Al Franken was an above-average senator from Minnesota who was driven from office in 2018 by his Democratic colleagues after several women accused him of touching them inappropriately or making them feel physically uncomfortable. Democrats opposing Donald Trump — then a confessed groper, later found liable for rape — did not want to have to ...Read more

With the coming of the annual National Electric Drive Week, we are again likely to hear politicians and proponents sing the praises of electric vehicles. EVs, we will be told, are going to change life in Illinois because they are cleaner, easier to maintain and fun to drive.

But here’s what we should also be discussing, although we probably ...Read more

A shutdown of the federal government, even if only temporary, would needlessly disrupt the lives of public employees and citizens who depend on government services. But, despite a flurry of activity on Capitol Hill, such a calamity remains all too possible next month.

The explanation is tiresomely familiar: the obstructionism of a small band of...Read more

President Joe Biden was inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2021. Imagine if someone could go back in time and inform him and his communications team that a few pivotal changes in the media would occur during his first three years in office.

There’s the latest news that Rupert Murdoch, 92, stepped down as the chairman of Fox Corp. and News Corp. on ...Read more

Trust in institutions is declining, expectations for small business outcomes are diminishing and real household incomes are sinking; it is fair to say that Americans seem to be in a funk.

The University of Michigan’s September Consumer Sentiment Index is sitting at 71.6 points, which is well above the June 2022 all-time low of 50 but well ...Read more

Donald Trump has successfully made up his own rules in the political arena, but in the legal arena, he will have to adhere to the rules that apply to all. That’s why a witness such as Molly Michael is so dangerous to him.

We just learned the broad strokes of what Michael, an assistant to the former president at Mar-a-Lago, told special ...Read more

When President Joe Biden urged world leaders on Tuesday not to diminish support for Ukraine, he used a phrase whose importance you may have missed. Speaking at the U.N. General Assembly, Biden charged (correctly) that Russia’s price for peace is “Ukraine’s capitulation, Ukraine’s territory, and Ukraine’s children.”

I’ve added ...Read more

The Texas Republican Party has been at war with itself for years, waging battles large and small, consequential and petty. The split over Attorney General Ken Paxton spilled it all into the open.

But just because the House voted to impeach Paxton and the Senate voted to acquit him, it doesn’t follow that the GOP, which runs everything at the ...Read more

It was nearly 80 years from Congress' creation to the first impeachment of a president, Andrew Johnson in 1868, and 130 years more until the second, Bill Clinton in 1998, both of them Democrats impeached by Republican House majorities. That total — two impeachments in more than two centuries — doubled in just over a year with the 2019 and ...Read more

The Republican Party of Florida did the right thing.

By scrapping a loyalty oath requirement for access to its presidential primary ballot next March, the party’s executive board was simply retracting what it should never have adopted last May.

Had that unprecedented rule remained in effect, it would have kept former President Donald Trump�...Read more

LOS ANGELES — For almost three years, "home" for Wendy Lockett was a dilapidated RV.

Her "community" was a close-knit group of men, women and dogs living in equally dilapidated RVs, and her "neighborhood" — much to the aggravation of many on the Westside of L.A. — was a trash-strewn encampment on Jefferson Boulevard alongside the Ballona ...Read more

Congress is bickering as usual. A potential federal shutdown is looming. Public respect for the elected representatives of government is at historic lows.

What a perfect time to announce that members of the world’s greatest deliberative body are welcome to start coming to the U.S. Capitol looking like slobs.

That sarcasm is perhaps ...Read more

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker reportedly leaned hard on President Joe Biden’s administration to make it possible for new migrants from Venezuela, several thousand of whom are sheltering in Chicago, to get authorization to work legally. Good job, governor. That’s a very positive development.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on ...Read more

The work-family balance topic is one of the dominant issues in American society, but you would not know this based upon the amount of attention it gets compared with immigration, guns, abortion, national defense, Social Security and Medicare, transportation, climate change and taxes.

This is yet another sign of our dysfunctional democracy. ...Read more

Extreme heat causes thousands of unnecessary deaths each year in the United States. And due to climate change, heat waves are becoming more common. This summer, for example, Phoenix had a record 31 straight days with temperatures hitting 110 degrees or higher.

Having an airtight home with decent insulation and functioning air conditioning ...Read more

According to the University of Michigan’s September Consumer Sentiment Index, Americans seem to be in a funk. At 71.6 points, the index is above the June 2022 all-time low of 50 but well below the 101 achieved in February 2020.. While the index is mired at pre-pandemic levels, the economy has marched ahead. According to a related Economist ...Read more

It’s easy to be dissatisfied with the actions, or inactions, of government these days. While Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives dithered over a plan to keep the federal government funded in order to avoid a calamitous shutdown — a scenario that has “always been a loser for Republicans politically,” according to Senate ...Read more

Supreme Court oral arguments have gotten too long. How do I know this? It used to be that during one of my longer morning runs, I could listen to an entire Supreme Court oral argument. Now, that’s getting harder and harder to do. I end my run, and the argument is still going. So I listen to it while I make breakfast. Then I listen to it on my ...Read more

We understand that Gov. Ron DeSantis is a very busy man. Iowa, New Hampshire, Tallahassee. It’s a lot. Somewhere along the line, though, surely he’s had time to read, and take final action on, 42 ethics cases against Florida public officials.

Yet he hasn’t bothered to finalize a single complaint forwarded to him by the Florida Commission ...Read more

The death last month of the killer whale known as Tokitae or Lolita touched a raw nerve in our culture. Toki lived 53 years in a deteriorating tank at Miami Seaquarium — a home that nearly everyone agreed was both inadequate and horrifically small for an animal whose wild counterparts often travel up to 100 miles a day. From her inhumane 1970 ...Read more