"More than anything else, I think deal-making is an ability you're born with," wrote Donald J. Trump in The Art of the Deal. "It's in the genes. Mostly it's about instincts."

Presumably, that firm conviction explains President Trump's resistance to detailed briefings on prior, failed deals with North Korea. And his insistence that he can ...Read more

WASHINGTON – It was only a matter of time. Now we have "spygate."

Or, so declares Donald Trump, who is outraged, really outraged, that after the FBI was told by the Australian ambassador that a Trump campaign official was boasting about his contacts with Russia, a "human source" was asked to find out what was going on.

The FBI says that this...Read more

The McHenry, Ill., VFW post's Queen of Hearts raffle has reached $1 million in bets and is attracting thousands of players, a few new members -- and at least one critic.

Hundreds of people crammed into the bingo hall for the weekly drawing Tuesday evening. Bettors have been lining up out the door and into the parking lot to buy the tickets, and...Read more

Should courts have the power to impose wage cuts, shrink the economy and require private organizations to deliver costly services for free?

Most people would probably say no. Yet this is what could happen when the U.S. Supreme Court issues its ruling in Janus v. AFSCME Council 31, expected sometime in June.

At issue in Janus -- a case that ...Read more

For almost a year, Donald Trump's rage about the investigation into his campaign's possible collusion with Russia -- or, as he calls it, "the greatest Witch Hunt in American History" -- has threatened to provoke him to trigger a constitutional crisis by firing the lawyers leading that investigation or by making it impossible for them to do their...Read more

It's all of a sudden OK, at least in the eyes of The New York Times and other guardians of progressive bias, for an administration to spy on a political campaign. You can maybe catch crooked candidates that way, such as one named Donald Trump, or even stop Russia from doing its thing of electoral interference. Less on their lips is the chance of...Read more

I hereby demand that President Donald Trump stop setting a poor example for America's schoolchildren by misusing the word "hereby."

Sunday afternoon, Trump tweeted, "I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political ...Read more

David Runciman, a professor of politics at Cambridge University, is one of the more compelling analysts in the expanding field of democratic decline. His last book, "The Confidence Trap," which was published in 2013, took the measure of democracy as overconfident and underprepared. His new book, "How Democracy Ends," depicts what the title ...Read more

The National Rifle Association wants to make Friday's high school shooting in Texas all about building security. The answer, as robotically recited by various officials, is to harden schools, establish airport-style security checkpoints, add more armed guards and allow teachers to pack heat.

But apparently no number of young people's corpses ...Read more

Dr. Van H. Vu was put on probation in 2015 by the California Medical Board after being accused of gross negligence in the cases of two patients who fatally overdosed. If you were about to go into Vu's pain management clinic for treatment, you'd be pretty interested in that information, wouldn't you? Just as you'd want to know if your surgeon had...Read more

Earlier this year, I was riding a rented bike through a neighborhood in Alameda, California, while visiting my children at their other mother's home. They have lived there for three years and I visit frequently, often several times a week.

This time, a white woman stopped me and asked if I lived there.

I responded no, and asked if she lived ...Read more

In business, use of the "best practices" concept -- managing based on trial and error and by seeing what's worked well for others -- is the biggest bellwether for success. It's an approach that law enforcement latched onto more than most other aspects of government, exemplified decades ago by widespread adoption of the "broken windows" policing ...Read more

Women should be informed of all their options when they seek reproductive health care, including their ability to terminate an unwanted pregnancy.

But a new proposal from President Donald Trump's administration would threaten this basic flow of information, while simultaneously cutting off money for clinics to provide vital preventive health ...Read more

In 1969, after having already been held hostage for four years, a graduate of the United States Naval Academy faced a lonely choice in a North Vietnamese prison camp: how to prevent his captors from using him in a propaganda piece. James Stockdale chose to smash his own face in with a stool rather than give "aid and comfort" to the enemy.

In ...Read more

In announcing a new effort to limit access to federal family planning dollars, the White House said its proposed rule would fulfill President Donald Trump's promise "to continue to improve women's health." That's laughable.

The proposal outlined Friday would deny federal Title X family planning funds to organizations that provide abortions -- ...Read more

A divided Supreme Court undercut American workers on Monday, ruling that employers can bar employees from bringing class-action lawsuits over wage and workplace disputes. The court held in Epic Systems Corp. vs. Lewis that the right to collective actions guaranteed by the National Labor Relations Act does not bar employers from requiring ...Read more

It was wonderful to see the way Meghan Markle infused her African-American heritage into her wedding with Prince Harry.

The new Duchess of Sussex gave the world a taste of two distinctly different cultures -- that of a black girl raised by a single mother in Los Angeles and a royal whose family traditions in England go back a thousand years -- ...Read more

A half-century after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, Kansas City is poised to belatedly but appropriately honor the civil rights activist.

Whether it was simply an oversight, the result of indifference or a sign of outright bigotry, the lack of a proper public marker here has gone unaddressed for far too long.

On Sunday, an ...Read more

Women reporting a rape are often encouraged to undergo a grueling and invasive examination to collect DNA and other physical evidence. The process can take several hours, and involves poking and prodding and swabbing and questioning as medical professionals take samples from the parts of the victim's body that the rapist touched during the ...Read more