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A look inside New Jersey’s wind-powered energy debacle

Columns

In one of his classic New Jersey ballads, Bruce Springsteen sings of the sun “rising over them refinery towers.” If New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy had gotten his way, the Boss would need to update the lyric to rhapsodize about enormous wind turbines looming on the horizon instead. Murphy’s obsession with wind power is one of the reasons that the state’s gubernatorial race is competitive and Republican Jack Ciattrelli has a chance to upset Murphy’s potential Democratic successor Mikie Sherrill in a much-watched off-year election. Gov. Murphy brought a European-style ...

Let’s legalize catastrophic health insurance for all

Columns

The government shutdown has focused debate on the vast sum ($136 billion in 2025, as projected by the Congressional Budget Office) that the federal government spends to annually subsize continually skyrocketing Obamacare health insurance premiums. The Wall Street Journal reports that regardless of how that fiscal tug-of- war turns out, health insurance premiums paid by Americans are expected to rise another 8% or 9% next year. One reason health care costs are rising at two to three times the cost of everything else is that the entire insurance market is dysfunctional. Most ...

The big question remains: Which kind of country will we be?

Columns

My two boys recently got new passports. The little books are gorgeously designed. On thick paper, drawings are etched of wheat fields and farmers, statues and monuments. Quotes from great Americans — former Presidents George Washington, Theodore Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, as well as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — top each page. The security measures are a marvel of modern ingenuity: Watermarks and holograms, color-changing ink, stamps and microtext. Combined, it represents a vision of what the United States of America is, or, increasingly, what it should be. Admiring the ...

Finding ways to protect your inner peace

Columns

The first week of October was Mental Illness Awareness Week, a designation by Congress since 1990 in recognition of the ongoing work of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. To help bring more understanding of the seriousness of emotional challenges that many people face, the American Behavioral Clinics shared on their website that the number of U.S. adults suffering from “a diagnosable mental illness every year” exceeds 25% and that “45% of these diagnosable adults” could also have more than two mental health disorders. The website includes links where people can schedule ...

Mamdani thinks he has integrity: He doesn’t

Columns

Zohran Mamdani’s alleged zinger in last week’s New York mayoral debate was a claim that he had “integrity” and his chief opponent, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, did not. The people know Cuomo’s glories and missteps. But many have been TikTok-ed out of recognizing Mamdani’s two-faced candidacy displaying more calculation than conviction. Start with the New York City Police Department. In June 2020, Mamdani tweeted: “We don’t need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety. What we need is to #DefundTheNYPD.” He tweeted, ...

Trump has shown he is really able to defy conventional wisdom ... so far

Columns

“What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.” That was the mordant comment of Lord Melbourne, Queen Victoria’s first prime minister, on the failure of a liberal reform to achieve the results promised with great assurance by the articulate liberal eminences of the day. With two centuries of foresight, he might just as well have been describing President Donald Trump’s triumph, celebrated “in a state of ecstasy” in Israel’s Knesset, as he secured the release of hostages held by Hamas for two years and ...