Free Republic

The federal indictment of New York’s attorney general centers on a home she purchased for a relative. It is an act that rings deeply familiar to many.To some Black families, it was an intimately familiar arrangement.A woman whose parents fled a life of sharecropping in the South was among the first in her family to achieve a prestigious career. She extended her help to relatives who had less, even buying a home for a grandniece in need of stability.The house sits at the center of the indictment of Letitia James, the New York attorney general, by the Justice Department. She...

Free trade has been so beneficial to so many countries that the world may find a way to live without its biggest player.President Trump’s self-proclaimed “liberation day,” in which he announced across-the-board tariffs on the United States’ trading partners, carries an echo of another moment when an advanced Western economy threw up walls around itself.Like Brexit, Britain’s fateful vote nearly nine years ago to leave the European Union, Mr. Trump’s tariffs struck a hammer blow at the established order. He is pulling the United States out of the global economy much as Britain withdrew from a continentwide trading bloc, in...

When I was starting out as a Chicago City Hall reporter for that big metropolitan paper—when we could smoke in newsrooms on deadline, curse, tell jokes, laugh and wore jackets and ties to work—I had one rule. I’d often discuss this rule with my political sources, elected officials, cops, city workers and others: Lie to me just once, just once, and I’ll burn you to the ground. It wasn’t an empty threat. Chicago politics wasn’t a cloistered convent. It was and remains a place of thieves protected by the laws and regulations that they themselves controlled. It is a Democrat...