OPINION

The better strategy is to get money into the hands of cash-strapped businesses that promise to use it to keep workers on their payrolls — or, if that fails, to get it into the hands of laid off workers who will likely spend it on essentials.

OPINION

Certainty is the scourge of panic. Amid the calls for flattening the curve and washing our hands, we must demand reliable information.

OPINION

Unless the virus is quashed everywhere, it can resurge anywhere. That means the U.S. government has to be concerned about the skyrocketing epidemic in Iran.

OPINION

While we should not be cavalier about the dangers of this pandemic, neither should we feel hopeless and paralyzed with fear. Hope abounds.

OPINION

The enemy is still at our gate, waiting for the moment when we surrender to our frustrations and anxieties.

OPINION

The federal government could follow a similar “Netflix financing” model to pay a single price to vaccinate the population against the coronavirus.

OPINION

We can shift the narrative and see the potential mitigation of caseloads as a unifying success rather than a nefarious miscalculation.

OMBUDSMAN

As you may have heard, the Defense Department wants to shut down Stars and Stripes. What graver threat to Stripes’ mission could there be?

The real estate mogul who pledged to make the federal government work more like a business hasn’t kept that promise or even really tried.

OPINION

Without a decent, affordable child care system, flexible work hours and paid sick leave, the over-65 population is propping up families all over the United States by performing essential child care for free.

OPINION

The federal government’s projections show that, in a moderate disease outbreak, 200,000 people will need intensive care. Today, there are fewer than 100,000 ICU beds in the United States, and most of them are already occupied.

OPINION

As the Cold War illustrates, large numbers of troops garrisoned at multiple fixed facilities are not needed to secure U.S. interests.

OPINION

Combating the virus demands social distancing, but a campaign demands social contact — constantly. The more of it, the better.

OPINION

Academic modeling has long shown that even a moderate viral pandemic can quickly lead to a need for resources — including intensive-care beds and mechanical ventilators — that surpasses our health system’s capacity.

OPINION

Voters pay attention to a president’s leadership in a crisis — his grasp of the issues, his steadiness, his ability to manage unexpected circumstances. So far, Trump is failing those tests.

OPINION

The complicated agenda we face is that, in this time of a pandemic, just as we are supposed to distance ourselves, we must also band together.

OPINION

How bad COVID-19 will be for the U.S. economy is almost impossible to say, since there are few precedents to look to. By considering two extreme scenarios, however, it is possible to get a sense of what the issues are.

OPINION

The coronavirus is a force of nature and our response to it is a reminder of our common humanity.

OPINION

I like to think of myself as part of a larger community, and the thought of being forcibly cut off from it is disquieting. We are social animals, as the scientists keep reminding us, and I don’t think we’re meant to be quarantined.

OPINION

For Sanders to come back, he’ll need to hope that voters either do not care about foreign policy or that his more progressive foreign policy platform starts to attract new voters.

OPINION

Never again should it be the purpose of American forces to overthrow regimes in distant lands with vague expectations of being able to install a political order more to our liking. That way lies only more “endless wars.”

OPINION

Elizabeth Warren may not have succeeded in her race for the Democratic nomination, but she certainly did not fail.

OPINION

If we’re going to ascribe Warren’s failure to win the nomination to sexism, we’d be calling lots of Democratic women in early voting states sexist.

The place where our family lived the longest was Virginia Beach, Va. Our first house, a vinyl-sided Dutch Colonial on a cul-de-sac, was close enough to the elementary school to hear the morning announcements from our porch. Despite deployments that took my husband away, we spent nine wholesome, grounding, family-oriented years there, growing roots, making friends and providing stability for our kids.

Two months into 2020, statistics dictate that most people have already given up on their New Year’s resolutions. Sadly, only about 6 or 7 percent who make resolutions attain their goals. I’ve always been a resolution-maker and a yo-yo dieter, so I am forever making plans to lose 10 pounds, then breaking them. But one year, I made a resolution that would take me a decade to achieve.

OPINION

Although ending American participation in an unwinnable war is necessary, there will be a strong temptation, if not need, to return unless there is real peace.

OPINION

Iran’s willful mismanagement of the crisis can no longer be overlooked. The international community must pressure the regime to get serious.

OPINION

The current nomination system makes both parties vulnerable to the easy lies of popular characters who are not equipped for the presidency, or who pose a threat to democracy by virtue of their authoritarian temperaments.

OPINION

Although no one likes having to choose between paying an upgrade fee and being shoe-horned into a tiny seat, it’s unlikely that nationalization would improve matters.

OPINION

Trump is still making the situation as risky for himself as possible — and risking real policy failure in responding to real danger to public health.

OPINION

Over the past five decades the LWCF has funded and protected thousands of public parks, historic battlefields and urban community projects in all 50 states.

OPINION

The crisis brought on by the virus — Iran already accounts for the most fatalities outside China — is a microcosm of the regime failures that have left Iranians with little faith in their leaders.

OPINION

If Trump wants to withdraw troops as part of a comprehensive deal — one that avoids chaos, meets U.S. counterterrorism needs and gives Afghanistan a chance at peace — he’ll need to exercise unwonted self-restraint.

We lived on this base four years ago. Now we fall into the category “retiree and family,” but I still drive across the bridge and through the gates every week. Why? After 28 years of active-duty military life, I have learned that spending time on base boosts my morale.

OPINION

We cannot keep pretending, in the face of mounting evidence, that work-family conflict is only a woman’s problem, or that the only reason more women aren’t working 24-7 is because of their children.

OPINION

Going forward, there’s reason to believe that growing numbers of Americans will be able to launch their careers without feeling like student loan debt is a necessity.

OPINION

We need to acknowledge that large-scale, public financing of EVs may not have the intended effect.

OPINION

The president of the United States isn’t a king, and he isn’t above the law — or so constitutional law professors like me keep reminding everybody. But the painful truth is that there is one exception to this truth: the pardon power.

OPINION

To fail to properly identify and characterize Vindman’s choices will leave our soldiers wondering what their moral and legal obligations are. Ambivalence about ethical choices in peacetime can be manifested by choices in wartime that cost lives.

OPINION

We cannot turn away from the fundamentals of our justice system — especially when we’re confronting its most difficult and trying cases.

OPINION

If the provisions of the agreement that require the Taliban to break with terrorism are not public, then how much are they really worth?

As much as I’d like to blame Hallmark, FTD, Whitman’s Sampler, Russell Stover, Brachs and The Melting Pot for inventing Valentine’s Day to benefit the blood-sucking consumer industry, unfortunately I can’t.

OPINION

The first presidential impeachment and trial in 1868 involved President Andrew Johnson. For a century thereafter, the experience was considered so terrible, so fraught with danger, and so discredited that there was no desire for repetition.

OPINION

By denying easy access credit to military families, the Military Lending Act forces military families to use more damaging and permanently scarring options of not paying bills on time, bouncing checks, or even going to foreign online lenders who don’t follow laws, and with whom military families have no protection.

OPINION

The new Air Force policy will not cure the hostility against religion that continues to plague our nation and our military. But it is a positive step in the right direction.

OPINION

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has put forward a new rule that places unreasonable burdens on defrauded student borrowers.

OPINION

“Promises made, promises kept” has been one of President Donald Trump’s frequent boasts in his campaign for a second term. He promised to balance the federal budget in eight years, a longstanding Republican aim that those economic growth rates could make possible.

OPINION

Soldiers and families — and all of us — need to know that deployment-related challenges might creep up in the months after returning home.

OPINION

Buttigieg effectively tied with Sanders in the chaotic Iowa caucuses last week. But he ran well ahead among voters who call themselves “somewhat liberal,” the party’s largest ideological category.

OPINION

Whether one views the president’s actions as justifying removal from office or not, we believe that the prospect of foreign interference in U.S. elections is today so grave — whether initiated by a foreign power or invited by a candidate — that Congress must make such activity illegal.

OPINION

The Russians are discovering, as Americans and Europeans have before, that with Turkey’s current president, matters are always coming to a head, accompanied with threats to end alliances.

When I took my husband to the hospital for hip-replacement surgery recently, I envisioned myself playing the part of Florence Nightingale during his post-operative convalescence at home: propping his pillows, retrieving fresh ice packs, delivering steaming bowls of soup and neatly quartered sandwiches, topping off his water with candy-striped bendy straws.

OPINION

As the late Dallas-Washington lawyer-lobbyist-political guru Bob Strauss always said, in politics things are never as good or bad as they seem.

OPINION

Was the president chastened by the bipartisan outcry in the wake of his misuse of military funding for his own political purposes? No, he has continued his efforts to poach defense funding to build the wall.

OPINION

Moon’s sustained efforts require discipline and courage, qualities demonstrated throughout his long career.

Dust bunnies are the bane of my existence. That might sound dramatic, but let’s just say that I pretty much hate dusting. Then again, Mom told me to never use the word “hate,” so let me rephrase: Dusting is an activity of which I am not particularly fond. (And I get bonus points for not ending with a preposition.)

For military spouses enduring deployments in this complicated world of internet-based communications and 24/7 news, is ignorance bliss, or is knowledge power?

On Monday nights, my 19-year-old daughter, Lilly, and I commandeer the television to watch a show that admittedly has no cultural value. Though billed as a reality show, it’s not based on reality at all. It’s a carefully contrived dating competition in which 30 women compete for the affections of one man in the midst of sprawling hilltop villas, sequined gowns, helicopter dates, tropical resorts, champagne-fueled cocktail parties, rose ceremonies and ginormous diamond engagement rings. That show is, of course, “The Bachelor.”

OPINION

U.S. policy in Syria represents a counterproductive “regime change-lite” approach.

OPINION

By embedding counselors in-uniform with military units to interact with, relate to, and meet the warrior on their own terms, we can get our soldiers talking.

OPINION

Our security in America is not contingent on having a handful of troops deployed in Iraq and Syria. And with tensions in the region boiling over, our forces in Iraq and Syria are in a vulnerable position.