Recent headlines, from the Jan. 6 committee’s hearings to the Supreme Court rolling back the right to reproductive health care, profoundly implicate the freedom that many will celebrate this Independence Day.

Opponents of democracy — a system that works best when it empowers people to have an equal say in decisions that affect their futures...Read more

Even still — after more than half a dozen years of jaw-dropping behavior — Donald Trump has the capacity to shock.

Accosting a Secret Service agent. Pitching a fit and heaving his lunch plate against the wall. Risking bloodshed in hopes of building a bigger crowd and feeding his insatiable ego.

The facts that surfaced in Tuesday's special ...Read more

They knew.

Donald Trump. His chief of staff, Mark Meadows. His closest advisers in the White House.

They knew about what could happen on Jan. 6. About how there was a real potential for violence if Proud Boys and Oath Keepers marched on the U.S. Capitol like Trump had asked them to.

About how things could — as Meadows said — “get real, ...Read more

Independence Day is recognized across America as the day to celebrate freedom. As the popular song says, “I’m proud to be an American/Where at least I know I’m free.” Yet many people don’t feel terribly free. Some think the traditional American way of life is under attack. Others think that hard-won freedoms are being rolled back. Just...Read more

Even as pro-life Americans celebrate the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Biden administration has been busy promoting abortion abroad.

From day one, President Joe Biden removed the pro-life protections implemented by his predecessor. The White House then released its ...Read more

This month, workers at an Apple store in Maryland voted to unionize, another signal that the labor movement is gaining momentum at tech companies. This follows a victory at an Amazon Staten Island warehouse in March, the first U.S. union vote in Amazon’s history (though another company warehouse voted against unionizing in May).

Tech is ...Read more

The leadership of the Texas Republican Party recently proposed a remarkable and bizarre platform, even by today’s wacky standards, which, among other pithy items, denied the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory, evoked God in almost every sentence, demanded repeal of the Voting Rights Act, upheld the unalienable rights of the “preborn” — ...Read more

The six conservatives on the Supreme Court, who purport to revere the Constitution, have a funny way of ignoring the parts of the document that go against their conclusions. We know of no other way to rationalize their blithe ruling letting a high school football coach lead post-game prayers on the 50-yard line.

Joe Kennedy’s religious ...Read more

The overturning of Roe v. Wade is devastating for women across the country — particularly for those who live in states that don’t adequately protect their reproductive rights, and who lack the wherewithal to go elsewhere.

That said, all is not lost. By focusing on those places where they can make the most difference for the most vulnerable,...Read more

Brett Kavanaugh is a serial liar.

It's jarring to write that about anyone, let alone a life-tenured justice on the Supreme Court. Yet years of evidence throughout Kavanaugh's career show it's a fact.

And that fact, together with recent years' confirmation controversies and Clarence Thomas' ethical lapses, is central to understanding why public...Read more

Nicotine kills. Oh, not directly, for the most part. It’s just so addictive that cigarette smokers find it nearly impossible to quit a product that subtracts years off their lives, causes cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, strokes and heart disease, along with worsening Type 2 diabetes. In 2018, more than half of the smokers in ...Read more

In the end, the person who told us, under oath, what the president was doing as a violent mob descended on the U.S. Capitol wasn’t Mark Meadows or anyone else in Donald Trump’s inner circle.

It was a 25-year-old woman who had far less authority than any of them.

Cassidy Hutchinson, principal aide to former White House Chief of Staff Mark ...Read more

Hello America, try not to get shot today.

That's it; that's the lede.

In what's obviously become the safest country in the world so long as you're invested in this guns-make-us-safer psychosis, you can now get shot for the way you make a sandwich.

Or did you miss that story in the wrap-up of the overnight carnage?

Man walks into Subway ...Read more

Within hours of the news that more than 50 migrants had died in the back of a tractor-trailer near San Antonio on Monday, the men, women and children having been baked alive in the blistering Texas heat, anti-immigrant Republicans quickly descended into blaming President Joe Biden. Not because he had anything directly to do with this disaster, ...Read more

The weightiest immediate question raised by the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol and the continuing House hearings is whether the deadly insurrection requires an unprecedented criminal prosecution of a former president.

It’s not a question anymore.

The disturbing firsthand account of Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to White House...Read more

In May, weeks before the U.S. Supreme Court discarded the law to return abortion policy to the states, Missouri lawmakers talked about putting an abortion ban in the state constitution.

“Let the voters decide whether they want to make it clear that there is no right to abortion in the Missouri Constitution,” said state Sen. Bob Onder, a ...Read more

When a 2,000-pound Russian missile slammed into a crowded shopping mall in the central Ukrainian city of Kremenchuk on Monday — killing at least 18 people buying bathing suits or blenders — that was par for the course for Russia.

Only the day before, Sunday, a barrage of Russian missiles pounded a quiet civilian neighborhood in the center ...Read more

Tuesday’s blockbuster testimony before the House Jan. 6 Select Committee brought the American public directly into former President Donald Trump’s inner White House sanctum to understand his thinking and motivation as the Capitol insurrection was being planned and launched. The evidence and testimony strongly suggest that he knew an attack ...Read more

It tells you a lot about the U.S. Supreme Court, and the state of the country, that only one of its nine justices appears to have given the possibility of compromise on abortion more than a moment’s thought.

Chief Justice John Roberts voted with the majority in Friday’s decision to allow Mississippi’s law prohibiting abortions after 15 ...Read more

We have our Jan. 6 hero.

Her name is Cassidy Hutchinson.

She is the 25-year-old former executive assistant to President Donald Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, both of whom should now be very, very afraid.

Hutchinson is the one we’ve been waiting for, the one who saw everything, heard everything and has now spilled the tea about the ...Read more