ArcaMax

After a fierce rainstorm, the light shone on the Capitol dome like a city on a hill.

The House of Representatives was returning at that moment Monday to an utterly changed reality. The day before, an ailing President Joe Biden withdrew from his race for reelection. The old chieftain, 81, was last to know it was time to go after his alarming ...Read more

Washington is burning. This is America.

The mercury soars to 100 F, and people are sheltering in place. Death by heat wave or dehydration? No, that couldn't happen here.

And yet, consider the wild things that have happened here lately, turning the presidential race upside down since the end of June.

The shocking attempt on former President ...Read more

Cutting dead flowers while barefoot in the summer garden is a sublime sensation that seldom leads to thoughts of politics. Yet this time my thoughts traveled straight to President Joe Biden, 81 years of aged mind, body and memory.

Roses and cosmos ready to bloom need the sun and space blocked by the old ones. That's just a fact, ma'am.

In ...Read more

MADISON, Wis. -- The presidential torch passed from Dwight D. Eisenhower, who seemed ancient at 70, to vigorous young John F. Kennedy, 43, a Bostonian who spoke these stirring words on a bright new day, snow glistening on marble: "Let the word go forth from this time and place ... that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans...Read more

Chief Justice John Roberts, meet Roger Taney, your history big brother.

Abraham Lincoln despised Taney as the legal upholder of white supremacy but had to suffer being sworn in by the old Maryland scarecrow in 1861. In that fraught March moment, the dark past and bright future of America came face to face.

Lincoln defied Taney's trying to ...Read more

Speaking to my father on Father's Day, he looked back on his boyhood in Madison, Wisconsin, to the time his father died when he was 8 -- just weeks before the Pearl Harbor calamity.

His mother, Marie, a nurse, found herself with four children to raise under their Spooner Street roof.

Yet there was no better place for a fatherless child. ...Read more

Finding the last good Republican president was not hard in light of the moving 80th anniversary of the D-Day invasion on the beaches and by the cliffs of Normandy, France.

In military annals, the Allies storming Nazi-occupied France on June 6, 1944, went down as the most extraordinary land, air and seaborne invasion ever.

American, British ...Read more

The Jan. 6 mob attack on the Capitol was the worst day of my life. I was inside the besieged building, and there was no telling how it would end.

Jan. 6 was the best day of former President Donald Trump's life.

The man enjoyed every moment of the storming violence done in his name. He incited the throng of 30,000, directing them to the ...Read more

In a glass pavilion, the tables sparkled, set for 500 guests at the White House state dinner for Kenyan President William Ruto.

A guest of Kenyan descent didn't stay for dinner, President Joe Biden announced.

"One just left: Barack," Biden noted. Washington lore says former President Barack Obama ducks listening to other people's speeches.

...Read more

WASHINGTON -- The silence from the Supreme Extreme Court is deafening. News broke that a Republican member's house flew a "Stop the Steal" American flag days after the Jan. 6 mob attack on the Capitol.

This kind of defiance, actually applauding the violent takeover of democracy, is unheard of in the annals of the Supreme Court.

Justice ...Read more

My father, Richard, 91, was missing his departed friends and folk, so I suggested planting a memory garden.

Close to his heart was Leon Rosenberg, his friend from Randall School to the University of Wisconsin and medical school. They knew each other from ages 10 to 89, when Leon died. They were born weeks apart: my father on Jan. 22, 1933, ...Read more

You know the way Shakespeare created a portrait of a family's hard feelings in King Lear, his tragedy about a raging, storming English king with three daughters? That play, set in Gloucester, speaks to me now of how Congress and the country are falling apart.

It even takes me back to the Civil War.

Shakespeare got it right. Conflicts and ...Read more

The Luncheon Society intrigued me by its very name. My grandmother attended women's society "luncheons."

So how could I refuse a Zoom invitation ("you might enjoy") out of the ether to join a virtual conversation mixing yesteryear and tomorrow?

Speakers and guests are all over the map. Somehow Bob McBarton, the ebullient host, curates ...Read more