Author: Kelly Sloan

Kelly Sloan In a better and more ordered world, Mike Pence would be the automatic frontrunner in the Republican presidential primary. The former vice president is everything that, at least once upon a time, one would look for in a Republican presidential candidate. His conservatism is unquestioned, across the board, and intellectually rigorous, and he…

Kelly Sloan It came as perhaps something of a relief, if not much of a surprise, that Speaker Kevin McCarthy and the White House arrived at a debt ceiling deal last weekend. On the balance, the GOP did reasonably well on the negotiations this time. The fact that both the hard right and the progressives…

Kelly Sloan Tim Scott threw his name into the presidential ring earlier this week, and it’s encouraging to note the generally positive reaction from Republicans, accounting, of course, for the 5-to-7-day honeymoon period that customarily follows such an announcement. Encouraging, because the good senator from South Carolina is a very attractive candidate: intelligent, well-spoken, infectiously…

Kelly Sloan May 2023 greeted America with the story of the death of Jordan Neely, a mentally ill homeless man who was acting erratically and violently toward passengers on an New York subway, where erratic and violent behavior has become de rigueur since New York decided that the anti-crime policies of the late 1990s and…

Kelly Sloan The perennial fights in Washington D.C. over the extension of the debt limit have become routine, and on the whole rather boring. They generally go something like this: Congress spends enough money that it finds itself approaching a breach in the debt ceiling. The consequences of this (they are real) are shouted from…

Kelly Sloan Democrats on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, despairing of anything else to do with their time, held another hearing earlier this week, ostensibly on Supreme Court ethics. This came after a series of articles published by ProPublica which revealed, to the dismay of the Democratic Committee members, that Justice Clarence Thomas has friends…

Kelly Sloan Joe Biden announced his bid for re-election this week, and it appears, for now at least, he is the only viable candidate the Democrats have. That’s bad enough; the only thing that could be worse would be the situation that seems the most likely one at this juncture – a Biden-Trump rematch. Biden will…

Kelly Sloan There remains a great deal to occupy the minds, passions and dwindling time of the Colorado General Assembly, but most of the conversations recently have tended to come back to the perennial contentions surrounding the politics of land use and housing costs. These contentions are all wrapped up neatly in an enormous package…

Kelly Sloan French President Emmanuel Macron went to the People’s Republic of China last week and has been busy explaining himself ever since. In an interview with Politico following his tete-a-tete with Chinese Communist Party boss Xi Jinping, he engaged in that most quintessentially French exercise in foreign relations; expressing in no uncertain terms France…

Kelly Sloan While much of the world – at least the tabloid-obsessed part of it – was distracted by the historic (if inept) indictment of former President Donald Trump, a far more important historical event was taking place in California. U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy met with Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen on Wednesday at the Ronald Reagan…