ArcaMax

While the nation braced to see what would happen next in Los Angeles, on Thursday a surprising message appeared on President Trump’s Truth Social account.

A day after videos emerged of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents chasing after terrified farmworkers trying to hide in California fields, the president suggested in the Truth ...Read more

For those who think government should be run like a business, the messy social media spat that played out last week between President Trump and billionaire CEO Elon Musk suggested that business could be doing a lot better.

That may help to explain why shares of Musk’s company Tesla dropped 14 ...Read more

Where are the Democrats? What are they doing about the damage President Trump is doing to ... everything?

I hear that a lot from my liberal friends these days, ever since Trump swept the battleground states six months ago and proceeded to dismantle government as we Americans used to know it.

With the fury of a man who is trying to make up for ...Read more

I can hardly think of President Trump and Africa without also remembering his global insult to underdeveloped nations.

In a 2018 Oval Office meeting, you may recall, he grumbled aloud about why this country would accept more immigrants from “politics/fromtheleft/clarencepage/s-3722120">Read more

President Trump’s refugee policy reminds me of what automaker Henry Ford supposedly said about his company’s Model T:

“A customer can have a car painted any color he wants as long as it’s black.”

So it is with the Trump administration’s policy toward refugees who are fleeing war or political persecution, albeit with a color ...Read more

Once loyal Chicagoans got over the double shock of hearing that a local native, Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, has been named the 267th pope, some critically important, locally familiar questions came up:

Which parish is he from?

Sox fan or Cubs fan?

And what bearing will his papacy have on the Great Pizza Schism, under which the local deep...Read more

Will Donald Trump have Chicago to kick around anymore?

That question, an update of Richard Nixon’s memorable farewell to news reporters as he dropped out of the California governor’s race in 1962, came to mind on the heels of some unusually welcome news about violent crime in Chicago.

The city finished April with only 20 reported murders, ...Read more

As President Trump’s polling takes a tumble 100 days into his second term — and Dick Durbin, the Senate’s second ranking Democrat, announces his retirement, a very old hit tune by Ethel Waters comes to mind: “There’ll be some changes made.”

I'm gonna change my way of livin', and that ain't no bluff

Why, I'm thinkin' ...Read more

Kafkaesque.

One hears that word a lot in discussions of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

Or, for lowbrows like me, "The Twilight Zone" might be the pertinent reference.

Abrego Garcia is the Maryland man who was wrongly deported and imprisoned without trial in a grim prison in El Salvador. In March, agents of the politics/fromtheleft/clarencepage/s-3678508">Read more

President Trump has signed an executive order that directs Vice President JD Vance to eliminate “divisive narratives” and “improper ideology” from Smithsonian museums, educational and research centers, and the National Zoo.

My immediate reaction? Surely, you jest, sir. There may not be any area of American discourse that is more ...Read more

Lately Elon Musk has been looking like a good candidate for Washington’s unofficial “So Sorry to See You Go” award.

We used to hand it out annually on “The McLaughlin Group,” among other deliberately dubious honors, as a snarky salute to the formerly powerful and influential who, in the inevitable way that Washington cycles through ...Read more

A hard-won Senate confirmation was not enough to keep the aroma of scandal away from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth for long.

As labels like “Signalgate” or, as I call it, “the Big Ooops” struggled for dominance in headlines, Hegseth’s fellow Republicans struggled to ignore calls, mostly from Democrats, for him to resign.

One ...Read more

President Donald Trump and the GOP have called themselves the party of free speech. But since taking office, the president has been tightening up his definition of freedom like a hangman’s noose.

We could hear it in the White House’s Orwellian decision in February to revoke the Associated Press’ long-held access to the White House, ...Read more

Amid the blizzard of breaking news, a familiar irritation poked through: ethnic labeling.

The issue unexpectedly emerged this week while the Senate considered a stopgap federal funding bill to keep the federal government running and avoid a possible shutdown,

After Trump said Democrats would be blamed and taxes would surge if Democrats didn’...Read more

My advice to congressional Democrats: If you’re going to embrace performative politics, be sure you give a good performance.

Instead, the Dems at President Trump’s speech to a joint session of Congress looked like an angry and lonely clown car.

They looked the very portrait that they have become in Donald Trump’s second term: angry, ...Read more

Marlean Ames of Akron, Ohio, is not gay or a member of a racial minority.

But, please, she points out, don’t hold that against her, as she alleges her employers have, as she takes her “reverse discrimination” case all the way to the Supreme Court.

I wish her well. As an African American male, I ...Read more

Colorful billionaire and presidential adviser Elon Musk sparked quite a reaction at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington last week when he leaped around the stage waving a chainsaw.

“This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy. CHAINSAAAW!” he politics/fromtheleft/clarencepage/s-3609505">Read more