There’s a disconnect between the Republican Party leadership, President Trump, conservatives in the House, practical dealmakers in the Senate and those hard-core working-class voters who supported Trump’s election chiefly based on their hatred for President Obama.　　In fact, there are so many disconnections that Republicans’ plans to dismantle the Affordable Care Act are starting to be reminiscent of a shade-tree mechanic who boasts as he takes apart a motor -- and then has no idea how to put it

Last week’s “A Day Without a Woman” truly bothered me, as did last month’s “A Day Without Immigrants,” but I could not place why.　But as I pondered my new role as “The Grinch Who Stole ‘A Day Without’” on the train, a realization was knocked loose from the back of my mind: I really take issue with just one word: “without.”　　For so many of our boardrooms and operating rooms, battalions and bylines, every day is a day without women. And immigrants. And people of color. And so many other groups who

Former Russian domestic intelligence officer Dmitry Dokuchaev won’t appear in a US court to face charges related to the mass 2014 hacking of the Yahoo user database. That’s because he already sits in a Moscow jail, accused of treason. Dokuchaev’s rare achievement in being wanted by both the US and Russian authorities sheds light on what is widely said in the West to be “state-sponsored Russian hacking,” but would more accurately be described as a combination of freelance theft and a concept know

President Donald Trump is a populist, a mix of conservative and liberal, and while the conservative side of him is already making the economy sparkle, the liberal side threatens its future. How things play out is anyone’s guess, but right now we can all celebrate a great February jobs report on top of high consumer confidence and zooming stocks.　　The heartening jobs data -- 235,000 new ways for Americans to earn a living -- was accompanied by a slight fall in unemployment rates and a slight budg

At a meeting with small-business leaders last week, President Donald Trump pledged to do “a big number” on the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, which he blamed for cutting off the bank lending needed for growth. “It’s almost impossible now to start a small business and it’s virtually impossible to expand your existing business,” he said.　Trump is wrong about small-business starts. Since early 2010, new business creation has rebounded.　But he’s right, albeit with a whiff of exaggeration, that it’s harder to

Democrats trust only Democratic-approved media sources, and Republicans trust only Republican-approved media sources. Perhaps the only medium that both Democrats and Republicans will accept as a valid source of information is … the stock market.　With the stock market, there is a price at which one can buy or sell. And that’s that. No alleging that Fox News peddles “alternative facts,” or MSNBC spins.　Additionally, for anyone with their wealth in financial assets, movement in the stock market aff

President Donald Trump’s unwarranted anti-Muslim ban imposed on refugees, immigrants and visitors from seven mostly impoverished and war-torn countries contained an extraordinary clause exempting Christians from these same countries from its draconian sway.　Trump then doubled-down with a tweet the following day: “Christians in the Middle-East have been executed in large numbers. We cannot allow this horror to continue!”　The cynical executive order is not only blatantly discriminatory, but it pla

Do humans act largely rationally, or can stories and rumors throw an entire economy off course? Lately, economists are increasingly recognizing that narratives matter.In the early 1920s, the US suffered a brutally sharp economic contraction, in which inflation turned rapidly to deflation and stock price-to-earnings ratios dropped to 50-year lows. The economists Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz, in their book “Monetary History of the United States,” blamed an inexperienced Federal Reserve, which