John Stoehr

Senator Rand Paul and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie must feel like they’ve been thrown under the bus. They were just doing what every red-blooded Republican would have done. In saying parents should have the right to choose whether their kids are vaccinated for measles and other preventable illnesses, as Christie did, and in saying […]

It’s too bad Mitt Romney decided against running in 2016. If the Republican Party were smarter, it would run him. (Maybe.) I say this as someone who wrote reams of copy about his 2012 campaign, much of it critical, much of it antagonistic. But if Romney’s public statements in the days since he floated the […]

For Charles Blow, the recent deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Tamir Rice meant that black parents should talk to their children, especially sons, about the realities of police power. That lesson was affirmed last weekend when the New York Times columnist’s own son, an undergraduate at Yale, was mistaken for a burglary suspect. […]

If you didn’t know anything about Alan Gross other than what you saw on television, you probably thought it was appropriate for him to sit next to First Lady Michelle Obama as a guest of honor at this year’s State of the Union address. Television news reporting told the story of Gross as a humanitarian […]

I was wondering when Rick Santorum was going to reassert himself into the discussion of potential candidates for the Republican Party’s 2016 presidential nomination. That moment came on January 11 in an interview published in the New York Times. In it, the former Pennsylvania senator said the only reason he wouldn’t seek the nomination would […]

My initial reaction to the collapse of The New Republic was hardly unique given that I’m someone who cobbles together a living by writing, teaching and being generally committed to a life of the mind. I felt professional solidarity with the host of esteemed editors and journalists who found themselves facing industry forces beyond their […]

Professional journalists know, or should know, that certain words are not to be used outside their proper contexts. For instance, “murder.” A person accused of murder did not “murder” and is not a “murderer” in crime reporting until that person is convicted of the charge in a court of law. Until then, the crime is […]

After the funeral of Michael Brown, the unarmed black man shot to death last summer by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo., I was invited to appear on Newsmax TV. It’s the television offshoot of the conservative political magazine by the same name. Producers of a program called “MidPoint,” which is hosted by the […]

Yes, but not because of his business ventures

Congressional Republicans have run out of options in countering President Barack Obama’s decision to exercise “prosecutorial discretion” in the enforcement of federal immigration law. Such discretion means Obama’s administration, like all administrations, is given the leeway to choose which methods of enforcement work best, and in this case, the result is that as many as […]