activism.”

Gee, who would have guessed that?

Well, me for one.

During my many years in the news racket, I’ve met dozens such characters.

I’ve yet to encounter one who met my definition of conservative.

“Conservative activism” is a contradiction in terms, at least when applied to journalism.

The goal of a journalist is to describe things as they are.

The goal of an activist is to change things.

Weiss seems to have run afoul of this in her coverage of the Minneapolis anti-ICE demonstrations.

Her former co-worker at “60 Minutes, Scott Pelley, had this to say about her activism:

“My impression at the time was that she was putting a thumb on the scale on behalf of the administration,” Pelley said. “Constantly looking out for the views of the president.”

President Trump is perfectly capable of looking out for his own views.

He doesn’t need the help of every liberal to ever make a public conversion to conservatism.

Make that “neoconservatism.”

Most conservatives have right-wing views that apply across the political spectrum.

The neocons weight their ideas and activism toward Israel.

That certainly applies to Weiss.

She has made no secret of her promotion of Israeli interests.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that – for an activist.

But that poses problems for a journalist sympathetic to the “America First” view of the world.

Those problems surfaced again this week when the 1967 attack on the U.S.S. Liberty was brought up by conservative Republican Thomas Massie.

The Kentucky congressman wants a new investigation into the attack by Israeli ships and that killed l34 Americans and injured 171.

The Israelis maintain that the daylight attack was a mistake. My sources in the CIA and military intelligence find that laughable.

There was a mistake, all right. They didn’t succeed in sinking the Liberty. If they had, there might not have been any witnesses.

But there were. And they testified the attack was deliberate.

This was during the Six-Day War, before Israel had become a U.S. ally, so the Israelis had the legal right to attack a foreign spy ship.

But why lie about it?

That’s what Massie and other conservatives want to know.

It’s a fair question, one that shows the rift between old fashioned conservatives and “neo” conservatives. Massie intends to bring it up this week in a House hearing attended by some of the Liberty survivors who have testified about the daylight attack.

So that should be fun.

As for the kerfuffle over Weiss and CBS news, I don’t expect much good to come out of it.

The liberals at the network are all yammering on about conservative interference with their reporting. But I never heard these guys protesting interference with conservative writers.

Perhaps that’s because they don’t know any.

Perhaps

Maybe that’s because they don’t know of any.

There is nothing wrong with writing under a pen name, or “nom de plume” if you prefer the French.

I’ve done so several times during my career

One of my favorite pen names was “Moe Just,” combining the French term for precise word selection with the American name of everyone’s favorite of the Three Stooges.

Then there was “Lance A. Boyle.”

If you don’t get that one, better stick to the comics.

But what about “Grant Hollister” and “DJ Lattimore?”

Both have perfectly plausible pen names, but for one thing:

They don’t exist.

They are products of artificial intelligence – AI for short.

The Broward Tribune – a real newspaper in Florida– blew their cover in a recent article about a fake online newspaper:

“Trib reporter Kate Payne reported on Thursday how the site, now offline but partially preserved on the Internet Archive, featured work it claimed was by ‘local journalists,’ but who were actually ‘creations of artificial intelligence – complete with fake headshots and made-up biographies peppered with South Florida cliches, their bylines plastered on articles that were lifted from actual news outlets, recycled through AI and republished.’”

It had to happen, I guess.

But let me state that as a lifelong writer, it’s hard enough to make money competing against people.

The last thing we need is competition from computers.

Once you get the software up and running, articles about subjects like sports and politics can be spit out at no added cost.

Forget benefits and pensions. Machines don’t need them.

This debate has been around for quite some time.

In 2008 we were hearing the same thing about the blogosphere from self-appointed experts like blogger Glenn Reynolds of the Instapundit site:

“When enough bloggers take the leap, and start reporting on the statehouse, city council, courts, etc. firsthand, full-time, then the Big Media will take notice and the avalanche will begin,” Reynolds quoted a fellow blogger as saying.

Reynolds is a lawyer. And lawyers protect themselves from competition through bar associations that restrict entry to the field. Otherwise anyone with a laptop could charge for legal advice.

Back when I used to cover those local boards, I knew as much about the legal issues at hand as the typical municipal attorney.

One difference: He was making $200 an hour and I was making a little over minimum wage. This has led many a journalist to “go over to the dark side,” as the saying goes.

Would I prefer if newspapers had similar barriers to entry? Not at all. That would give even more power to editors.

Editors are one of the reasons newspapers are in such a parlous state. Many of them see their role as ensuring that nothing new gets in the newspaper.

As the great H.L. Mencken once wrote, as journalists age they often become “correct in every idea and hollow as a jug.”

Now they have a new medium with which to echo the establishment.

So keep that in mind as you read the news.

The problem for publishers is that people with professional skills expect to be paid professional salaries.

But now that problem is solved.

So how are readers supposed to determine the veracity of news items in the blogosphere?

Here’s my suggestion:

Take two empty tin cans and connect them with a string.

Give one can to the person you want to talk to.

Speak into the other can.

Now just cut the string before the bloggers find out.

The finals will be held here in Jersey at the Meadowlands.

A lot of amateur epidemiologists have offered their views on what should be done to minimize contact with soccer players who may be infected with ebola.

Here’s my suggestion:

Don’t let them touch the ball with their hands.

What’s that? You say they’ve already got a rule that says players can’t touch the ball?

You gotta be kidding.

Who would think up a sport in which players can’t use the single most important part of the human body?

Scoring would be almost impossible. Who wants to watch a game that ends with scores like 1-0?

It turns out the English do. About 150 years ago the Brits thought up what is called “Association football” –soccer for short.

Also evolving at the same time was rugby, a sport in which the hands are employed not just to touch the ball but to touch other players.

Our own football is a variant of that. It’s the best spectator sport in existence, but you’d have to be nuts to play it.

One of my old high-school buddies made that mistake. He lost a vital organ while tackling a runner. Good thing humans have two kidneys or he’d have died.

When I had that opportunity in high school, I chose cross-country instead. I deduced – accurately – that running is more rewarding if you don’t have people running into you.

Soccer fans don’t see it that way. They get so frustrated by the lack of scoring that they start using their hands. Not to touch the ball, but to fight the fans from the opposing team.

That prompts me to offer a bet. I hereby bet that in the coming weeks ebola will cause less damage to human health than soccer.

How do I know?

Because we went through this same situation in 2014.

Here’s a column I wrote back then: It was headlined “Whatever happened to that ebola epidemic?

The phone rang the other day. It was my old surfing buddy Howie.

We got to talking and I mentioned that my daughter is spending a semester in London. Then she’s flying to South Africa over Christmas with her boyfriend, who grew up in Capetown.

As anyone who ever watched the surf movie “Endless Summer” knows, South Africa has some of the best surf on the planet. So I was taken aback when Howie let loose this line:

“Better her than me. I wouldn’t go to South Africa for a million bucks.”

“Huh?” I said.

“Ebola,” he said.

“Ebola?” I said. “South Africa’s on the other side of the continent from Liberia. Heck, London’s closer to Liberia than Capetown is.”

For that matter, New Jersey’s almost as close to Liberia as South Africa is. Howie didn’t care. He wouldn’t go if you gave him the best condo in Cape Saint Francis.

Where do people get such ideas? Though as a member of the media I hate to admit it, they get them from us. And it’s only gotten worse since the invention of the internet.

I love to read the Drudge Report for laughs. But at the peak of the panic last month, the site had Ebola scare stories lined up like jetliners from Liberia waiting to land.

And then there was talk radio. Last month it was all-Ebola all the time. It got so crazy that at one point I heard an ad from an animal hospital warning people about the risk of Ebola to their pets. They didn’t tell them the risk to their pet is nonexistent – unless of course the pet is an African fruit bat.

All of this alarmism could have been avoided if the media had listened to the actual experts instead of the alarmists. In early October, I asked the head of infectious diseases at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School for a realistic estimate of the risk to Americans.

“In the health care business, you learn never to say never and never to say always,” Dr. Mel Weinstein told me then. “But the risk to the lay public is as close to zero as you can get.”

When I called Weinstein yesterday, he said he was glad to see the media moving on to other topics.

“I think we’ve passed the hysteria stage and are hopefully now in the sanity stage,” he said.

Weinstein pointed out that tropical diseases need tropical conditions to thrive. Here in the temperate zones we should worry more about the diseases that thrive here.

Take for example that other deadly virus that is likely to reach our shores this winter. I learned about it from a long-time critic of journalistic alarmism, Dr. Paul Offit, chief of infectious diseases at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia.

“There will be a virus that will come into this country that will sicken hundreds of thousands of Americans and kill perhaps 10,000,” he said.

The virus in question is influenza. But under that name it doesn’t seem to attract its rightful share of media attention. That gave Offit an idea:

“Maybe if we call it the Gamma Delta 80 virus, ” he suggested.

He proposed that we in the media could then run front-page stories and breathless television reports spreading fear about the threat from Gamma Delta 80.

“Then we’ll announce we have a vaccine that would work against it,” he said.

Of course, we already have that vaccine. It’s called a flu shot. But thanks to the media, many people are busy obsessing about Ebola and ignoring that very real risk.

All of that alarmism had the effect of stigmatizing health workers who took real risks to keep the disease isolated to that small corner of the African continent, he said.

“They go into an area where they at risk of contracting a fatal infection,” Offit said. “They should be treated like heroes not like lepers.”

That’s especially true of that nurse from Maine who was detained at Newark Airport thanks to a couple of governors who were looking for some headlines.

“Certainly the way that nurse was treated was abysmal,” said Offit.

It certainly was. But the polls showed the people approved. How could they disapprove after all that nonstop media hype?

“What chiefly distinguishes the daily press of the United States from the press of all other countries pretending to culture,” the great H.L. Mencken once wrote, “is its constant effort to evade the discussion of all fundamentals by translating all issues into a few elemental fears.”

Or in other words, here in the Home of the Brave you’ll never go broke selling fear.

He’s fooled the gringos once and he’s still fooling them from the grave

But he never fooled me

I’m talking about Fidel Castro

I followed that power-mad porch-climber from the beginning, when he was on TV with Jack Paar, who was Johnny Carson’s predecessor on the Tonight Show back in the early 1960s.

Paar nodded as Castro was telling us what a nice guy he was, certainly not a communist.

There was a problem: Also on TV at the time were news reports of his firing squads dispatching the losers in the coup that brought him to power.

The evening news would show the poor guys saying their final confessions and getting the last rites before heading off to face execution.

I was just 9 years old at the time, but I concluded that the man responsible for having those unarmed men shot was an evil man.

Nothing that has happened since has caused me to change my mind, certainly not the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Here was a guy who was willing to kill me and everyone I knew to impose his vision of socialism on the world.

Also on TV with Castro back then was Ed Sullivan.

Here’s a snippet of dialogue:

SULLIVAN: In Latin American countries, over and over again, dictators will come along. They rape the country; they have stolen the money, millions and millions of dollars; tortured and killed people. How do you propose to end that here in Cuba?

CASTRO: Very easy: not permitting any dictatorship to come again to rule our country.

At the time, Castro was turning Cuba into a single-party dictatorship.

Yet American liberals still made excuses for him and his brother Raul, who was his partner in crime.

They still do.

Not for long, perhaps. On Wednesday, federal officials announced that the U.S. has issued arrest warrants in the 1996 shootdown of Brothers to the Rescue.

Like his brother, Raul has a penchant for killing unarmed men. Sending heavily armed MiGs after propeller planes was his style.

This won’t be as easy as grabbing Maduro

The Cuban Communists have threatened all sorts of violent reprisals. We’ve lost the element of surprise.

But don’t count the Donald out. If he could clear the hemisphere of commies, that alone would make his second term a success.

Plus, it will be wonderful to hear all the liberal Democrats try to defend cold-blooded murder.

They’ve had plenty of practice.

It was a poem about the man who had been appointed Pope Paul VI.

An excerpt:

“A sheriff could never subpoeni
“Giovanni Battista Montini;
“No one would ever dare quibble
“With someone who’s infallibibble.”

Many a truth is said in jest, and that was one.

But Donald Trump was serious.

Where did the Donald get the idea to start a fight with the leader of the most popular religion on the planet?

And when it comes to dumb ideas about religion, why did he fill his administration with dullards like JD Vance?

Vance makes much of his conversion to Catholicism six years ago, but he evidently never read the Catechism.

I did. Over and over in my 12 years of Catholic school.

I’m talking about the doctrine of papal infallibility. The Catechism tells us the Pope is infallible when speaking on matters of faith and morals.

No one ever made that claim about the politician who joked about grabbing women by the pussy.

Vance, however, warns Pope Leo to “be careful” regarding comments about theology and “stick to matters of morality.”

The self-proclaimed “hillbilly” vice president clearly has no idea that Leo could excommunicate him at will if he so desired, thus ending his political career.

Instead, Leo welcomed a visit from the man who is apparently the sole genuine Catholic in Trump’s social circle. That’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio. He was born into a Cuban family and was baptized as a Catholic.

He spent a few years as a Mormon, but for political purposes that’s a plus.

The key is that Rubio knows how to treat the Pope – like royalty, only better.

Just listen and nod your approval.

Trump couldn’t quite master that.

Instead he started a debate with the Pope and - even worse - lied about him.

“I think he’s endangering a lot of Catholics and a lot of people,” Trump said in a recent interview. “But I guess if it’s up to the pope, he thinks it’s just fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”

Leo said no such thing. He has said that he thinks all nuclear weapons should be banned. But that’s the opposite of what Trump accused him of saying.

In the good old days about 1,000 years ago, such a lie could get an apostate burned at the stake.

Now the punishment is simply getting burned in the polls.

Plenty of Catholics were upset about his attack on their leader.

But is there is a single voter who will now pull the lever for Republicans because of it?

He’s already got the support of the Catholic-haters out there.

Recently he linked to a clip from one of the biggest Catholic-haters, evangelical pastor Robert Jeffress, saying “President Trump has a better understanding of what the Bible teaches about the role of government than the pope has.”

As the old saying goes, “With friends like that, who needs enemies?”

Trump isn’t up for election. It’s his fellow Republicans who have to deal with the aftermath of his stupidity.

Vance is likely the biggest victim. He violated that rule of religion that states that recent converts should be seen and not heard.

If the vice-president wants to communicate his views on religion, I know an Irish bar in San Francisco that might have some space on the men’s room wall.

If he really wants to quibble with someone who’s infallibibble, that’s the place for it.

Therefore I did not automatically dismiss the views of Paul Ehrlich after I read in his book “The Population Bomb” in 1969.

That was a good time to promote apocalyptic visions.

Ehrlich didn’t disappoint.

The book predicted that overpopulation would cause deaths in the millions.

He was still at it by the time Barack Obama came into office. One of his acolytes by the name of John Holdren was named as Obama’s chief science adviser despite his 1986 prediction that a billion people could die due to climate change by 2020.

That sort of thing outraged both liberals and conservatives. But as one obituary stated after Ehrlich died last week at the age of 93, stated, he was “’Fearlessly unconventional’ with a mischievous wit.”

I wonder where he got that. Perhaps it was in Maplewood, where he grew up and went to school.

He ended up at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, where he was a professor for the rest of his life.

I went to college at Berkeley, which is just up the freeway from Stanford.

So we had something in common:

Traffic.

Whether you’re driving on a California freeway or the Garden State Parkway, the traffic is horrendous. And it’s getting worse by the minute thanks to population growth.

I have fond memories of tearing along the two-lane roads in what is now known as Silicon Valley on a motorcycle, leaning it over left, then to the right- with no traffic to slow things down.

California was a pristine paradise back then. Everybody wanted to live there.

That’s the problem.

Now they want to escape.

But it will just get worse as population grows.

The same is true of the Parkway.

When I started at the Ledger in 1995, I could head home at 5 p.m. and count on traveling at 70 mph or so. Now it’s bumper-to-bumper.

If anyone should know that it’s Kamala Harris, who grew up in Berkeley

Here’s a column I did in 2024 on Harris in which I quoted Ehrlich After you read it, do a search on his name,

Prepare to be outraged:

A wise man once said that a gaffe is what happens when a politician accidentally gets caught telling the truth,

That seems to be what happened Friday when Vice President Kamala Harris addressed a conference on climate change in Baltimore.

After describing the Biden administration’s plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions 50 percent by 2030 and reach net-zero emissions by 2050, Harris said, “When we invest in clean energy and electric vehicles and reduce population, more of our children can breathe clean air and drink clean water,”

A video of the speech shows the crowd breaking out in applause as Harris nods approvingly.

The White House wasn’t so happy. Population reduction is the real third rail of American politics. The Harris media people soon released a corrected version of the transcript with the word “pollution” where “population” had been.

But one expert on population growth preferred the text as delivered.

That’s Paul Ehrlich. He’s the biologist who got the population debate going with his 1968 book “The Population Bomb.”

“She’s absolutely correct,” the 91-year-old Ehrlich told me when I called him at his home in Palo Alto, Calif.

“This is super-important, and it’s exactly the thing idiots hate because they don’t have a clue how the world works,” Ehrlich said.

“Infinite growth on a finite planet is insanity. You can’t grow perpetually.”

That’s certainly true. But when that book came out, Ehrlich got a lot of flack from both right and left. Some of his gloomier warnings failed to come to fruition, such as his 1968 prediction that “By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people.”

But closer to home – his home – the San Francisco Bay Area is now overrun with homeless people. Ehrlich, a long-ago graduate of Columbia High School in Maplewood, recalled that when he and his wife first arrived in Palo Alto in 1959, “We drove through orchards to get to the one restaurant we could afford.”

I first went to the Bay Area in 1968. There were lots of open spaces and few traffic jams.

These days, those country roads are now boulevards with rush-hour traffic from dawn to dusk.

The population question has been kicked around in California since before Ehrlich’s book came out. In 1966, Sierra Club Executive Director David Brower opposed nuclear energy not on safety grounds but on the grounds that it would encourage more people to move to California.

“If a doubling of the state’s population in the next 20 years is encouraged by providing the power resources for this growth, California’s scenic character will be destroyed,” Brower warned.

He got that right. California’s population has more than doubled since then and its scenic character sure isn’t what it used to be.

But the bigger question concerns population growth overseas. Ehrlich is among many scientists who argue that population growth in countries such as India and China will negate any efforts Americans make to combat climate change.

Another is Ben Zuckerman. He’s an astronomy professor at UCLA who parted ways with the Sierra Club over his call for immigration restrictions.

“I just can’t understand it,” Zuckerman told me. “It’s just beyond me the lack of attention to population on the part of people who claim to care about the environment. It’s just mind-boggling.”

It certainly boggles my mind. But then I’m a misanthrope. I prefer comedian Bill Maher’s views on the subject. On a recent show, Maher gave an eight-minute spiel in favor of population reduction:

“There just is no there there to the argument that we can keep adding people without consequences,” said Maher. “The argument is the same one people use for Bitcoin: We haven’t thought it through, but who cares?’

His audience was as receptive as the vice president’s

But a comedian can get away with things that a politician can’t

A more skilled politician would have caught the misreading right away, and said something like, “Sorry, I meant pollution reduction.”

But Harris just nodded her head and accepted that applause.

That permitted commentators on the right to assume the worst.

“Reduce population’ @VP what do you mean by reduce population? Abortion? Assisted suicide? Or what means are you suggesting to reduce population in order to help public health?” wrote Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.

I sincerely doubt that’s what Harris was thinking.

But looking at that video, I have to wonder if she was thinking at all.

But my friend Zeke is a connoisseur of the genre.

That’s how I ended up conversing with one of the most fascinating women I ever met.

She was a dancer at a bar in an old hotel in Montreal where Zeke and I were staying.

She wasn’t fascinating because she was nude.

She was fascinating because of her political background.

I learned about that when I began chatting with her during her break.

I had assumed she was French. But she said she wasn’t.

“I’m from a different country, a country you Americans don’t like,” she said.

“Iran?” I asked.

She said yes.

This was interesting to me. In a place like Montreal, you can interview a naked woman every day. But a refugee from Iran? That’s a real find.

After she put on her robe, as go-go dancers do when not performing , she told me that, like a lot of young people in Iran back then, she found life under the Shah oppressive.

They were right about that. But they were wrong about what would follow once the Shah was deposed.

So was Jimmy Carter.

The term“regime change” was not common in the late 1970s. But the delusion was.

The student radicals in both Iran and America were of the opinion that once a dictatorship fell, democracy grew to fill the vacuum.

Recent history teaches otherwise. In places like Iran and Afghanistan, dictators were replaced by dictators that were even worse.

The religious zealots that followed the ayatollah imposed a regime that was infinitely worse than what had come before.

Women like my dancer friend soon found they had to wear burqas whenever they went outside.

The student radicals hadn’t signed up for that. She left Iran for Canada. That’s how she ended up nude dancing.

I asked her what her family would do if they knew she what she did for a living.

“They’d kill me,” she said.

But there are 6,000 miles between Tehran and Quebec. So she was safe in Canada.

No thanks to Jimmy Carter.

If he had been smarter – or perhaps more cynical – he would have realized that he became president at a time of unique opportunity.

The Soviets were also threatened by an uprising of their Islamic radicals, in Afghanistan.

The deal with the Soviets would have been simple.

You beat up your religious zealots and we’ll beat up ours.

We’ll both be happy.

Instead, Jimmy issued the weakest move in international politics. He boycotted the 1980 Olympics.

He also proposed instituting gas rationing.

That move was rejected even by his own party.

The federal government was still imposing price controls on gas. The result was gas lines that stretched for blocks.

American drivers revolted.

In the 1980 election they replaced Carter with Ronald Reagan.

And the rest is history – sad history for the regime-change crowd.

It’s hard to come across an illustration of a St. Bernard without a small wooden keg under his collar.

That keg was a mystery to my friends and me when we were kids. What was the dog going to do with that booze?

Drink it?

Nope. Turns out it was for the lost humans the dog was sent to rescue.

But why would a rescuer carry hard liquor?

For the same reason sailing ships carried rum:

Because it’s the most efficient way to carry a big supply of energy in a small container.

The math is simple. There are just four sources of energy available for the human body.

Both protein and carbohydrates are relatively weak sources of energy at a mere four calories per gram.

Fat is the most powerful source of energy at nine calories per gram. But it has to be stored under refrigeration or it will go bad.

But alcohol has seven calories per gram – and it doesn’t require refrigeration. That makes it the No. 1 energy source for survival in tough conditions.

Of course, it’s also the No. 1 energy source for pleasant conditions, such as in a hammock under a tropical palm tree.

What’s not to like?

There is a coterie of health professionals who proclaim that alcohol is a deadly poison, so deadly that no one should chance consumption even in tiny amounts.

Never mind that mainstream medical studies show that people who use alcohol in moderate amounts actually live as long as teetotalers, if not longer.

That doesn’t dissuade these self-appointed experts from seizing on remote threats to advise against any alcohol use whatsoever.

These threats typically come from cancer centers, i.e. from people whose income depends on the threat of cancer.

“The important thing to remember is that every time you drink, you increase your cancer risk,” says one such scold.

“As with cigarettes and processed meat, there is no safe amount of alcohol,” she says.

There is no safe amount of air either, but that’s no reason to stop breathing.

In a prior life as a science writer, I used to read a lot of health studies.

Contrary to popular belief, these studies are not difficult to comprehend. And their authors will often take a phone call from anyone with a sincere interest in explaining their content.

That led me to formulate what I call Mulshine’s Rule. It’s a handy tool for determining the risks of various activities.

Let’s look at two of the most common mood-altering substances, alcohol and nicotine.

Let me first factor out cigarettes. If you are dumb enough to smoke them, what you’re taking into your lungs is primarily dried tobacco leaves, not nicotine.

Cigars are different. Cigar smokers generally don’t take the smoke into their lungs, and the threat of cancer is greatly reduced. So that provides a better basis for comparison.

In that case, a search through the medical literature will tell you that you should avoid alcohol because it speeds up your circulation. But you should avoid nicotine because it slows down your circulation.

The error here is a simple one. These scolds are analyzing a dynamic system as if it were a static system.

Yes, studies may show a negative health effect from alcohol if considered in isolation.

But that ignores the great health benefits that come with alcohol.

It turns out that consuming alcohol is the easiest and quickest way to raise your blood levels of the good cholesterol HDL, which clears the bloodstream of the bad cholesterol called LDL, which clogs the arteries. And heart disease is the leading cause of death in America.

So that presents a simple solution:

Just have a cigar while you drink your IPA.

And bring along a keg of whiskey – just in case.

Donald Trump needs to change his campaign theme music

In most of the Trump rallies I have covered over the years, Trump has walked off to the strains of the Rolling Stones’ playing “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”

He’s certainly proved that after that Supreme Court ruling on his tariff plan.

Let me propose a new tune.

How about “The End” by the Doors?

That ruling ended Trump’s hopes of imposing what’s termed the “unitary executive” on the federal government.

Under that theory the president can usurp the powers of the legislative and the judiciary whenever the president is in the mood.

In the 6-3 ruling, the court restored the good, old-fashioned doctrine of the separation of powers.

The power to tax belongs to Congress, the decision states.

If the president wants to raise taxes, he has to ask Congress to do it. He can’t just do it on his own.

But what if it’s an emergency?

It ain’t, said the majority decision. It’s just normal, everyday lawmaking, which is the power of Congress, not the chief executive.

If the president wants to impose tariffs, he can prevail on the voters to elect representatives in November who will do so.

That’s a trap.

“Elect me in November and I’ll raise your taxes,” is hardly a winning message – especially for Republicans.

“If you own a small business, I’ll make you comply with mountains of paperwork as well.”

That’s the rest of the message.

Small business – not the MAGA movement – is and always has been the base of the GOP

And in this case, it was a small business that toppled Big Government.

The plaintiff in the case was a wine importer by the name of Victor Schwartz of VOS Selections.

CNN Business had an excellent piece quoting the owner on the effect Trump’s tariffs would have on his business:

The article noted that VOS imports wine and spirits from 16 countries.

The article said of Schwartz, “He is no stranger to the nation’s complex tariff code and how quickly rates can change, especially when Trump is in office.

So much for the idea that Trump is a conservative. He’s shown himself to be a classic tax-and-spend liberal.

But the tax he wants to collect is so convoluted that even his own administration can’t calculate it.

“The bills are sudden and jarring: $5,558 for a $300 shipment from Japan, $1,300 for $65 worth of items, and fees that often make no mathematical sense,’ said one report.

The problem is simple, though not perhaps simple enough for a simpleton like The Donald.

He keeps harking back to the good old days before the income tax, when tariffs paid the cost of government.

But collecting the revenue was simple back then. Everything had to move either on a road or through a port.

The taxman lurks in wait.

“Toll to the troll” - as the saying goes..

These days, imports come in all different ways. How do you tax a car that has 49 percent imported parts? An electric item with parts from 12 countries.

That great conservative humorist P.J, O’Rourke addressed that in a piece titled “Terror of the Euro-weenies.”

In Europe, he wrote, “you can’t swing a cat without putting it through customs.”

Trump is doing his best to turn us all into a nation of weenies.

Thank God for the separation of powers.

Now if only someone can explain it to the Donald.

And thank God he has no idea what it is,