ArcaMax

Donald Trump promised to rein in drug prices. It was his only sensible campaign promise.

But the plan he announced Friday does little but add another battering ram to his ongoing economic war against America's allies.

He calls it "American patients first" and takes aim at what he calls "foreign freeloading." The plan will pressure foreign ...Read more

The Environmental Protection Agency recently granted to an oil refinery owned by Carl Icahn a so-called "financial hardship" waiver. The exemption allows the refinery to avoid clean air laws, potentially saving Icahn millions of dollars.

Icahn is not exactly a hardship case. According to Bloomberg's Billionaire Index, his net worth is $21.8 ...Read more

Why did working-class voters choose a selfish, thin-skinned, petulant, lying, narcissistic, boastful megalomaniac for president?

With the 2018 midterms around the corner, and prospective Democratic candidates already eyeing the 2020 presidential race, the answer is important because it will influence how Democrats campaign.

One explanation ...Read more

Congressional Republicans would be more willing to stand up to Donald Trump if their major financial backers -- big business and Wall Street -- had more backbone.

Ever since 1971, when then-future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell urged corporations to mobilize politically, corporate money has flooded Washington -- most of it into Republican ...Read more

"It's nonsense that there's a beautiful free market in the power industry," Energy Secretary Rick Perry said recently as he pushed for a government bailout of coal-fired power plants.

Republicans, who for years have voted against subsidies for solar and wind power, arguing that the "free market" should decide our energy future, are now eager to...Read more

The petulant adolescent in the White House -- who has replaced most of the adults around him with raging sycophants and has demoted his chief of staff, John Kelly, to lapdog -- lacks adequate supervision.

Before, he was merely petty and vindictive. He'd tweet nasty things about people he wanted to humiliate, such as former San Francisco 49ers ...Read more

Last week, Laura Ingraham, Fox News' queen of snark, tweeted that David Hogg -- a 17-year-old who survived the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, and has been among the eloquent advocates for gun control -- "whines about" being rejected by four universities to which he applied. She linked to an article from the Daily Wire calling him a "gun ...Read more

What's worrying isn't that Donald Trump is now getting advice about public policy from fanatics such as John Bolton and Lawrence Kudlow. Trump has never cared about public policy.

The real worry is that with special counsel Robert Mueller breathing down Trump's neck, and with several special elections suggesting a giant "blue wave" in November,...Read more

Donald Trump is moving into a new and more dangerous phase.

Before, he was constrained by a few "adults" -- Rex Tillerson, Gary Cohn, H.R. McMaster and John Kelly -- whom he appointed because he thought they had some expertise he lacked.

Now, Trump has either fired or is in the process of removing the adults. He's replacing them with a "Star ...Read more

Last Friday, Martin Shkreli was sentenced to seven years in prison. What, if anything, does Shkreli's downfall tell us about modern America?

Shkreli's early life exemplified the rags-to-riches American success story. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1983, to parents who emigrated from Montenegro and worked as janitors in New York apartment...Read more

Before I turn to Jared Kushner, let me ask: Do you believe the U.S. government does the right thing all or most of the time?

The Gallup organization started asking this question in 1963, when more than 70 percent of Americans said they did. Since then, the percentage has steadily declined. By 2016, before Donald Trump became president, only 16 ...Read more

For years, big corporations had welcomed the opportunity to accumulate more customers by giving discounts to NRA members. Yet in the aftermath of the shootings in Parkland, Florida, and the activism of high school students, corporations are bailing out of their deals with the NRA.

As we've seen with the corporate firings of sleazebag movie ...Read more

When Donald Trump and his followers refer to "America," what do they mean?

Some see a country of white, English-speaking Christians.

Others want a land inhabited by self-seeking individuals free to accumulate as much money and power as possible, who pay taxes only to protect their assets from criminals and foreign aggressors.

Others think ...Read more