Newsweek 02/22/2019

2001 Bill Clinton had finished his embattled two-term presidency on January 20, but his 11th-hour pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich “pushed the public to its limit.” Sources told Newsweek that Hillary Clinton, then a recently elected senator from New York, was furious; “the rocky start of her husband’s new life” had obscured coverage of her first floor speech the week before.” The former president, meanwhile, was enjoying his new office in New York’s Harlem, “among his most loyal supporters, African-Americans,” ready “to launch yet another campaign as the Comeback Kid.” 1960 “Our solar system was thought to be one happy accident,” Newsweek reported, but with the emergence of the technology and research efforts of the mid-20th century, scientists were able to send out signals in hopes of reaching alien life in at…

Congresswomen pose for a photo as they arrive for the State of the Union address at the Capitol on February 5. Voters sent a record number of women to Congress in the November elections, giving them just under a quarter of the seats in the House. Dressed in white in tribute to the women’s suffrage movement, the group later stole the show from Donald Trump when he noted that women had filled 58 percent of newly created jobs in the past year. “You weren’t supposed to do that!” the president joked after they rose to their feet and applauded.…

IN DECEMBER, PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN called for Russia’s economy “to enter another league.” But that priority is far from clear if one looks at where the Kremlin places its foreign policy chips. The latest gamble is Venezuela, where Russia recently flew two nuclear-capable Blackjack bombers. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo dismissed this as “two corrupt governments squandering public funds and squelching liberty…while their people suffer.” Indeed, Venezuela is an economic basket case where, the International Monetary Fund predicts, inflation this year will hit 10 million percent. The U.S., too, has taxed its domestic economy to spend vast sums on foreign wars, from Korea and Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq. During the Cold War, it expended resources to counter Soviet interference in multiple poor countries, such as Nicaragua, Angola and the Horn of…

JAY INSLEE IS WORRIED ABOUT THE FUTURE OF AMERICA. He’s worried about the future of the world too. If something doesn’t change soon, he says, it won’t be here for much longer, at least not in any inhabitable way. That’s why the Democratic governor of Washington state is heavily weighing a presidential run, and he sees himself as the only person in his party who is uniquely qualified to fight what he considers the biggest threat to mankind: climate change. Sure, other candidates talk about global warming, but he has actually run a government that has acted on it. As the two-term chief executive of the Evergreen State, he pursued perhaps the greenest agenda in the nation, creating a clean energy fund and limiting greenhouse gas emissions. Today, solar farms sprawl…

AMERICANS ELECTED DONALD Trump in 2016 on his pledge to “drain the swamp.” Two years later, they turned to Democrats to demand what Nancy Pelosi called “a new dawn.” But fixing Washington requires more than new leaders and new variations on partisan orthodoxies. It requires a new governing vision, propelled by public demand, for a basic overhaul of how government works. Reforming the current system will not be sufficient. Modern government is disconnected from the needs and capabilities of real people. Instead of honoring what Karol Wojtyła, later to become Pope John Paul II, called “the fundamental uniqueness of each human person,” it dictates uniform public choices at a granular level, applying to all people. The relevant question in public interactions is not what a person needs or believes but what the…

IN PAUL SIMON’S “THE BOY IN THE BUBBLE,” he sings, “It’s every generation throws a hero up the pop charts.” It’s both an observation and a lament about how each generational changing of the guard demands its own unique voice, coded language and defiant look. That need to rebelliously announce and define what’s news and cool while scornfully denouncing what’s old and uncool is as true in laundry detergents (New and Improved!) as it is in music, literature, politics—and sports. Every age needs ageless heroes. But it’s important that we closely study our culture’s most prominent heroes because they reflect the trending values we are being asked to embrace while pointing to the future those values will lead us to. This generation’s most prominent basketball hero is LeBron James, and he…