In the Wall Street Journal, Holman Jenkins writes a column headlined "Anatomy of a Witch Hunt":

as a colleague once said of Stalin, "[He] tries to force life into a ready-made framework. The more life resists . . . the more forcefully he mangles and breaks it."

Come to think of it, that's not a bad way of describing how the D.C. anthill has reacted to the unexpected, exotic, high-risk, possibly providential experiment of the Trump presidency.

We mean every descriptor. His very unsuitability, the mood of the American public that elected him, the obscure impasse of American politics that brought him to power—all these signs deserve more respect than they're getting.

His Torquemadas don't and can't know whether our democracy, in the improbable Mr. Trump, found a lever to move us forward, but there's something repugnant in their desire not to find out.

The online homepage of today's Boston Globe provides a textbook example of bad journalism with its coverage of a proposal to increase the Massachusetts state income tax.

Ironically, the headline comes over a more thorough, balanced, and nuanced article by Michael Levenson, who from what I can tell is one of the Globe's stronger players these days.

It begins with an on-the-record quote from Richard J. Valentine, who says he "might move to Florida rather than pay the new tax."

It reports: "New Jersey estimated that 25,000 residents who would have paid $150 million in income taxes per year left the state in the seven years following its tax increase on high earners."

It reports:

From a front-page New York Times article about drug-treatment centers in Florida that are making money by...well, let the Times itself explain it:

Robert Mueller's investigation of Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election is both a forerunner of Hillary Clinton's 2020 campaign and a replay of the insider-trading prosecutions of the past decade, I write in my column this week. Please check the column out at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

Excellent David Brooks column today about President Trump and Russia:

There's just something worrisome every time we find ourselves replacing politics of democracy with the politics of scandal. In democracy, the issues count, and you try to win by persuasion. You recognize that your opponents are legitimate, that they will always be there and that some form of compromise is inevitable.

In the politics of scandal, at least since Watergate, you don't have to engage in persuasion or even talk about issues. Political victories are won when you destroy your political opponents by catching them in some wrongdoing. You get seduced by the delightful possibility that your opponent will be eliminated. Politics is simply about moral superiority and personal destruction....

Ivanka Trump is on Capitol Hill today meeting with senators to discuss how to incentivize businesses to offer more paid parental leave, perhaps using tax dollars. As is often the case, government trails behind the private sector on this sort of thing, a point that was driven home for me by a full-page ad in Sunday's New York Times from a founder of Harry's, which is a mail-order shaving supply company:

we're excited to offer a new, progressive policy: 16 weeks of equitable paid parental leave, taken any time within the first year, to every person on our team. That applies to men, women, transgender, birthing parents and non-birthing parents.

A federal judge in Manhattan is faulting the Justice Department for failing to obey his order to provide updates on its criminal investigation into the FBI's leaks to the press of information in an insider trading case.

In an order dated June 16, 2017, Judge P. Kevin Castel of U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York writes, "In the case before this court, a supervisory special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation leaked grand jury information to journalists without authority to do so." The judge noted that a knowing violation of the rule against leaking grand jury materials is punishable as contempt of court. Judge Castel had ordered the updates on the criminal investigation into the leaks, but complains in his order that the latest update doesn't meet his standards.

The judge writes:

Arthur Laffer, responding to reports that the Trump administration is readying some kind of executive action on pharmaceutical pricing, suggests in a Bloomberg View column:

As an alternative, Trump could use his deal-making skills to negotiate voluntary pricing restraints in the drug industry. Such restraints would reduce the distortionary effects that inevitably result when the government forces specific cost-control measures in areas that may not be the most efficient places to cut costs. Instead, voluntary pricing restraints would enable individual companies to determine the most effective ways to cut their costs to reduce aggregate drug spending....

The New York Times' Philip Galanes interviews Al Franken, the Democratic Senator from Minnesota, who used to be a comedian:

PG To be fair and balanced about this, there is a Democratic version of this problem, too. When President Obama said, "Don't worry, you can keep your doctor ..."

AF Yup. He shouldn't have said it.

PG Was he selling or lying or just really hoping it would be true.

AF I'm not sure why he kept saying that. First of all, no one can definitely keep their insurance because insurance companies make the decision whether to offer the same damn insurance. But it was embarrassing and bad that he said it. And it opens us up to the same charges we're heaping on everyone else.

From my May 27 Las Vegas Review-Journal column on similarities between Trump and John F. Kennedy:

The most terrifying way in which Trump resembles Kennedy is in the bitter hatred that is directed at him by his opponents.

Kennedy was reviled by both the far left on college campuses and by the extreme far right. In the end, he was slain by a self-described Marxist who had spent 32 months in the Soviet Union.

There are no shortage of people who hate Trump enough that they'd be glad to see him killed.

Since that column appeared, we've seen:

Here's something you don't see often: on the same day, both NPR and the New York Times separately unleash long investigative articles critical of a drug, Vivitrol, made by a pharmaceutical company, Alkermes. The NPR story, provided by "Side Effects Public Media," is here. It ran at eight minutes, 15 seconds on "All Things Considered," which is pretty good play as far as NPR goes. The New York Times article is here; it ran on page one.

Now, maybe it is a total coincidence that NPR and the New York Times independently decided to pursue lengthy articles about this drug with the same skeptical-verging-on-hostile point of view. I emailed the NPR/Side Effects reporter and tweeted at the Times reporters to ask them about the "coincidence" and where they got the idea for the story; they did not respond. I also emailed Alkermes and got no response.

The less-than-stellar record of the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the presidential election, Robert Mueller, is the topic of a piece I wrote that was published in the New Boston Post. Please check the article out by clicking here.

Jeff Immelt's departure from the CEO spot at GE is the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here) and Newsmax (here).

The editor and publisher of the Hillsboro, Ohio, Times-Gazette, Gary Abernathy, reflects on his decision to endorse President Trump in the presidential election:

The negativity that permeates Trump coverage is a frequent subject of conversation here. Matters that are not frequently discussed: James Comey, tax returns, the Paris climate accord and the Russians. Instead, we talk about the heroin overdose epidemic ravaging our community....I'm still astounded that our brief endorsement of Trump garnered such attention. In the end, Trump won the state by a solid eight-point margin. Consider the fact that Trump won the popular vote in 30 states, but in most of those states not a single newspaper endorsed him. Could there be better evidence of the gulf that exists between what is called the "mainstream media" and millions of Americans?

Sunday's New York Times has a dispatch by Chris Buckley from Chishi, China, that is a terrific antidote to years worth of Thomas Friedman columns and speeches by U.S. politicians of both parties about how America needs to spend more taxpayer money on "infrastructure" to keep up with China:

Fueled by government-backed loans and urged on by the big construction companies and officials who profit from them, many of the projects are piling up debt and breeding corruption while producing questionable transportation benefits.