ArcaMax

House conservatives have devised a "new and improved" threat to the world economy if their demands are not met. Once again, they vow to vote against raising the cap on U.S. debt if desired cuts in government spending are not made.

Once again, they insist their plan would not crash the world financial markets, because it would guarantee payments...Read more

The California governor has no business "canceling" Walgreens. But I could. The Florida governor has no business punishing Disney for disagreeing with him over his state's "Don't Say Gay" bill. But people who agree with Ron DeSantis here can boycott Disney World.

There is a difference between government interference with a private company's ...Read more

Let's be grateful that Ron DeSantis devotes so much of his time raging over drag queens and bragging how he punished Disney for disagreeing with him. An obsessive pursuit of "woke" has kept the Florida governor and apparent presidential candidate from mucking around serious matters. But, sadly, not always.

DeSantis shocked many foreign policy ...Read more

Elizabeth Warren has issued serial apologies for saying, when asked whether Joe Biden should keep Kamala Harris as his running mate, "I really want to defer to what makes Biden comfortable on his team." She went on to say, "I like Kamala," which is what we call "damning with faint praise."

Nothing Warren subsequently said erases her original ...Read more

Yes, Joe Biden believes that the District of Columbia should rule itself.

Yes, Biden believes that D.C.'s new softer-on-crime law was a bad thing and needed to be stopped.

But no, there isn't a disconnect between the first belief and the second. It's true that some of the changes in a criminal code have been misrepresented. But lowering the ...Read more

It would have been shocking had Fox News lied about the 2020 election being stolen from Donald Trump because the management and stars believed that nonsense. It would have been shocking had Fox known the truth but passed on lies in the belief that only Trump could save the country.

But the real reason it beat the drums for that lunacy -- at the...Read more

Some time ago, I worked after school and during summers at my town's public library. My supervisor was Mrs. Fowkes, a stunning grandmother who, in summer, wore straw hats with flowers.

There I mastered the trick of repairing loose bindings with glue and folded wax paper. Then I was tasked with rolling the carts down the aisles, placing books in...Read more

Maine's Aroostook County -- the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island put together -- is way north. Bordering the Canadian provinces of Quebec and New Brunswick, many of its people identify as Scotch-Irish or Acadians originally from France. Acadians distinguish themselves from the French Canadians headquartered farther west in Quebec. They even ...Read more

Nikki Haley is running for the Republican presidential nomination. Her pitch is time-for-a-new-generation. Also a new gender. She proposes requiring mental competency tests for any president over the age of 75. That would apply both to the Democrat incumbent, Joe Biden, and Republican candidate Donald Trump. The former South Carolina governor is...Read more

And so some angry, mentally ill person decides to shoot random human beings for no particular reason. Although mass killings have become commonplace -- the one at Michigan State University was the 67th this year, and we're only in February -- something feels different this time.

It's not the number of victims, three dead in this case. The 2017 ...Read more

Joe Biden's America has embarked on a muscular industrial policy aimed at curbing climate change, building U.S. manufacturing and competing with China. That's a lot of going on, though the broader public doesn't seem to be paying it much mind. Unidentified flying objects make for better visuals.

Our trading partners, on the other hand, are ...Read more

In Joe Biden's America, it's morning. For Republicans, it's now 3 a.m. in an after-hours bar. The people are wasted, hollering about their "enemies," some working to repurpose their bad behavior into grifting opportunities.

The sun in Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America" pitch set long ago. America, in the official Republican view, is something...Read more

Democrats loudly complained when Republicans threw Rep. Ilhan Omar off the Foreign Affairs Committee. But they should have thanked them, at least quietly.

Omar is a problematic presence. The right knows that, which is why Fox News flashes pictures of her in a hijab, seemingly by the half-hour.

It is true that Omar's left-wing views and Muslim ...Read more

"We have no choice but to make hard decisions," Oklahoma Rep. Kevin Hern recently said. He leads the Republican Study Committee, a group of more than 160 Republican lawmakers that recently called for making cuts in Social Security.

Among other things, the group wants to raise the age at which a worker can collect full Social Security benefit to...Read more

Political news pounces on any poll suggesting Republicans' preference for the 2024 presidential candidate. Little attention has landed on the Democratic side, where the numbers have been quite interesting.

The Granite State Poll suggesting a considerable lead for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over Donald Trump also puts Pete Buttigieg well ahead of...Read more

In late 2011, John Oliver and his "Daily Show" cameraman made a trek to my office, then in Providence, Rhode Island, to take me to task. I had recently referred to the Tea Partiers who had pushed America to the brink of a disastrous default as "economic terrorists."

Oliver had apparently swallowed whole a series of barbs directed my way by a ...Read more

There are moderates in the suburbs -- Democrats, Republicans and Independents -- who want Washington spending kept in check. They tend to be liberal on social issues but pained over the extremes of the woke. They have respect for various sexual identities but little interest in learning new pronouns. And they overwhelmingly want some access to ...Read more

China's shrinking population, we are told, poses an economic threat to that country, as well as an economic drag for us.

Here are the numbers: Deaths exceeded births in 2022 by 850,000. That leaves over 1.4 billion Chinese. That's over four times the U.S. population occupying about the same land mass. More than 1 billion people would be a lot ...Read more

When I worked on Reuters' business desk, we weren't allowed to parrot press releases reporting that earnings soared 100% from the year before. Why? Because here's the reality behind some such claims: Acme Pebble's income last year may have grown from a miserable $100 to only $200. That's a 100% gain but hardly a reason to party.

And so it is ...Read more

Sam Bankman-Fried perfected the poses, uniform and attitude of the bro, the boy-man who gets away with it. He sucked billions into his FTX cryptocurrency platform by convincing the public that he was touched with supersized genius at making fortunes. His claim to want the money for higher things than simply amassing luxury only burnished the ...Read more