Whatever you think of comedian Bill Maher, you have to credit him for his apt description of the Donald Trump presidency: Maher, along with others, is calling it a slow-motion coup.

A coup that, as he asserted several weeks ago, Donald Trump is winning.

On his home turf, Trump is indeed winning. He's not a terribly popular president; his ...Read more

If a family enters the United States from Mexico without permission, immigration officials should not separate minor children from their parents. To do so -- to detain adults in one facility and send kids to a shelter, maybe in a different state -- is cruel and unnecessary. Yet it's happening.

Enough alarm bells have gone off in Washington that...Read more

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When we're old and sick and poor, we might be forced to keep warm by burning all the government reports that we ignored, warning us that Social Security and Medicare are running out of money; the latest such report was issued recently.

According to the Social Security Administration, the Medicare trust fund will run dry in 2026 and Social ...Read more

With all the attention given the Donald J. Trump-Kim Jong Un summit and the president's pie-in-the-sky, ridiculously false claim on Twitter that "There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea," it would be easy to overlook Trump's sudden rewrite on health care. In a carefully worded letter, Attorney General Jeff Sessions revealed that ...Read more

On June 9, U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., spent several hours meeting with detainees at a federal immigration facility near the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.

Most of the detainees -- 174 of 206 -- were women. Many are fleeing violence and deprivation in their home countries; they are seeking asylum in accordance with U.S. and ...Read more

Breaking California into three states is no longer just a kooky idea being pushed by one rich guy. Now it's a kooky idea that millions of Californians will face on the ballot in November.

The so-called Cal 3 proposition, written and funded by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper, qualified last week for the ballot. While not quite as ...Read more

The J. Paul Getty Museum has been fighting in Italian courts for more than a decade to keep its bronze "Statue of a Victorious Youth," one of the museum's most prized antiquities. But the Getty has yet to emerge victorious. In the latest round, a court in Pesaro ruled that the bronze -- which was pulled out of the sea by Italian fishermen in ...Read more

CHICAGO -- Near the end of the long journey never before taken by human feet, the three remaining adventurers spied their final destination through the trees.

"Oh my God, you can see it!" said Emily Leu.

"There it is," said Jay Readey.

"Keep going!" cried Molly Fitzgibbon.

And on they trekked through downtown Chicago Monday evening, to the ...Read more

The U.S. economy is growing, unemployment has reached lows not seen in almost two decades, wages are starting to rise and inflation is subdued. Yet lots of Americans say they're not particularly happy or satisfied with their lives. Bloomberg Opinion columnists Conor Sen and Noah Smith met online recently to discuss the state of Americans' ...Read more

The J. Paul Getty Museum has been fighting in Italian courts for more than a decade to keep its bronze "Statue of a Victorious Youth," one of the museum's most prized antiquities. But the Getty itself has yet to emerge victorious. In the latest round, a court in Pesaro ruled that the bronze -- which was pulled out of the sea by Italian fishermen...Read more

True to form, North Carolina Republicans are wasting little time making life more difficult for the vulnerable in our state.

This time, that means those among us who have preexisting health conditions -- the kind that used to result in high insurance premiums or denial of coverage altogether before the Affordable Care Act made those practices ...Read more

The long-ago summer of 1950 was different from previous ones for this elementary school boy. Yes, I played stickball in the sidelot and began learning the artifices of adult card games. But something quite extraordinary captured my imagination and attention: the outbreak of the Korean War, on June 25, 1950.

For this boy, war was something he ...Read more

Missouri's education leaders can get back to business with enthusiasm and optimism this week now that Gov. Mike Parson has made two new appointments to the state Board of Education. The board, which oversees about 900,000 students in K-12 education, has had too few members since December to appoint a new state schools commissioner.

A hefty ...Read more

A recent survey that shows fewer Connecticut teens are drinking and using drugs is good news for the future.

It's hard to say whether the drop in the number of teens using drugs -- as well as alcohol and cigarettes -- is directly related to the sharp increase in video game use, also reported by the 2017 Connecticut School Health Survey.

But ...Read more

Blame Comey. That's the main takeaway of the much-awaited Justice Department inspector general's report on the Hillary Clinton email investigation. The report faulted former FBI Director James Comey both for saying in July 2016 that there were no grounds for a reasonable prosecutor to go after Clinton and for saying in October of that year that ...Read more