ArcaMax

Remember when candidate Donald Trump sought black votes by asking somewhat sarcastically, "What do you have to lose?" One answer now comes from President Trump's chosen attorney general: How about your police protection?

At a Justice Department awards ceremony to honor outstanding police officers Tuesday, Attorney General William Barr called on...Read more

A lot has changed in the 50 years since the predawn Chicago police raid that left two Illinois Black Panther Party leaders dead and four other members wounded.

For one, I'm a lot older now. Illinois chairman Fred Hampton, who was 21, and member Mark Clark, 22, were about the same age as I was then and were robbed of that opportunity.

I used to...Read more

Joe Biden and I share a problem that's not always easy to talk about. In fact, that's the problem. We stutter. That makes a lot of things hard to talk about.

Now that the 77-year-old former vice president is running for president, many people understandably are asking whether his notorious gaffes, bloopers and stumbles are related to his age.

...Read more

Sen. Elizabeth Warren is a woman of uncommon intelligence. But like all of us mortals, she sometimes makes mistakes.

Take, for example, the Massachusetts Democrat's embarrassing retreat on "Medicare for All." Please.

After weeks of being pressured to show some details as to how she would expand Medicare to cover all Americans and not just ...Read more

Having followed Deval Patrick's storybook rise from childhood poverty on Chicago's South Side to become the second black governor in U.S. history, I have a nagging question about his announcement that he's running for president: Why now?

He apparently wants to rescue the party from itself, although polls indicate most Democrats may not feel in ...Read more

Are black British actors black enough to play black Americans?

That prickly question has buzzed through black conversations and Twitter feeds since at least the casting of David Oyelowo -- the British son of Nigerian immigrants -- to play the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Ava DuVernay's 2014 "Selma."

Now it's back with the casting of black, ...Read more

Back in 1965, only a couple of years after the term "baby boomer" caught on as a label for the generation born in the wake of World War II, one 17-year-old high school newspaper columnist tried to explain his generation to his skeptical elders:

"Although we still have to face our responsibilities someday," he wrote, "our first impulse is to ...Read more

I know it's not easy to sort out the alleged conspiracies and counter-conspiracies involved in the House impeachment inquiry, but hang in there.

Most important in my humble view is this: When House Democrats voted in near-unanimity to adopt rules for public impeachment hearings, they effectively locked their party into an argument for the 2020 ...Read more

Formerly defined as simply the opposite of being asleep, "woke" in the era of Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movement frequently describes an awareness of important facts and issues, particularly in areas of racial and social justice.

However, as the crowdsourced and up-to-the-minute Urban Dictionary more recently offers, "woke" also can ...Read more

In their exhausting task of trying to defend President Donald Trump's fishy behavior in the Ukraine scandal, Republicans on Capitol Hill have been flailing this way and that, propping up questionable arguments, only to watch them fall like dominoes.

So far, violating -- or maybe illustrating -- the Washington maxim that if you're arguing about ...Read more

Apparently unable to make excuses for President Donald Trump's possibly impeachable behavior in regard to Ukraine, congressional Republicans have decided to just make a fuss.

For those who are taking the time to keep up with it, that probe took on new urgency after Marie Yovanovitch, the ambassador to Ukraine whom Trump fired, testified on ...Read more

Considering how she has been polling 2% or below in the crowded Democratic presidential field, you might think Rep. Tulsi Gabbard would appreciate the old show business saying that any publicity is good publicity.

Yet, gratitude was not to be found in her response to Hillary Clinton's strong hint, without mentioning her by name, that the ...Read more

President Donald Trump's best-laid plans sometimes turn out to be little more than slogans.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi memorably called his bluff in a meeting between Trump and congressional leaders on the Syria situation.

The House had just voted, 354-60, on a rare and overwhelming bipartisan rebuke of the president's announced withdrawal of ...Read more

When I heard that President Donald Trump had condemned a violent video parody that depicted a fake Trump shooting mainstream media and his political critics, I wondered whether he actually was upset that he hadn't tweeted the grisly video first.

After all, the president was nowhere to be seen as he announced his criticism through a White House ...Read more

China's clash with the National Basketball Association over a short tweet reveals an unfortunate truth. Contrary to our best American hopes that China's success with market capitalism would weaken that government's chokehold on free speech, it appears to have done more to seduce us.

That's ...Read more

Now we know who can drive a wedge between President Donald Trump and his strongest Republican allies: President Donald Trump.

The president, who sometimes exhibits the attention span of a fruit fly, acted so impulsively in ordering a pullout of American troops from northeastern Syria -- as Turkey prepares a military incursion to crush the U.S.-...Read more

Amber Guyger got off easy.

Amber Guyger got what she deserved.

It's easy to be in either camp -- or, for the truly ambivalent, be in both camps at once.

One thing is certain: Botham Jean is dead. Guyger killed him by accident, she says, but at best there appears to be considerable carelessness involved.

Which only brings up the very ...Read more

I know it has become almost a cliché by now, but can you imagine how Republicans would've reacted if President Barack Obama had behaved like President Donald Trump is behaving now?

Yes, it's time to update my WIODT -- What If Obama Did This -- list, which is unrelated although remarkably like HBO host Bill Maher's "If Obama Did It" lists.

...Read more

It was a week that began with President Donald Trump appearing to face no possibility of being impeached. It ended with impeachment appearing to be assured.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is not a drill. This is your democracy, once again facing a constitutional crisis that will test the ability of our institutions to endure.

While some see a ...Read more

With the 2020 presidential contest stirring up abortion rights battles, it is illuminating to note a new report that shows how significantly the numbers of reported abortions have plunged. This comes as a wave of abortion restrictions have been passed by conservative state legislatures.

Although the report by the politics/fromtheleft/clarencepage/s-2277102">Read more