STOP TALKING, TAKE AN ECON CLASS
“The Germans are bad, very bad,” Trump told EU Commissioner Jean‐​Claude Juncker and European Council president Donald Tusk, according to German news magazine Der Spiegel… .

“Look at the millions of cars they’re selling in the U.S. Terrible. We will stop this,” Trump reportedly said of the Germans.
—USA TODAY, MAY 25, 2017

THEY CAN’T EVEN PLAN FOR THEIR OWN SURVIVAL
Probably the most fraught 24 hours in the history of COG [continuity of government] worrying occurred on Sept. 11, 2001, when al Qaeda terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. COG projects and training had been ceaselessly initiated and honed for a half‐​century; but, as [author Garrett] Graff writes with impressive understatement, “the U.S. government [wasn’t] prepared very well at all.” …

While Vice President Dick Cheney had been swiftly hustled to the White House bunker, “those officials outside the bunker, even high‐​ranking ones, had little sense of where to go, whom to call, or how to connect back to the government,” Mr. Graff writes. But there were enough people in the bunker to deplete the oxygen supply and raise the carbon‐​dioxide level, and so “nonessential staff” were ordered to leave.…

“Air Force One’s limitations”—it wasn’t one of the Doomsday planes—“came into stark relief.” For one thing, the plane’s communications systems were woefully inadequate for what was required on 9/11. “On the worst day in modern U. S. history,” Mr. Graff writes … “the president of the United States was, unbelievably, often less informed than a normal civilian sitting at home watching cable news.”
—WALL STREET JOURNAL, MAY 5, 2017

SOMEONE HAS MISLED POPE FRANCIS ABOUT LIBERTY, LIBERTARIANISM, CIVIL SOCIETY, AND HOW TO ALLEVIATE POVERTY
Finally, I cannot but speak of the serious risks associated with the invasion, at high levels of culture and education in both universities and in schools, of positions of libertarian individualism.…

The radicalization of individualism in libertarian and therefore anti‐​social terms leads to the conclusion that everyone has the “right” to expand as far as his power allows, even at the expense of the exclusion and marginalization of the most vulnerable majority.
—POPE FRANCIS, MESSAGE TO THE PLENARY SESSION OF THE PONTIFICAL ACADEMY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES, APRIL 28, 2017

LEGISLATORS WILL GO ANYWHERE, ANYTIME, TO HELP THE PEOPLE
Nine of the 13 D.C. Council members, along with Mayor Muriel E. Bowser and city staff, were returning Tuesday from three days of socializing and meeting in Las Vegas with real estate developers and major retailers. A record number of city lawmakers flew to Vegas, most, if not all, at taxpayer expense, for the annual conference hosted by the International Council of Shopping Centers, which bills itself as the world’s largest gathering of retail companies.

Bowser (D) and the council members threw a party—funded in part with tax dollars—at the plush Foxtail Nightclub on Sunday night… .

By several estimates, the District’s contingent of taxpayer‐​funded lawmakers and staffers was the largest of any city… .

Few of the nation’s top 20 cities sent representatives, according to lists of attendees on the ICSC website.
—WASHINGTON POST, MAY 23, 2017

PRESUMABLY A COMPASSIONATE REPUBLICAN IS ONE WHO GIVES HER OWN MONEY TO CHARITY?
Former Miami‐​Dade School Board member Raquel Regalado announced her candidacy for outgoing Rep. Ileana RosLehtinen’s seat in Florida’s 27th Congressional District in 2018.…

Regalado … calls herself a “compassionate Republican.”
—ROLL CALL, MAY 24, 2017

THINGS ONLY AN INTELLECTUAL COULD SAY
[Hugh] Thomas was best known for a series of books about the Spanish‐​speaking world, including a monumental, 1,700-page history of Cuba, published in 1971.…

His history of Cuba was sometimes criticized for being too harsh on the communist economic policies of Fidel Castro.
—WASHINGTON POST, MAY 13, 2017