Among the many distressing aspects of the presidential impeachment now underway is the perception that extorting a foreign leader to investigate the President’s rivals is unsavory but not important enough to merit impeachment. The President’s defenders are pushing this specious line unrelentingly presumably because they think a lot of people will accept it.  This totally outrages me, but paradoxically, our era of far less crime—and far less crime committed by public officials—may have led … [Read more...]

  If you missed it, it’s worth catching up on the brilliant Emily Badger’s Upshot column in the New York Times that appealingly focuses on cities scared of becoming Manhattanized, or San Franciscoed, or Seattleified. These cities create a great deal of wealth and tens of thousands of jobs that pay six figures. But they are all unaffordable, afflicted with homelessness, and strangled by traffic. Wealth needn’t come at so high a price. The cities and their high-paying … [Read more...]

New York subway delays became epidemic this summer and emergency repairs at Penn Station snarled commuter traffic. A recent column by the NYT’s Michael Kimmelman ruminated on these transit woes and . . . Brexit. The column looked at London’s Crossrail—a $20-billion expansion of the city’s crowded transit system that is a heroic feat of engineering and said to be the largest infrastructure project in Europe. It’s an important story for Americans, who simply cannot competently build complex … [Read more...]