Author: Tom Cronin

Tom Cronin President Harry Truman established the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1947 to prevent future Pearl Harbors and to deal with the developing threats of the Cold War. He did not know this espionage agency would later topple foreign governments, assassinate people, operate overseas torture camps and frustrate virtually every president who came after…

Tom Cronin and Bob Loevy The United States has had a long history as a two-party electoral system. But many, if not most, Americans are unhappy with what looks like a tired and worn-out party system, where the two old political parties are bankrupting the country. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a famously…

Tom Cronin What do Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Bibi Netanyahu and New York City’s recent political shooting-star Zohran Mamdani all have in common?  According to the Human Genome Project, they share 99.9% of their genetic DNA sequences, and they can trace their ancestry back to relatively recent common ancestors. Yet Mamdani is getting the Obama…

Tom Cronin America’s best-known and most-revered storyteller, Mark Twain (1835-1910), is remembered for his novels, satirical punditry and travel writings, but is rarely thought of as a political thinker and activist. A lengthy and remarkably revealing new biography by prize-winning author Ron Chernow (“Mark Twain”, Penguin, 2025) highlights Twain’s evolution from a parochial pro-Confederacy, anti-Abolitionist…

Tom Cronin and Bob Loevy “Home Rule” legal authority gives city governments in Colorado the power to make laws regarding matters of local concern. It differs from state control, where matters of city government are controlled by the governor and state legislature. Under Home Rule, authority to act on matters of municipal (city) concern is…

Tom Cronin and Bob Loevy A major military parade in Moscow a week ago was just one of many celebrations of the victory of the United States and its allies over Nazi Germany in World War II. VE Day — Victory in Europe Day — was 80 years ago on May 8th, 1945. World War II was…

Tom Cronin Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, General David Petraeus and Democratic U.S. Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado served — along with 1.5 million others — U.S. military interests in the Iraq war beginning in 2003. The U.S. spent at least $2 trillion, lost about 4,500 service people and were responsible for a…

Tom Cronin Americans have been skeptical — if not hostile — to government bureaucracies since 1789. Americans generally view big government as bad, remote, wasteful and unresponsive, if not irresponsible. Americans, going back to the Anti-Federalist movement and the Whiskey Rebellion, have scorned national bureaucracy and yearned for local control and decentralization. “Bureaucratic man” has…

Tom Cronin and Bob Loevy President Donald Trump, the Tariff Man, has relished his retaking of the White House. He has also let everyone know, prematurely it seems, he’d welcome a third term as U.S. president. That would require repealing the 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, or it’d require some imaginative “workaround,” which President…