ArcaMax

I love us Americans. When we're not arguing about politics, we argue about people who are arguing about politics.

I woke up Friday morning to a Twitterstorm from President Donald Trump, whom I follow so you don't have to.

After firing away at such obligatory topics as the Islamic State, North ...Read more

Although they hardly could seem to be less alike sometimes, President Donald Trump and people of color have had a love-hate relationship for nearly three decades.

That thought came to mind as I was reading one of the least-reported nuggets in the nugget-filled "Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump and the Storming of the Presidency," the...Read more

Suddenly, in Washington deal-making is busting out all over, most significantly between President Donald Trump and his new BFPNFs -- Best Friends, Probably Not Forever -- in Democratic leadership.

Suddenly, in President Trump's telling, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi are jolly "Chuck" from Brooklyn ...Read more

Before he slithered out of the White House, President Donald Trump's former chief strategist Steve Bannon gave Democrats a piece of advice that Trump himself shows no desire to follow: Dump the "identity politics."

"The Democrats," Bannon said in an interview with Robert Kuttner of the liberal American Prospect, "the longer they talk about ...Read more

Some questions are more satisfying than their answers -- if, that is, you care about facts.

One such question exploded across the internet into flight like a flock of angry birds in defense of President Donald Trump against back-seat critics of his response to Hurricane Harvey.

Among the defensive tweets, a deluge of "What about ...?" ...Read more

In his recent Phoenix rally, President Donald Trump bashed one his favorite go-to scapegoats, the news media. We vex him with our insistence on reporting facts that he doesn't like to hear.

Instead of focusing on right-wing extremists, he said, we should focus on "antifa," short for anti-fascist. He was talking about the alliance of anti-...Read more

In her acclaimed 1987 book, "On Boxing," Joyce Carol Oates lamented that the sport had become "America's tragic theater." So has politics. But let's look at one crisis at a time.

As Oates was writing "in the grip of an inexplicable, curious compulsion," she said, boxing was riding a crest of public excitement. Muhammad Ali had retired, but ...Read more

Dick Gregory died last weekend at age 84 after leading a bunch of lives.

He was at various times a stand-up comedian, social critic, political activist, political candidate, nutrition regimen entrepreneur, diet consultant and, increasingly in his later years, obsessive purveyor of bizarre conspiracy theories.

But my favorite memories of ...Read more

As a late-blooming Civil War buff, I have mixed feelings about the recently renewed national push to remove Confederate monuments across the nation.

On one hand, the removal of hundreds of Confederate and related statues bears a troubling resemblance to efforts by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin or the politics/fromtheleft/clarencepage/s-1989150">Read more

Like a lot of television watchers, I was shocked and bemused by the way President Donald Trump dug a new hole for himself in the wake of the Charlottesville, Va., tragedy, only 24 hours after digging his way out of an earlier one.

Then I remembered that this is Donald J. Trump. Our nation's commander-in-chief probably thinks his presidency is, ...Read more

After the deadly, race-fueled clashes in Charlottesville, Va., I found the most memorable internet meme to be a news photo of torch-carrying white supremacists captioned: "Vanilla ISIS."

That's appropriate on several levels, most horrifically in the car that crashed into a crowd of peaceful counter-protestors, killing one and injuring at least ...Read more

In one of my favorite scenes in HBO's "Silicon Valley," a comedy series about the world of computer engineers, a male engineer injects himself into a meeting between two female investors to explain, of all things, "something called 'mansplaining,' ladies...."

They view him with silent, chilly bemusement as his condescending and patronizing ...Read more

After reading the leaked transcripts of President Donald Trump's January phone calls with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Mexico's President Enrique Pena Nieto, I have a good book to recommend to our nation's president.

It's called "Trump: The Art of the Deal."

Yes, that's the 1987 bestseller that is credited to Trump and ...Read more

When news broke that the Justice Department plans to investigate whether university affirmative action policies discriminate against white people, it hit late night comedians like a ball of catnip landing in a room full of kittens.

Particularly excited was "The Daily Show's" mixed-race host Trevor Noah. To the notion that white people might ...Read more

So President Donald Trump was just joking when he suggested police officers should play basketball with the heads of suspects against the doorways of police cars? That's what White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said she believed on Monday. The tragedy is that she's right.

One of the many things that we have learned about the ...Read more

Where is first lady Melania Trump's anti-cyberbullying campaign when Jeff Sessions needs it?

That question came to mind as her husband used Twitter last week to beat his attorney general like a Zulu drum.

And I also wondered, if President Donald J. Trump focused as much on his party's health care policy as he has on Twitter, would his party's ...Read more

On a day when President Donald Trump unleashed a Twitter storm that senselessly attacked his own attorney general, among other targets, the future might seem to be so bright for Democrats that they ought to be wearing sunscreen.

But as history shows us, you should never underestimate the Dems' ability to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory...Read more

Now the Senate has a zombie Trumpcare bill, too.

Back in March, you may recall, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) called off a showdown vote on its effort to "repeal and replace" the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare.

Good riddance, said many Americans. The bill would have cause 23 million people to lose their health care, ...Read more

After Republicans spectacularly failed to gather enough votes to repeal and replace Obamacare, President Donald Trump should consider changing his slogan from "Make America Great Again" to "Hey, We Tried."

And somewhere, I am so sure, former President Barack Obama is smiling.

His signature health care law, the Affordable Care Act, otherwise ...Read more

"Elitist," as Time magazine culture critic William A. Henry observed in his 1994 book "In Defense of Elitism," has begun to rival if not outstrip "racist" as the "foremost catchall pejorative of our times."

Henry later passed away, but the malady that he described lingers on. The latest evidence of decline in our regard for the upper crust pops...Read more