In late September 1968, presidential election polls showed that third-party candidate George Wallace's campaign was surging. With the support of a quarter of white voters, Wallace was within single digits of the Democratic nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Wallace's dominance in Southern states threatened to prevent any candidate from ...Read more

Last August, Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina was concerned enough about protecting Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation that he co-sponsored legislation that would make firing a special counsel subject to review by a three-judge panel. Tillis, in interviews then, did not shy away from indicating that his bill was directed at ...Read more

My favorite scene in one of my all-time favorite movies -- 1982's "The Verdict," with Paul Newman as a down-and-out lawyer taking on The Establishment -- comes near the end when Newman's attorney finally locates the woman whose secrets of male ambition and cover-up, which cost her her career and forced her to leave Boston, can prove his case.

...Read more

Roughly 120 miles separate Aberdeen and Great Mills. Annapolis is almost exactly the midpoint.

Grief unites all three communities.

The shooting Thursday at a Rite Aid distribution center in Aberdeen marks the third episode of mass gun violence in Maryland this year. Five dead in the Capital Gazette newsroom, one dead in a Southern Maryland ...Read more

In coming decades, the world's most affluent societies will invest trillions of dollars on new infrastructure -- sea walls, smart grids, basins for capturing rainwater -- hoping to mitigate unpredictable mega-storms, droughts, wildfires or other climate disasters. But engineered systems can't fully climate-proof our densely populated cities. ...Read more

Last year, Baltimore area food bank operators noticed a significant downturn in Latino clients. They worried that local immigrants -- with legal status and green cards -- were deliberately avoiding applying for the SNAP program out of fear that they'd be targeted for deportation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Such was the power of the ...Read more

Liberal foreign policy in the Trump era is a bit like a fantasy novel. The narrative is compelling, but it requires a suspension of disbelief.

This is particularly true when it comes to Russia. The Democratic Party is rightly furious at Russian President Vladimir Putin for his interference in the 2016 election. U.S. President Donald Trump's ...Read more

In a perfect world, the showdown this week over Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh would focus only on the credibility of accusations of sexual assault against him, which he has denied. But the outcome will swing at least as much on the politics of the situation.

In the perverse world of Washington, Republicans are likely to lose politically...Read more

The video always has been the roadblock to Officer Jason Van Dyke's freedom.

It is difficult for most people to get past the shocking image of Laquan McDonald's body twitching on the pavement from a hail of bullets. No doubt, it will haunt some members of the jury too.

That image alone has caused many of us to doubt Van Dyke's claim that he ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- In the presidential election of 1800, John Adams' camp, through the Connecticut Courant newspaper, said that should Thomas Jefferson win the presidency, the United States would become a nation where "murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will openly be taught and practiced."

Jefferson's camp in turn accused Adams of being a "...Read more

'The Godfather" ends with a famous scene in which each of the heads of the five most powerful New York mafia families is assassinated. One is exiting a gilded elevator. One is in a white tuxedo. One is on the steps of the Foley Square courthouse. One is on a massage table. One is in bed with a prostitute.

They're relishing their privileges, in ...Read more

Most of you don't smoke marijuana, for medical or recreational use. So you may be wondering, as you hear that Michiganders can vote to make recreational marijuana legal in the Nov. 6 election: Why should I vote yes?

Here's the short answer: Michiganders should vote YES this fall on Proposal 1 because

-- Prohibiting it outright does not work (...Read more

Our prison system does not provide a snapshot of crime in this country. It's a snapshot of policies and practices that are a combination of politically expedient, profit-driven, racist, and absent of larger strategy or meaning -- to say nothing of being divorced from actual crime rates.

Take a recent announcement by the Pennsylvania Department ...Read more

Perhaps the most galling aspect of Russian cheating in past Olympics was the Kremlin's smirky insistence that it had done nothing wrong. Steroid-laced cocktails behind closed doors, doped-up Russian athletes pilfering Olympic glory ... and Potemkin denials at the lectern.

Acknowledgment of guilt was supposed to be a condition for Russia's ...Read more

Five years after the Supreme Court gutted a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a new report from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has confirmed predictions that the ruling would hobble enforcement of that landmark law.

In addition to prohibiting racial discrimination in voting nationwide, the Voting Rights Act requires states and ...Read more

State Sen. Kevin de Leon, D-Los Angeles, seemed to hit his stride in recent months in his long-shot bid to unseat incumbent U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-San Francisco. He won the formal endorsement of the California Democratic Party, a sure sign of the former state Senate leader's appeal to the growing number of Democrats who have lost patience...Read more

Almost a year ago, a cautionary headline appeared atop a Tribune editorial: "Beware the long reach of #MeToo." A year later, that warning to sexual predators -- who rely on the silence of their victims -- reverberates just as powerfully through American society.

In autumn 2017, Americans couldn't tell if the #MeToo phenomenon would flare but ...Read more

Missouri was recently a purple state, but it's turning Republican red. Pennsylvania went for President Donald Trump in 2016 but it's still a purplish shade of Democratic blue. Ohio is like one of them, but which?

Ohio long has been a key swing state. The Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama each carried it twice. So did ...Read more

If the Democrats take the House, we may see a revival of President Donald Trump's promised $1 trillion (or more) infrastructure program, this time financed through federal borrowing rather than the public-private partnerships floated last year. Former economic adviser Gary Cohn and other sources tell Axios that Trump -- the self-styled "King of ...Read more