The headline news about the global warming provisions of the big budget bill being negotiated in Washington is that they're in trouble.

As has been the case with the safety net provisions of the bill, the news coverage has focused on process rather than substance.

It has focused on the obstinacy of Sen. Joe Manchin III, D-W.Va., who seems ...Read more

In 2009, I was nominated to be the 16th supreme allied commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. While I had already served three years heading one of the military’s 11 combatant commands — U.S. Southern Command, focused on Latin America — this new job would be jumping into the deep end of the pool.

For starters, I would be the...Read more

The U.S. Supreme Court is broken. The Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court last week released draft discussion material that discounted one much-debated idea for fixing it — expanding the court’s size — but took a more positive stance on the idea of term limits for justices. If done right, that could well take the heat out of these...Read more

Much as Colin Powell deserves a tribute as America’s first Black secretary of state and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he was under-recognized as a bridge-builder and champion of political moderation. Powell, who died Monday, was a Republican who dared to challenge his own party’s orthodoxy and tried to avert its drift toward right-...Read more

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Wildfires have always menaced California and that will never stop, especially with climate warming. What we can do is make them more controllable and less catastrophic.

That's what Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature are attempting to achieve — a bit belatedly — by pouring unprecedented amounts of money into fire ...Read more

Republicans themselves don’t all realize it, but they’re winning the political debate over voting laws.

It’s not just that Republicans are pushing through the laws they favor in multiple states while Democrats in Washington have not been able to enact anything. That difference is mostly a result of the Senate’s 50-50 tie and the ...Read more

The 2020 election was the most secure in American history and there's no evidence that any voting system deleted, lost or changed any votes. There, I said it!

Actually, I didn't say it, but rather Chris Krebs, who served as director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency during the Trump administration, said it and was fired ...Read more

The autumn harvest is underway in Illinois, and it’s a juicy one despite the otherwise lousy year.

Corn and soybeans matured early, yields are mostly abundant and prices stand at the third-highest level ever, according to the U.S. Agriculture Department.

Add to that a bumper crop of subsidy checks from the federal government, and Illinois ...Read more

As a San Francisco resident, Nancy Pelosi knows a few things about earthquakes.

So in 2010 when Republicans won the Massachusetts Senate seat once held by Edward M. Kennedy, an upset high on the political Richter scale, it was Pelosi — cool, calm, collected — who sought to steady Democrats and put some starch in their spines.

The loss was...Read more

Homeless veterans, mentally disabled or traumatized as a result of their service, and their advocates waged a long legal battle to force the Department of Veterans Affairs to stop using parts of the sprawling VA campus in West L.A. for non-veteran enterprises and return to the campus to the use for which it was originally intended: housing ...Read more

Thirty years ago, I helped organize the first National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, which began in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 24, 1991. It was the first time in U.S. history that leaders would come together to address human rights with a focus on environmental justice.

An English teacher by love and training, I came to the ...Read more

Manufacturers of COVID-19 vaccines say they’re now producing 1.5 billion doses a month and will have made 12 billion doses by the end of the year. In theory, that would be enough to meet the World Health Organization’s goal of vaccinating 70% of the global population. The challenge is to ensure these vaccines go where they’re needed. Most ...Read more

In extending a temporary restraining order on mandating COVID-19 vaccines for New York health care workers who raised religious exemptions, a judge made clear that the court did not determine that the health care workers qualify for a religious exemption. Rather, the court found, the workers have a federally protected right to seek such an ...Read more

Can you think of an opposing view on the Holocaust that isn’t antisemitic? Evidently, a school administrator in Texas seems to think so.

Gina Peddy, the executive director of curriculum and instruction for the Carroll Independent School District in Southlake, Texas, was caught on an audio recording telling teachers to “make sure that if you...Read more

Colin L. Powell led an extraordinary life: a son of immigrants who rose from the Bronx to lead the United States in both arms and diplomacy, the first Black American to be a White House national security adviser, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and secretary of state. In death he is rightly heralded — except for the one thing he called "...Read more

For its San Diego convention in the summer of 1996, the Republican Party was anxious to avoid the acrimonious tone of its gathering in Houston four years earlier. So the GOP turned to its most respected voice of moderation and reconciliation: Gen. Colin Powell. He did not disappoint.

“Yes, we Republicans have leaders and principles that are ...Read more

In the 13 years since California voters narrowly approved $9.95 billion in bond seed money for a statewide bullet train project, there has arguably been only a single upbeat story about it: the 2014 Mercury News report that "private investors across the country and abroad are expressing new interest in bankrolling part of the $68 billion project...Read more

In what is being widely interpreted as a threat against his own party, former President Donald Trump is warning that Republicans won’t get out and vote next year if the GOP doesn’t “solve” (whatever that means) the nonexistent vote fraud he falsely claims deprived him of reelection last year. If Republicans continue to stand behind a man...Read more

This has been a year marked by terrifying news about climate change: extreme weather, massive wildfires, persistent drought in some areas and catastrophic flooding in others.

The sense of impending doom was made official when the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that the world is almost certain to blow past the ...Read more

With the first Monday in October behind us, perhaps we can at last put to rest the refrain about how the current term of the U.S. Supreme Court is among the most momentous in history. The court’s terms are like presidential elections: Always, history has never seen one as important as the one coming up. But the wordsmith in me is aware that ...Read more