Free Republic

Senate hopeful John Fetterman (D., Pa.), a former mayor who is casting himself as the man who "worked to rebuild" the town of Braddock, Pa., missed more than a third of the borough’s monthly meetings during his time in office. Fetterman skipped 53 meetings as mayor of the Pittsburgh suburb from 2006 to 2018, according to documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. Fetterman has been dogged for years by criticism of his spotty work history. Jesse Brown, a former Braddock borough council president, said in 2015 that Fetterman "should have been at all council meetings," but stopped showing up...

I have a new fear. And this one’s a doozy. Having weathered more than one social-­media s- -t storm, I’m one column away from the round of mob opprobrium that sinks my career for good. A single unacceptable sentiment, a word usage misconstrued, a sentence taken out of context suffices these days to implode a reputation decades in the making and to trigger ­McCarthyite blacklisting. But that isn’t the fear in its entirety. Suppose a perceived violation of progressive orthodoxy translates into the kind of institutional cowardice on display in the forced resignation of Ian Buruma from The New York Review...