It’s happened to all of us: The holidays are here before you know it, and you’re scrambling for that last-minute gift. Maybe you procrastinated, but at least you are spending your own money on someone else. Conversely, the politicians in Congress are preparing to spend YOUR money on THEMSELVES and their special interests in a perverse, year-...Read more

When graduate teaching assistants strike, my work becomes impossible. I’m a professor at the University of California as we see the largest higher education strike in U.S. history. My 250 students — mostly new to UC San Diego this fall — have lost their teaching assistants to the picket line. They rely on TAs for feedback on their work, ...Read more

There is nothing showy or preposterous about the work of the House Jan. 6 committee.

Over the course of 10 sessions, a nominally bipartisan group of legislators and their indefatigable staff have presented a sober, methodical case that then-President Donald Trump and an expansive cabal of supporters incited a riot that cost lives and could have...Read more

The conviction of Oath Keepers leaders Stewart Rhodes and Kelly Meggs on charges of seditious conspiracy is a historic legal victory for the Department of Justice, but it is much more than that as well.

Tuesday’s verdicts in federal court in Washington will go a long way toward defining the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol melee, once and for all, as a ...Read more

To people of color in the United States, the death of Anastasio Hernández-Rojas — a brutal killing at the hands of U.S. government officials followed by impunity — is all too familiar. Yet in an extraordinary moment challenging that impunity, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights convened a hearing in November to consider testimony ...Read more

A favorable map. Media narratives dissecting the uphill climb for Democrats. A Senate majority within sight.

But Republicans underperform and fail to win the Senate. A postmortem is ordered by the Republican National Committee.

Sound familiar?

If it feels like history is repeating itself, that’s because it is.

In 2012, the Republicans had ...Read more

Eager-beaver that he seems to be — at age 8, he already knew he wanted to be a politician — new Miami-Dade Commissioner Kevin Cabrera is, unfortunately, off to a sour start.

At that tender age, he donned a suit to go to Publix with his mother so that his future constituents would get a good first impression.

And went on to study politics ...Read more

The United Nations climate summit in Egypt this month broke ground with a new agreement to compensate poor nations for the effects of global warming. The creation of a loss and damage fund is an important, if overdue, step toward climate justice and one of the top agenda items at the COP27 summit.

Developing nations have long sought help from ...Read more

Of all the harebrained things we could do to our form of government, possibly the hairiest would be to call a constitutional convention to rewrite our founding document.

But that’s not stopping some folks from calling for one. Over the years, I’ve learned that people who carry the Constitution in their pocket seem to know the least about it...Read more

Biogen Inc. and Eisai Co. caused a stir in September when they announced positive results in a late-stage trial for a closely watched Alzheimer’s drug, lecanemab. Doctors tempered their excitement, though, until they could scrutinize the full peer-reviewed data.

That data arrived Tuesday night. And while it is stoking enthusiasm that ...Read more

With unanimous Democratic support and a dozen Republican votes, the Respect for Marriage Act passed the Senate and will soon land on President Joe Biden’s desk, virtuously affirming that the United States will protect same-sex unions. That this is happening just 26 years after the bill’s nasty twin, the Defense of Marriage Act, passed both ...Read more

Hurricane season officially ends this week. Thank goodness. Tampa Bay got lucky again — barely — but Hurricane Ian and then Nicole landed one-two punches on Florida and exposed different vulnerabilities.

Hurricane Ian crashed into Fort Myers Beach on Sept. 28 as a huge Category 4 storm, devastating coastal communities and isolating Sanibel ...Read more

You can see why Gov. Ron DeSantis wants to prevent Floridians from learning more about the flights that took migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard.

What Floridians know is bad enough.

The DeSantis administration is fighting two lawsuits demanding that the governor and others involved explain under oath why and how the state paid to send ...Read more

The video of "Chongqing Superman" has gone viral amidst the explosion of protests across China against the government's "zero COVID" policy.

A man in a grey T-shirt with a Superman backpack stands on a street corner in the southwest Chinese city of Chongqing, ranting against the soaring price of carrots — and the government's failed strategy ...Read more

It’s not our collective imagination: Large numbers of deeply unstable New Yorkers are inhabiting the streets and subways. A small fraction of those beset with psychosis — Simon Martial, Peter Zisopoulos, Alexander Wright and Frank James come to mind — present a danger to others.

Chronically, such individuals fall through gaping cracks in ...Read more

Can Donald Trump win the Republican presidential nomination?

The contest is now in full flight, even though only one candidate, Trump, has formally announced. In echoes of 2016, political observers have been debating whether Trump could capture the nomination with a relatively small share of the overall vote.

Indeed, it appears that the Trump...Read more

Thank you for your service, Iowa and New Hampshire. But it's time to end the prominent, influential perch you two small rural states have long enjoyed in winnowing the list of presidential contenders.

Another state or states should get a chance to sort through candidates and make an early choice in the nation's first caucus or primary. ...Read more

In the first days after his acquisition of Twitter on Oct. 27, Elon Musk rattled the platform's users and advertisers with a series of tweets associating himself with far-right memes.

These included a grotesque conspiracy claim about the violent assault on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband, Paul, and an accusation that "activist groups" had ...Read more

Texans, did you know you reelected — cue dramatic music — an “election denier” as governor?

That’s according to the news site Axios. The way it reached that conclusion about Gov. Greg Abbott is a tale of our fractured media era, obliteration of nuance and Abbott’s efforts to straddle the fence. Let’s unpack it.

Shortly after the ...Read more

Perhaps it’s a mere coincidence that Donald Trump, white nationalists and far-right extremists find themselves so often mentioned in the same sentence.

But we don’t think so.

The former president — poor guy — claims to know nothing about them. In 2016, Trump feigned ignorance about former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke, who ...Read more