Even Halloween candy isn’t immune to the affordability crisis, making one of America’s little luxuries just a little more painful ahead of this holiday weekend.

Consumer prices for sugary treats and chewing gum have risen more than 50% since September 2019, including 7.7% in the past year alone, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. ...Read more

If you’re still still considering whether to vote for Amendment 3 (which would eliminate non-school property taxes for almost every homesteaded property in the state, and give the Legislature far more authority over local governments’ spending decisions) please understand: This amendment is a giant boondoggle, a tax shift gussied up as a tax...Read more

Thank you to fired Manhattan federal prosecutor Maurene Comey for fighting back and winning her lawsuit Monday that last year’s termination ordered by an angry President Donald Trump was not legal and violated the Constitution.

But, this being the vindictive Trump administration, hours later, the Department of Justice filed clearly phony ...Read more

Democrats are in a tizzy over a Trump administration lawsuit, claiming the legal action provides evidence that the White House will deny the results of the November election if Democrats make significant gains. That’s a stretch — and the Democrats are hardly innocent bystanders.

Last week, the Justice Department filed suit to stop Alaska ...Read more

If you’re a lawyer and your client tells you to file a meritless case, you’re supposed to say no. The U.S. Justice Department is apparently not constrained by this ethical obligation.

That helps explain why the department filed a lawsuit against Alaska last week seeking an injunction against the results of the state’s election only if the...Read more

Every time a young person opens fire at a school, the same question follows: Where did they get the gun? That question came up again after a 16-year-old killed three children and an educator at Silver Rail Elementary School on Oct. 15 in Bend, Oregon.

The answer is predictable, because we’ve heard this story before. In 2021, a 15-year-old ...Read more

A few bumps are bad for roads but good for government.

When I became mayor of San Diego in 2014, the city had spent years putting off street repair. Its pavement condition score had cratered to 59 out of 100. Residents felt that failing grade in their tires, their backs and their patience.

So we made a promise: Focus the budget on ...Read more

The most pressing policy question facing the U.S. — how to restore fiscal control — has been conspicuously absent in campaigning for the midterm elections. Neither party is willing to frame a plausible way to solve the problem, so they’ve seemingly agreed not to discuss it. Their silence is an abject failure of governance. One wonders how ...Read more

Nearly 50 million young people ages 18-29 will be eligible to vote this November, including an estimated eight million who have become newly eligible since the 2024 election. The conversation about this voting bloc tends to focus on two big questions: what will it take to get young people to the polls, and which party will capture their vote?

...Read more

Cancer care doesn’t begin when someone sits down for chemotherapy or radiation treatment. It begins long before the first dose, with a diagnosis that arrives early enough to help the patient survive.

From there, cancer care also means providing transportation to the clinic week after week, and offering support to keep a steady paycheck. It ...Read more

If an airline assures you that its flights are 99.9% safe, you would feel secure getting on one of its planes, right? However, if that same airline tells you that it’s had a crash in one out of every thousand flights—which is actually the same as “99.9% safe”—you would cancel your ticket right away.

The horse racing industry uses the ...Read more

Plenty of criminals are stupid and contemptible. Among the lowest of the low are the ones who hate police officers and prosecutors personally. They are too dim to comprehend an honest officer who is just doing his job. And so they sometimes seek revenge in ways that make no sense even from the standpoint of heartless self-interest.

President ...Read more

The soaring cost of higher education has been a problem for decades. Congressional Republicans have shown how to fix it.

Last year, President Donald Trump signed his One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Because it contained so much — tax cuts, ICE funding and a new school choice program — it’s easy to overlook how it reformed the student loan ...Read more

This November, Floridians will vote on Amendment 3, which would drastically increase the homestead exemption for local property taxes and, over the course of two years, almost completely eliminate non-school property taxes for homeowners.

This sounds good — but it’s not, because the cuts will almost certainly be offset by shifts to other ...Read more

Nothing in this column is meant to suggest that if Democrats achieve a majority in the House in next week’s midterms, they should immediately impeach President Donald Trump for a third time.

Republicans are already rejecting hasty calls for impeachment by some impulsive Democrats as unalloyed political payback, and in some cases, they’d be ...Read more

Democrats have a path to the Senate majority, but it runs through a difficult map. They must defend competitive seats and win several Republican-held states. Their choices in Maine and Michigan have complicated that effort, while New Hampshire, once viewed as a safe Democratic hold, is now a real contest.

Maine was supposed to be Democrats’ ...Read more

The end of the Trump era is in sight.

Sure, our next presidential inauguration is still a twinkle in the nation's political eye. But it's finally possible to imagine a country whose president does not cozy up to murderous dictators, spend his energy enriching himself and his family, pick pointless fights with longtime allies or let a foreign ...Read more

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — You haven’t voted yet because the state propositions are too bewildering? I’m with you. There are too many for normal human consumption. But I’ve figured them all out at last.

I’ve concocted my own personal voter information guide that I’ll share here. Heads up: I’m negative on most measures, including some ...Read more

On Tuesday, Israelis will head to the polls for an election that the international press has described as Israel’s most consequential in decades — if not ever. The outcome will determine whether Israel continues its march to the ultraright, in which extremist political parties increasingly serve as kingmakers, or whether it reorients to the ...Read more