"The first principle," said Richard Feynman, "is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool."

Reasonable people will debate the likeliest ramifications of President Donald Trump's decision to order the killing of Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the Revolutionary Guard commander whose power in Iran was second only to that of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — and whose power in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq was arguably second to none.

The Free Press takes a look back at memorable cartoons of 2019.

Minor league baseball was not a part of my childhood because there was no minor league baseball in Chattanooga during my formative years.

With the conclusion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's 70th anniversary summit in London, it's fair to say that Donald Trump thinks that most alliance members, starting with France and Canada, are a bunch of ungrateful freeloaders. Fair to say, also, that most of those members see Trump as an erratic and pompous simpleton.

Between the collapse of George W. Bush's presidency and the rise of Donald Trump, the Republican Party was a more ideological institution than the Democratic Party.

President Trump deserves credit for ordering the operation that killed Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. It was a high-risk mission that required U.S. forces to fly hundreds of miles into al-Qaida- controlled territory to storm a heavily armed terrorist compound.

A decade ago, it was conventional wisdom that the world would soon start running low on oil and that the United States would henceforth be at the mercy of the inexorable trend.

Well, people engaged in impartial investigations aimed at finding the truth don't violate every precedent and standard of due process set during previous presidential impeachments.

It's Washington's new favorite Latin phrase: quid pro quo.

With three polls showing her in the lead, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, may soon eclipse former vice president Joe Biden as the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The ridiculous number of candidates on the Democratic stage Tuesday night created a fundamentally misleading aural and visual impression.

"I have seen the future, and it works," the left-wing journalist Lincoln Steffens famously declared, after observing Bolshevik Russia in its infancy.

The time is the early 1980s. The place is the South China Sea. A sailor aboard the U.S.S. Midway, an aircraft carrier, spots a leaky boat jammed with people fleeing tyranny in Indochina. As he helps bring the desperate refugees to safety, one of them calls out: "Hello, American sailor — Hello, Freedom Man."

President Trump has defended his shameful abandonment of our Kurdish allies in Syria, declaring that "I was elected on getting out of these ridiculous endless wars" that have left America "bogged down, watching over a quagmire." Listening to the president, Americans might think that we still have large numbers of U.S. troops fighting on fronts across the Middle East. We do not.

Former vice president Joe Biden has said that in holding up vital military assistance to Ukraine, President Trump "used the power and resources of the United States to pressure a sovereign nation, a partner that is still under direct assault from Russia ... to subvert the rule of law in the express hope of extracting a political favor."

An imagined conversation between Flyover Man and Urban Guy.

In 2001, Gordon Chang, an American lawyer who had spent many years in Hong Kong and Shanghai, published a book forebodingly titled "The Coming Collapse of China." At the time, the thesis seemed improbable, if not preposterous.

President Trump's critics are now complaining that he asked the Australian prime minister to cooperate with the Justice Department's investigation into the origins of the Mueller probe and that Attorney General William Barr has traveled overseas to ask foreign intelligence officials to cooperate with that investigation.

Let's be clear: President Trump's call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was not "beautiful" or "perfect." Far from it.

Remember when Democrats insisted that President Trump was "working on behalf of the Russians," only to have special counsel Robert Mueller declare he "did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities"?

We don't yet know whether President Trump delayed some military aid to Ukraine as leverage to get Ukraine's president to reopen an investigation into Hunter Biden. But if we are concerned about U.S. officials inappropriately threatening aid to Ukraine, then there are others who have some explaining to do.

WASHINGTON — A Columbia Journalism Review poll released this year found that half of all Americans have "hardly any confidence at all" in the media, which beat out even Congress as the institution for which the public has the lowest confidence.