ArcaMax

It’s ironic to see the best-laid plans of political men and women lead to unexpected consequences.

But it happens. Take, for example, the issue of immigration reform, Texas-style.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott put an extra 10-gallon hat full of irony into the issue when he decided to bus migrants into New York, Washington and, most recently, ...Read more

Is there no end to the mighty powers of our former President Donald Trump?

We were suitably impressed or, at least, astonished when he famously told us in his 2016 campaign, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”

We were similarly surprised when he claimed to have drawn “1.5 million...Read more

Congratulations to this year’s notable authors of banned books.

According to the Chicago-based American Library Association, whose Office for Intellectual Freedom keeps track of such things, schools and public libraries are headed toward another record-breaking year of attempts to ban or otherwise challenge books.

As a fellow scrivener, I ...Read more

Sorting out my own grief over the death of Queen Elizabeth II, I feel some of what I imagine Frederick Douglass felt when he wrote his historic speech titled “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July.”

Douglass had escaped slavery to become a journalist, orator, statesman and friend of a president, Abraham Lincoln.

“This Fourth of July is...Read more

As a journalist, Bernard Shaw was an iconic pioneer who hated to be called “iconic.”

Yet, as far as I was concerned, the label fit. He turned his name, along with that of his employer CNN, into strong brands before branding in today’s marketing jargon was cool outside of a cattle ranch.

I search for apt descriptions now because the award...Read more

Barbara Ehrenreich told us about “essential workers” before it was cool.

In more than 20 books and numerous articles and essays, she earned a reputation as a self-described “myth buster,” although her titles sometimes sounded more like a buzz-killer.

In 1989′s “Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class,” she examined ...Read more

What a week. In a prebuttal to President Joe Biden’s prime-time “Battle for the Soul of the Nation” speech, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy on Thursday called on the president to “apologize for slandering tens of millions of Americans as fascists.”

McCarthy was upset by the way Biden said in a Delaware fundraiser that the “...Read more

When Sen. Lindsey Graham warned that there would be “riots in the streets” if Donald Trump is prosecuted for his handling of classified documents, I wondered what the South Carolina Republican was up to.

Was this a prediction, suitable for a political pundit? Or was it a threat reminiscent of a mob boss?

Either way, it appeared to be ...Read more

Dark Brandon is figuring out how Twitter works.

“Dark Brandon,” if you haven’t heard, is a Twitter meme promoted by liberal tweeters to rebrand the right’s “Let’s Go Brandon” taunts of President Joe Biden’s competency.

You could hear Dark Brandon’s voice punching back Friday morning in White House tweets responding to ...Read more

Just as I was wondering whether various crises were coming too fast to allow our usual “silly season” of oddball late summer news, an appropriately weird-sounding social trend popped up on social networks and intriguingly struck a nerve.

It’s called “quiet quitting.”

Put simply, it refers to the act of taking your job seriously but ...Read more

Yes, I had to polish my eyeglasses and put them back on for a second look before I could believe what the always provocative and occasionally rational Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene had just tweeted.

In a takeoff on the Black Lives Matter slogan, she tweeted “Defund the FBI.”

Cute.

Barely a step ahead of other like-minded lawmakers, the ...Read more

“I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous Peoples.”

So said Pope Francis last week, at a powwow in Alberta, at the start of his “apology tour” across Canada — for the participation ...Read more

This week, he has a high-visibility time slot on the opening day of CPAC Texas, the once annual conservative conference that’s become such a successful grift for Republicans, it’s now held multiple times a year.

...Read more

As much as I call myself a zealot for free speech, I also find it prudent sometimes to remember the value of not speaking.

Or, at least, in pursuit of reasoned discourse I will seek a substitute that sounds less inflammatory.

One of them is an F-word.

No, I know what you’re probably thinking, but I don’t mean that F-word.

I’m talking ...Read more

In the long-running talkfest known as the Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6, 2021, Attack on U.S. Capitol, we haven’t seen too many made-for-TV moments.

We don’t, for example, have video of Secret Service agents in then-Vice President Mike Pence’s detail making phone calls to their family members to say goodbye as they helped him...Read more

Like a slowly unfolding detective story, the search for justice for Emmett Till keeps taking new and painful turns — and not always toward justice.

The latest comes from an unpublished memoir by the white woman, Carolyn Bryant Donham, whose accusations of improper advances in the store where she worked in Money, Mississippi, triggered the ...Read more

No matter how much congressional Republicans leaders may encourage us to look anywhere but at the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol assault, the hearings have only become harder to ignore.

Hiring a veteran TV executive helped. The committee astutely turned to former ABC News president James Goldston to help avoid ...Read more

Having witnessed how much the world seemed to change after the Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion nationwide, it has been stunning — although not too surprising — to see how much the world has tried to change back.

Written by Justice Samuel Alito, the conservative 6-3 majority opinion maintained that the right to an abortion was a part...Read more

Remember Bill O’Reilly? He hosted the top-rated show on cable news until Fox News forced him out amid sexual harassment allegations — and settlements — in 2017.

He occasionally invited me on his show, especially when he needed a foil for his endless populist-conservative complaints, particularly about the “Democrat-run Chicago” when ...Read more

I’m really getting tired of writing about mass shootings.

I’m not alone in my weariness. Back in the final summer of Barack Obama’s presidency, he sounded the same weary tune in 2015 following the shooting at an Oregon community college.

“Somehow this has become routine,” he said. “The reporting has become routine. My response here...Read more