ArcaMax

"I'm very pro-choice," Donald Trump said in 1999, when he first flirted with the idea of running for president. "Just very briefly, I'm pro-life," he announced at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2011. In 2016, campaigning for the support of anti-abortion leaders, he promised to appoint judges who would overrule Roe v. Wade -- ...Read more

I left the house at high noon.

Outdoors, Washington dressed in light spring green with splashes of pink cherry trees. The sun shone, no cloud cover. We earthlings had our eyes on the sky, from Texas to Maine. A solar eclipse was landing.

That was the path of "totality," a harmonic convergence of the sun and moon.

Totality -- a word meaning ...Read more

"Somebody better investigate soon."

That's a lyric in Bob Dylan's "Oxford Town," a 1962 song deploring the relentless murdering of Black people and civil rights activists in the Deep South. The line mocks the refusal of racist officials to punish the white murderers, instead cynically covering up atrocities by promising do-nothing "...Read more

MSNBC's talk show "Morning Joe" is catnip for political junkies, especially those who detest Donald Trump. Hundreds of thousands of us, our body clocks by now conditioned to wake in time to grab coffee and hop on the treadmill just before 6 a.m., start each weekday with predictable, comfortable left-of-center patter from the show's regulars.

...Read more

Barack Obama got it right. He refused to be held captive to his party's left wing. He adopted a strenuous policy of border enforcement, even as some Latino activists threatened to withhold their support for him. He had tense relations with Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu, but when anti-Israel protesters interrupted a Biden fundraiser over ...Read more

Since the Supreme Court struck down longstanding affirmative action admissions policies this past summer in SFFA v. Harvard/UNC, institutions from a variety of sectors have grappled with how to stay true to their commitments to equal opportunity in light of the court's ruling. But this year, the Supreme Court did something noteworthy: It ...Read more

Every country needs a coherent foreign policy. And it's impossible to overstate the importance of the United States' military and diplomatic posture.

The U.S. has the world's second-largest and most sophisticated nuclear arsenal, exclusive, comprehensive command over the oceans, perfect strategic geography, nearly a thousand military bases ...Read more

When I wrote a few weeks ago about Donald Trump predicting a "bloodbath," my readers -- most of them in civil and respectful tones -- were quick to correct me. It was only the auto industry he was referring to, they said. They tried to defend him. They needn't have bothered. Trump has, since that time, adopted the idea of a "bloodbath" as a ...Read more

With every day that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. runs his peculiar presidential campaign, he offers a display of delusional narcissism and feckless duplicity. Aside from drawing attention to himself, Kennedy seems to be trying to ensure the reelection of Donald Trump, provoking the suspicion that he shares Trump's toxic politics despite his own ...Read more

Sitting in courtrooms isn't an art. It is the process of hibernation, being asleep enough not to hear everything but awake enough to hear anything important. It is the light semisleep of a man whose pregnant wife is two weeks overdue and sleeping next to him.

Reporters know the day's action in a trial is likely to hinge on one evidentiary ...Read more

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton was criticized for her use of the word "superpredators" back in 1996. Some on the left laid into her, accusing Clinton of racism.

Meanwhile, her opponent, Donald Trump, trying to sucker leftist Bernie Sanders voters into not voting for her, piped in, saying yes, she was smearing African ...Read more

Back in 2020, the daughter of the judge presiding over Donald Trump's hush money trial in New York worked for a digital advertising firm that was involved in then Sen. Kamala Harris' presidential campaign. According to Trump, that made her a Trump hater and meant that her father should not be permitted to try the case. The judge, Juan Merchan,...Read more

A week ago, while Baltimore slept, the Francis Scott Key Bridge stood, its gorgeous and graceful truss lighting and spanning its busy global port. It is -- was -- a beloved landmark.

When the city woke in the dawn's early light, the bridge was not still there. A massive 21st-century cargo ship rammed it and it all fell down, severing a vital ...Read more

Free market ideologues fabricate some of the most preposterous yarns trying to justify their assertion of corporate greed over public need.

Consider their far-fetched of laissez-fairyland tale that by allowing corporate giants to dodge the billions of tax dollars they owe to our country, the top executives of those corporations will plow that...Read more

In the summer of 1997, the Republican-controlled Senate Governmental Affairs Committee was investigating whether the Clinton-Gore White House and the Democratic National Committee had engaged in improper, or even illegal, fundraising practices during President Bill Clinton's 1996 reelection campaign. Acrimony was high, and partisan divides ...Read more

Donald Trump last week posted an item on Truth Social that broke new ground for incoherence. What got his fingers fumbling on the keyboard was Joe Biden's being out in the country warning Americans that another presidential term for Trump would cost them their health care.

Trump wrote, "I'm not running to terminate the ACA, AS CROOKED JOE ...Read more