Be careful what you wish for.

Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt is an embarrassment in an administration that does not embarrass easily. His petty graft alone -- taking a $50-a-night room from a lobbyist's wife; spending taxpayer dollars on luxury travel -- should have cost him his job already. He also hit up donors and...Read more

Even by the historically low standards of the Trump administration for integrity in public office, last week was extraordinary.

It began with revelations about the $82 million that presidential daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband earned while serving as unpaid advisers to President Donald Trump.

It continued with suggestions by a federal ...Read more

New Jersey's decision to tighten its already strict gun laws is an example of what political leadership looks like.

New Jersey already had some of the strictest gun laws in the country. In response to a mass shooting at a high school in Florida, lawmakers moved to further tighten gun controls.

Gov. Phil Murphy signed legislation that enacted ...Read more

"Deaths of despair" sound like something that would be found in miserable, wretched places -- refugee camps, war-torn cities, famine-wracked villages in poverty-stricken countries. In fact, the term has emerged to describe a crisis in one of the most advanced societies on the planet -- ours.

The United States is in the grip of two lethal ...Read more

Republican leaders, energizing the troops at their state convention this weekend, wildly applauded key issues they always embrace: preserving Second Amendment gun rights; anti-abortion efforts; lowering taxes; and publicly-funded school choice.

But they were shamefully silent as they tip-toed around the elephant in this elephant's gathering ...Read more

Good job, Jeff Sessions! It seems the attorney general's misguided attempts to revive the unpopular and unjust federal war on marijuana may be having the exact opposite effect -- prompting a new bipartisan effort in Congress to allow states to legalize cannabis.

Last week Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) introduced...Read more

The nearly century-long battle to pass the Equal Rights Amendment came back to life last month with a sudden jolt. Ninety-five years after it was first introduced and more than a generation after Congress passed it and sent it to the states for ratification, the Illinois Legislature became the 37th state to approve it.

It was more than just a ...Read more

America's second president, John Adams, waxed cynical when it came to the subject of democracy. "Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide," he wrote in 1814. A decision last week by the U.S. Supreme Court marks a big step toward that end.

The ...Read more

SAN ANTONIO, Texas -- Texas Republicans had plenty to pray for Saturday: sinners, the president and for divine healing of their ruptured state party, preferably by Nov. 5.

There were prayers not only on abortion, morality and decency, but also on greed and corruption.

Yet not once did anyone mention those children already born but now sent by ...Read more

Cable news TV is not the first place I go looking for moral authority.

But I am happy to say that I found it there at MSNBC as it reported, critiqued and challenged the Trump administration's "zero-tolerance" policy of separating parents and children from families that had come seeking asylum at the Texas border.

For all the times I criticize ...Read more

Whatever you think of comedian Bill Maher, you have to credit him for his apt description of the Donald Trump presidency: Maher, along with others, is calling it a slow-motion coup.

A coup that, as he asserted several weeks ago, Donald Trump is winning.

On his home turf, Trump is indeed winning. He's not a terribly popular president; his ...Read more

If a family enters the United States from Mexico without permission, immigration officials should not separate minor children from their parents. To do so -- to detain adults in one facility and send kids to a shelter, maybe in a different state -- is cruel and unnecessary. Yet it's happening.

Enough alarm bells have gone off in Washington that...Read more

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Ever since President Donald Trump set in motion the gradual termination of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which gave work permits to young immigrants brought here illegally when they were children, Congress has been stalled on solving the situation of these 700,000 so-called Dreamers.

After much Republican intraparty ...Read more

When we're old and sick and poor, we might be forced to keep warm by burning all the government reports that we ignored, warning us that Social Security and Medicare are running out of money; the latest such report was issued recently.

According to the Social Security Administration, the Medicare trust fund will run dry in 2026 and Social ...Read more

With all the attention given the Donald J. Trump-Kim Jong Un summit and the president's pie-in-the-sky, ridiculously false claim on Twitter that "There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea," it would be easy to overlook Trump's sudden rewrite on health care. In a carefully worded letter, Attorney General Jeff Sessions revealed that ...Read more