Opinion

In his new book “The Watchdog: How the Truman Committee Battled Corruption and Helped Win World War Two,” journalist Steve Drummond tells the littleknown story of how a littleknown Senate committee headed by a little-known senator from Missouri led a bipartisan battle to strengthen America by exposing self-interest and waste in our military establishment. Regarded by students of Congress as The Gold Standard of congressional investigations for its effectiveness, the investigation was conceived by Harry Truman and spearheaded by him. Formed in 1941, when the Nazis were rapidly overrunning Europe and America was utterly unprepared for what lay ahead, the Truman Committee proved to be a model of bipartisanship, as much a relic of the past as a telephone booth.

WASHINGTON -- The president just had a rise over congressional Republicans in the debt ceiling crisis and a fall at the Air Force Academy -- one big deal and a small one. The fall: much ado about nothing.

Dear Annie: My daughter was 14 weeks pregnant when the baby died. The nurse midwives, who were wonderful, sent her home to have the miscarriage and told her it could take up to two weeks to “be complete.”

President Joe Biden’s dramatic fall at the Air Force Academy commencement underlined a dangerous theme for Democrats: Joe Biden is too old to serve another full term, until he’s 86. He’s already struggling at 80.

My ‘Ivory Tower’ Is in the Basement of a Suburban Split-Level I got an interesting email (actually, it was more like a rant) from a guy who was upset about an encounter he had with the Social Security Administration. It went on for a couple pages.

Today is the 159th day of 2023 and the 81st day of spring. TODAY’S HISTORY: In 1789, James Madison, then a member of the House of Representatives, proposed the Bill of Rights to Congress.

Dear Annie: My 81-year-old mom and I live together. I work 52 hours a week, so she is home alone a lot.

Tennessee passed a law that bans drag performances anywhere minors might attend. Happily, a federal judge stopped it. Very happily, the judge is a conservative, reminding all that some conservatives value principle over politics.

WASHINGTON -- Last week in this space I wrote about culture and how essential it is to the politics of a nation. If the culture of a country is upbeat, the country will be fine. If the culture of a country is in decline, its politics will follow. Simply put, culture prefigures politics. Russia -- once referred to as the Soviet Union -- is an example of what I have in mind. Imagine mighty Russia struggling with heroic, though much smaller, Ukraine. Closer to home, if the culture of a country is infantile, the political issues that the country immerses itself in will be infantile. America now spends an inordinate amount of time administering to the public bathroom needs -- or claimed needs of people who insist they are something other than what their biological manifestations claim they are. The whims of congenital malcontents trump biology.

Let’s start with a disclaimer: The compelling moments have been fleeting, few and far between for the 2023 Royals. Through Sunday, after all, they’d won 18 times in 59 games and generally given fans far more reason to look away than follow along day by day. Calling it an “evaluation season” doesn’t diminish the agony of all this defeat.