Let's consider Mike Pence. Steadfast. Loyal. Vice president extraordinaire -- if you are of Donald Trump's political persuasion, whatever that is. And head of the federal coronavirus task force.

Oops.

We're to believe what Pence says. Not the facts.

Repeatedly, Pence has said of this historic pandemic what the facts simply do not support: The...Read more

After a disappointing spring in which kids at home learned far too little, the Los Angeles Unified School District will keep its campuses closed for at least the start of the new school year.

The surge in Los Angeles County COVID-19 cases has been too big for the schools to work around, according to Superintendent Austin Beutner. As good as ...Read more

Roger Stone has a tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back. But it's the current president, Donald Trump, who had Stone's back when on Friday he granted a commutation of the 40-month sentence his friend was facing for lying during the Russian investigation.

In doing so Trump turned his back on the justice system and, ultimately, the American people ...Read more

From the Trump administration perspective, suddenly forcing international students out of the country must have looked like three wins in one. It would have ejected mostly non-European immigrants, advanced the administration's new demand that schools reopen their campuses despite the threat posed by COVID-19 and financially and academically ...Read more

I'll admit, I cried a bit when I heard that Los Angeles Unified School District students won't be returning to their campuses next month. Instead, students will start the new school year they way the ended the last one -- online and at home.

Like many parents, I've anxiously watched the calendar and the COVID-19 case numbers. In April, as ...Read more

When you think about it -- and I've been thinking about this since I landed in Baltimore with the tall ships and the nation's bicentennial -- two realms of science hold prominent places in the regional conscience: medical, because of the abundance of research that takes place here, and environmental, because of the Chesapeake Bay and the high-...Read more

I'll admit it.

I thought there was a good chance that Fox News host Tucker Carlson would apologize for the racist, sexist, homophobic online rants posted by his head writer Blake Neff, who resigned Friday after CNN exposed him. So I turned on Carlson's show Monday night to see how he would handle himself.

For the last five years, as we learned...Read more

Republican Senator Mitt Romney described President Donald Trump's commutation of Roger's Stone sentence as "historic, unprecedented corruption," and many seem to agree. Yet a deep dive into the history shows another president's relentless campaign of pardons as far more destructive to the nation at one of its most fragile moments.

Prior to the ...Read more

When I saw the headline on CNN analyst Harry Enten's July 12 column -- "Texas is a swing state in 2020, new polls reveal" -- I did a double take. Really?

"It's pretty clear looking at the data that Texas is a swing state in the 2020 election," wrote Enten, a thoughtful observer of American politics.

But just a few paragraphs later, he used a ...Read more

There was no good reason for the federal government to rush the execution Tuesday morning of Daniel Lewis Lee. No good reason, that is, other than politics.

Lee was the first of five condemned prisoners Attorney General William Barr named in a July 2019 order resuming federal executions after 17 years (some states have been executing prisoners ...Read more

In the newest White House nod to neo-authoritarianism, President Donald Trump seems bent on remaking Voice of America into Voice of Trump.

This U.S.-funded network was set up in Washington, D.C., in 1942 to broadcast news of America overseas. It was never intended to be a partisan propaganda tool, like state-run Russian or Chinese overseas ...Read more

It's understandable that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is outraged by President Donald Trump's decision to commute the sentence of his pal Roger Stone. Last year, a jury convicted the self-described dirty trickster of seven felony counts, including witness tampering and lying to Congress, and he was sentenced to three years and four months ...Read more

Here we go again. California is back on coronavirus lockdown.

And we have no one to blame but ourselves.

With the harshest of initial pandemic closures lifted around Memorial Day, many Californians seemed to think the danger from the novel coronavirus was over and rushed out to make up for three terrible months of quarantine.

We partied, we ...Read more

Obamacare is cushioning the fall for many Americans who have lost their health insurance, along with their jobs, in the coronavirus pandemic. Millions of the newly unemployed are eligible for premium subsidies if they buy individual policies on the marketplaces created under the Affordable Care Act. Millions more are eligible for Medicaid, which...Read more

He came into the Orange County hospital because he had trouble breathing.

A week later the sign "caution droplets" hung on his ICU room door.

"Droplets," code for COVID-19.

He hasn't been conscious for 36 hours.

Only the ventilator keeps him alive.

Together, the doctor, hospice social worker and I tell the family nothing more can be done.

...Read more

We are four months away from what is shaping up to be a very strange presidential election -- the strangest in many of our lifetimes.

Americans will vote in an atmosphere of deep and bitter division. We are at each other's throats in a way we have not been since the 1960s. In some ways it may be worse than the 1960s.

We will also hold this ...Read more

Long before the novel coronavirus jumped from animals to humans, presumably in a live-animal market, people were getting sick from animals right in their own homes. People who feel the need to obtain an exotic "pet" are putting themselves at risk -- from E. coli, salmonella, ringworm, campylobacter and other pathogens -- and relegating wild ...Read more

The police reforms that are currently stalled in the U.S. Senate are so basic, so necessary and so modest that it's embarrassing they are not already law.

Much of what's in the House-passed "George Floyd Justice in Policing Act" has been adopted by police in Los Angeles and elsewhere. Much of the rest has been stuck in the discussion phase for ...Read more

I used to argue with my very progressive mother about whether women belonged in combat.

Women create life, she told me. They should not be in the business of snuffing it out.

I think her rationale probably sprang from her pacifist tendencies, but hers was not an unusual point of view.

Indeed, American women were not officially allowed to ...Read more