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The President and the Pope

Call him the “antisocial” media president. When a president attacks the Pope, he telegraphs: “There’s nothing I won’t do or say.” That is a profoundly troubling message. There are no lines I won’t cross, no rules I won’t break, President Donald Trump is telling the whole wide world. Nobody is safe nor sacred in my book. Got it? And the White House press corps meekly accepts that. The worse Trump gets, the worse Trump gets, in a vortex of flexing power and expressing anger. This week he insulted the Roman Catholic Church and its 1.4 billion members. Last week, he ...

Dear Annie: The uneven split

Dear Annie: My friend insists on splitting every restaurant bill “evenly,” no matter what. The problem is, she always orders cocktails and appetizers, while I usually stick to one entree. Last week, my $22 dinner somehow became $48 after the “split.” When I suggested we each pay for what we ordered, she laughed and said, “That’s so much more complicated.” I like spending time with her, but I’m starting to dread going out to eat. How do I bring this up without sounding cheap? — Tired of Picking Up the Tab Dear Tired: There are plenty of ways to split a bill that ...

Man gets diagnosed with PSC, which then morphed into cancer

DEAR DR. ROACH: No parent should ever outlive their children. A couple of years ago, my son, who is now approaching 54 years young, was diagnosed with what I am told is an extremely rare illness called primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC). Since he required special bile duct tubes to be installed and repeatedly changed out, he had been waiting for a proper liver transplant. When this was finally about to happen, the disease apparently morphed into abdominal cancer, thus rendering the (long-awaited) liver transplant no longer viable. I had never heard of this illness before, but ...

Little kids, big government

Child care got expensive — more than $13,000 per child, per year. So many people want government to pay for it. My state just agreed. New York will fund free child care. Yay! But wait ... what government does isn’t free. Taxpayers pay. And taxpayers pay more because “government rules have unintended consequences,” says Carrie Lukas of the Independent Women’s Forum. Washington, D.C. day care teachers must have a degree in Early Childhood Education. That can take two years and cost $22,000. “Of course you’re going to have to pay a lot more,” says Lukas in my ...

What the end of Viktor Orban means for the New Right

Viktor Orban, the proudly “illiberal” prime minister of Hungary, beloved by various New Right nationalists and MAGA American intellectuals, was crushed at the polls this weekend. Over the last decade or so, Hungary became for the New Right what Sweden or Cuba were to the Old Left. For generations, various American leftists loved to cite the Cuban model as better than ours when it came to healthcare, or education. Some would even make wild claims about freedom under Fidel Castro’s dictatorship. Susan Sontag famously proclaimed in 1969 that no Cuban writer “has been or is in jail ...

Dear Annie: Resetting a pandemic friendship

Dear Annie: My neighbor and I became friendly during the pandemic. We’d pick up things for each other at the grocery store, help water each other’s plants, chat on our porches in the evening. Somewhere along the way, she decided we were much closer than I did. Now she’ll drop by unannounced and even text things like, “I miss you, haven’t seen you today!” if I don’t respond quickly. This type of thing was fine when we were all locked at home, but we’re not living in a pandemic anymore. I’m too busy to entertain her all the time. She’s a really nice woman, but ...