ArcaMax

"A Face in the Crowd" is the prophetic 1957 movie about a charismatic drifter "discovered" in an Arkansas jail. The face belongs to "Lonesome" Rhodes, a scoundrel whose folksy act catapults him to national prominence. "Lonesome" (Andy Griffith) abuses women, but the crowd only sees a lovable spinner of down-home yarns. He deflates after ...Read more

So far, the number is $37.5 billion. That's how much we've spent so far on the war against Iran.

What have we got to show for it, other than lost American lives?

What could we do with that money at home?

I'm not even up to those questions yet, because $37.5 is just the start of the story. The administration has also requested up to $90 ...Read more

Since the Fourth of July celebration of the nation's 250 years was a bust, let's look at the next anniversary, noting when a Puritan governor declared that we would be as "a city upon a hill" in 1630.

Almost 400 years later, in our summer of desperation, that's a quaint notion.

Massachusetts Bay Colony leader John Winthrop reached for a ...Read more

Executives climbing the corporate ladder to the top seem to lose IQ the higher up they get.

That might explain why John Deere's top corporate bosses have imposed an astonishingly stupid policy on America's farmers. For years, they've decreed that while a farmer "technically owns" a tractor or other John Deere product, the owner is prohibited ...Read more

Time-honored wisdom holds that if it looks like a duck, waddles like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. The explosion of venom, vitriol, vandalism and violence against Jews since Israel was attacked by genocidal killers on Oct. 7, 2023, begs the question: Is what certainly looks like anti-Semitism something other than anti-Semitism? ...Read more

Many of today's consumer loans are legal but abusive. Payday lenders and used car sellers often steer customers into costly contracts they barely understand. Low-income borrowers with jobs, and therefore, dependable cash flow to siphon off, are favored targets.

Sure, there's a sucker born every minute, as P.T. Barnum allegedly said. But now ...Read more

Just last week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement shot and killed a man in Houston who had lived in the country for 35 years; he was a father to three sons and a business owner. ICE didn't even allege that he posed a danger at the time or had committed crimes in the past. This wasn't a lone occurrence: Senior White House official Tom Homan ...Read more

The New York City Public School system is 62% Black and Hispanic. At its eight most prestigious competitive high schools, 80% of the students are Asian or White. Wait -- what's considered the most selective of the city's schools, Stuyvesant High, 777 students were offered slots. Of those, how many (or should I say how few) went to Blacks? Take...Read more

Right-wing Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, former Senate majority leader and key senior legislator, went missing for weeks. No one -- including President Donald Trump and the governor of his home state -- knew whether he was sick, wallowing in depression like a recently MIA congressman from New Jersey, on a wild incognito adventure,...Read more

The first thing Mariel Gardner mentioned was the sound.

Cicadas and katydids buzzed while butterflies and bees drifted among bright yellow blooms in Louisville's Chickasaw Park.

Gardner smiled. "This is what I wanted to hear," she said.

A new aptly named Butterfly and Bee Pollinator Meadow honors Muhammad Ali, but Gardner hopes it also ...Read more

Writers are weird people, and we start out as weird kids.

I was a weird kid. Worse yet, my family moved quite a bit, so I was often the weird new kid.

Our last long jump of a move was from Baltimore to a suburb of Kansas City, Missouri. Before that, we'd banged from town to town in Massachusetts.

And I was a weird new kid, and I was 12 and ...Read more

For some reason, many Americans seem convinced they have to tour Europe this summer -- despite the heat, oppressive crowds and high prices all descending on the continent. And if anyone needs a fourth reason, it's to recognize the growing resentment among many Europeans as the tourist hordes turn their town centers into trinket malls, eroding ...Read more

Representative Ro Khanna was touring the West Bank in Israel when, he says, a group of armed Israeli settlers detained his group. A terrifying incident, it would seem. A publicity stunt, Khanna's critics were quick to point out. IDF forces said they arrived at the scene and disbanded the settlers. Khanna said, "The IDF is lying," and that four...Read more

Madison, Wisconsin -- This is my hometown, where it's consoling to be in a sane state in high summer.

Since Maine Democrats fell for the oysterman hook, line and sinker, they deserve what they get in November. Choosing Graham Platner's rocky record over a seasoned woman governor, Janet Mills -- who could have defeated Sen. Susan Collins in a ...Read more

What a show, huh? Big-name corporations went all out this July 4th with a patriotic ad blitz professing their devotion to America's democracy.

But it amounted to a Firecracker of Hypocrisy, for many of these showboat patriots have been backroom funders of the President Donald Trump regime's repression of our people's democratic rights.

Also,...Read more

"I cannot tell a lie," young George Washington supposedly told his father when asked if he'd cut down a cherry tree. That there was no tree and George never said those words hasn't impeded the myth that holds otherwise, popularized by one of Washington's early biographers. Ever since, Americans have opted to think that their first president was ...Read more