ArcaMax

Even in this ugly era of political divisiveness under "King Donald," some things remain bigger than partisan politics.

Travel deep into Southwest Texas to the Mexican border and you'll witness two powerful forces of political harmony in Big Bend National Park. First is the true majesty of nature -- 1,200 square miles of high desert beauty, ...Read more

Congressional hearings aren't known for generating Must-See TV, so the rare exceptions tend to be notable. Attorney Joseph Welch's takedown of the demagogic Senator from Wisconsin during the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings -- "At long last, sir, have you no sense of decency?" -- became iconic. Oliver North's attorney, Brendan Sullivan, torpedoed ...Read more

When police arrested Kimberlee Williams, a grandmother living in Oklahoma, because of a warrant from Maryland, she was shocked. She had never been to Maryland in her life.

Ms. Williams later learned that Maryland police had relied on an incorrect result from facial recognition technology that falsely flagged her as a suspect. She is the 14th ...Read more

I've been playing in the public arenas of politics and commentary, of columns and television and campaigns, for long enough not to pretend that it was all warm and fuzzy back then. It was mean and sometimes scary. But mostly not. Even during the "hottest" times, we mostly managed to separate the professional from the personal. We disagreed; we...Read more

The first quarter of this century in the United States saw the rise and triumph of "team politics," in which voters view the Democratic and Republican parties less as representatives of an ideology or set of policies than as opposing teams defined by culture, style and aesthetics. Democrats follow TikTok or Threads, shop at Trader Joe's, drive...Read more

Gasoline prices have surged to their highest levels since the COVID-19 pandemic and it has me feeling pretty good about my electric vehicle purchase. I know that utility prices are also on the rise, but being able to plug my car in at home instead of paying horrid prices at the pump has still saved our family money. Charging an EV at home costs ...Read more

Catholics don't like converts, not really. We don't trust converts. Converts annoy us because no convert to Catholicism can resist finding a real Catholic and explaining the Catholic Church to him.

Enter JD Vance, the latest convert to explain my own religion to me.

How long's this guy been Catholic? Maybe 30 minutes? In that short time, he'...Read more

Democrat Eric Swalwell and Republican Tony Gonzales were both accused of sexual misconduct involving staffers. Californian Swalwell said he'd resign from his House seat after giving up on his run for governor. Texan Gonzales said he was withdrawing from the 2026 reelection race.

Back in the day, male politicians cavorted with their female ...Read more

Usually, when you're talking about winning a war, it helps to know what you were fighting for. What was the goal of the war? If you don't know that, how do you know the difference between winning and walking away?

In a way, the Trump administration has made it easy on itself. Since they haven't managed to explain what we're doing plunging the...Read more

Call him the "antisocial" media president.

When a president attacks the Pope, he telegraphs: "There's nothing I won't do or say." That is a profoundly troubling message.

There are no lines I won't cross, no rules I won't break, President Donald Trump is telling the whole wide world. Nobody is safe nor sacred in my book. Got it? And the White...Read more

There's a clique of plutocratic, high-tech billionaires who think they're entitled to turn America's farmlands and rural communities into their personal domain of predatory AI "data centers." But a little bookstore in Tulsa, Okla., recently hit those puffed-up elites where they're most vulnerable: The funny bone.

Magic City Books put up a ...Read more

As a surveillance and cybersecurity counsel for the ACLU, I spearheaded an ACLU project beginning in 2020 to strengthen warrants in the digital age, so that law enforcement does not conduct overbroad searches of our cellphones, computers and other devices. I traveled the country talking to judges and criminal defense lawyers about warrants and...Read more

There is lore about the 1862 meeting between Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," -- the influential novel about slavery -- and former President Abraham Lincoln. "So," President Lincoln is reported to have greeted her, "you're the woman who wrote the book that made this great war." History doesn't indicate whether Lincoln made...Read more

That $7,500 tax credit to buy an electric vehicle, now gone, was a "grotesque misallocation of federal spending." It was a form of "rent-seeking," whereby companies seek "to dominate the bureaucracy instead of the marketplace."

Thus wrote Kyle Smith in a Wall Street Journal column titled "EVs Can't Compete Without Subsidies." Smith deserves ...Read more

"You can kill 10 of our men for every one we kill of yours," resistance leader Ho Chi Minh told the French who ruled Vietnam as a colony in 1946. "But even at those odds, you will lose and we will win." Historians who describe this remark as directed toward France's successor oppressors in Southeast Asia (the U.S.) are mistaken -- though the ...Read more