ArcaMax

Should Alec Baldwin have been charged with involuntary manslaughter in the shooting death of the cinematographer on the movie set of "Rust"?

To answer that question, you need to know what he knew or should have known at the moment he pulled that trigger.

This is what we know. He pulled the trigger. He did the act that caused death. Act and ...Read more

What's good for the goose is good for the gander. It's the latest game in Washington, being played out every time a document is found in a garage or a room near a garage in Wilmington, Delaware, as the relics of 40 years in public life are searched for random classified documents. And so the game goes.

They both have special counsels.

They ...Read more

Back in the '90s, my ex-husband wrote a movie about a con man who discovers where the money is and runs for Congress and actually gets elected. The movie, "The Distinguished Gentleman," was very funny. In real life, it's not so funny. I wonder if George Santos ever watched it.

This week's developments in the George Santos saga only underscore...Read more

I'm not a fan of the privileged prince, to say the least, but with his latest book, I feel like we all owe a debt of gratitude to the spoiled prince. After all, most of us come from less than perfect families, like the prince. The difference is that we deal with it privately, quietly, hopefully in a way that allows us to work through our ...Read more

The other shoe just dropped. Or maybe it's the first shoe. It's a new committee to keep an eye on the way the government collects information on private citizens. Good idea? Sure, why not. As the new speaker, Kevin McCarthy, put it, "Government should be here to help you, not go after you."

That was his explanation for the new committee, one ...Read more

You start unpacking, one piece at a time. That's the way to start the new year. One piece at a time. First piece: the next senator from California

The most expensive and most watched Senate race began this week with Rep. Katie Porter's announcement that she will be running for Dianne Feinstein's seat in the United States Senate. Feinstein, at...Read more

Now is the time when we remember that football is dangerous. It's not just about those brains on ice, those players who have lost the ability to think or recognize their loved ones. It's not just about the arthritis that comes later or the broken bones that come sooner or the cardiac arrest that is one in a million.

There is a reason you suit...Read more

After years of legal skirmishes, court battles and the rest, the House Ways and Means Committee finally released President Donald Trump's tax returns last week. It didn't make front-page news because they had already been leaked. Even so.

We should be mad as hell.

Unlike every president and presidential candidate, Trump refused to disclose ...Read more

They call them "overdose prevention sites." I'd never heard of them until I saw the picture in the LA Times of a drug user literally falling down in the middle of a city plaza where dozens of people were openly consuming fentanyl, meth and other deadly drugs. What makes it a "prevention" site is that they are less likely to overdose out in ...Read more

The trouble with Israel is very simple. It's a democracy. They elect their own leaders. Not ones I'd vote for. They may sometimes feel the same way about us.

So no, I don't support Bibi Netanyahu. I worry about the right wingers he is making common cause with, because they include those who do not stand for human rights for all. I worry about...Read more

Masks aren't. The number one weapon for fighting COVID is in a box in the front hall closet, in my house and in plenty of other people's houses.

Why aren't people being required to wear masks? What's the difference between COVID now and COVID when you had to wear masks?

The answer, it seems, does not require a degree in medicine. It's ...Read more

Harvey Weinstein's lawyer called the wife of Gov. Gavin Newsom, one of four women whose accounts of forced sex formed the basis for the charges against Weinstein, "just another bimbo" who engaged in what he described as "transactional sex."

The jury hung 8-4 in favor of conviction after she testified that Weinstein's aides left her alone in ...Read more

"Find a new vice," my doctor told me. Smoking one joint a day, he said, increases your risk of lung cancer by 8% each year. He is the top lung surgeon in town. I quit smoking cigarettes 30 years ago, but I'm still at risk because of the years I smoked. Stupidity follows you. And then there's my vice.

"Vaping, too?" I asked him, meaning using ...Read more

There's a tendency to assume the best about Ron DeSantis because, after all, he isn't Donald Trump. But DeSantis is no moderate. He is an extremist, cut from the same cloth as Trump, just with a better tailor.

Consider his latest move. On Tuesday, the anti-vax co-front-runner announced that he was forming a new committee at the state level to...Read more

It doesn't sound like much, but President Joe Biden is doing better on Main Street. His overall approval ratings have been slowly improving since August, when gas prices finally settled down and Biden won congressional approval for the Inflation Reduction Act. According to the fourth quarter poll conducted by CNBC and Survey Monkey, Biden's ...Read more

By now, you would have to be under a rock not to have heard that Donald Trump has outdone himself once again. Just when you thought there was nothing more outrageous he could do, the former president who swore to uphold the Constitution comes right out and says that the Constitution should be "terminated." Democracy be damned. Trump as king. ...Read more

A new report out this week has found the gun death rate to be the highest in 40 years. No one is exempt. More men are dying than women -- by 86% to 14% -- but deaths among women are increasing faster than those of men. Race matters. Gender matters. Age matters.

Young Black men are most likely to die: 142 per 100,000 is the homicide rate for ...Read more

In traffic downtown, the man next to me wanted to get over in my lane. I slowed up a little and let him in. His hand went out the window, and I lifted mine to return what I anticipated was an incoming obligatory thank-you wave. Instead, he extended his middle finger. This threw me off until I saw the car in front of him return the gesture. The ...Read more

Sixty is the magic number to beat a filibuster in the United States Senate. Sixty votes means a bill is on its way to becoming law, at least as far as the Senate is concerned.

Sixty-two votes is how many the gay marriage bill received in the Senate last week.

Twelve Republicans joined all 50 Democrats to support legislation protecting the ...Read more

If she hadn't married the governor of California, she would've been "just another bimbo" who engaged in "transactional sex" to get ahead.

Harvey Weinstein's lawyer, in an opening statement straight out of the 1980s, reportedly dismissed and disparaged Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the wife of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who took the stand this ...Read more