If you're weary of America's politics of grievance, fed up with its constant churning of resentment and bitterness, then the Fourth of July might be just the festive reprieve you need. Provided you don't pay too close attention to the holiday's bill of particulars.

Over the course of more than two centuries, America has buried most of the ...Read more

When President Donald Trump launched his reelection campaign, he hoped to run, in part, on a record of foreign policy success.

He told voters he was making progress toward a big trade deal with China: "The biggest deal ever," he promised.

He was holding peace talks with North Korea aimed at dismantling Kim Jong Un's nuclear arsenal and ending ...Read more

In the spring of 2019, I was walking through a Providence, R.I., airport concourse after what had been a very painful, yet rewarding day. I had just bid a final goodbye to Armand LaValle, my pal since we were seventh-graders in Florida, who had courageously battled a cancer that we both knew was going to claim him in just a few hours.

As I ...Read more

There is something especially grotesque about the timing of President Donald Trump's pledge to veto a $740 billion defense bill if military bases named for Confederate military leaders are renamed.

He made this pledge during the July 4th holiday week.

This is a moment when Americans are roiling over issues of racial intolerance that date back ...Read more

When New York City's COVID-19 epidemic peaked in late March and early April, the city was reporting more than 5,000 new confirmed cases a day, and more than 60% of tests for the disease were coming back positive. In Arizona, which has a similar if somewhat smaller population (7.3 million versus 8.3 million), new cases are currently averaging ...Read more

"DC should be a state. Pass it on." That's the message supporters of D.C. statehood pushed on social media late last week as the U.S. House of Representatives prepared to vote on D.C. statehood.

And on June 26, for the first time in our nation's history, the majority-Democrat U.S. House of Representatives passed along party lines (save for a ...Read more

Donald Trump is responsible for a fair amount of badness in the 3 1/2 years he's served as president of the United States: Dismantling and denigrating American institutions, encouraging white supremacy, locking up immigrant children, asking a foreign government to interfere with an American election, lying 5 million times. And those are just a ...Read more

According to a series of detailed dispatches from The New York Times, Russia's military intelligence agency has offered bounties to Taliban fighters for killing U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. Some details remain unclear, and the White House says that "the president was never briefed on this."

Nonetheless: The undisputed facts are bad enough. If ...Read more

The Supreme Court on Tuesday needlessly poked a hole in Thomas Jefferson's "wall of separation between church and state." By a 5-4 vote, the court ruled in a case from Montana that if a state provides a tax break that benefits students at a secular private school, it must include private religious schools as well. The decision is doubly ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- For five years, ever since Donald Trump announced he was running for president, we have heard allegations that he is inappropriately obsessed with Russia. Millions of Americans have dismissed such a suggestion as ridiculous.

Those people should look -- seriously and objectively -- at the evidence. It is enormously compelling.

For...Read more

In recent weeks many members of Congress have been arguing against extending the $600 weekly supplement to unemployment insurance benefits that was put into the original pandemic relief package. Some members of Congress have even argued for extra payments to encourage unemployed workers to return to work.

These proposals miss the logic that led...Read more

July 1 is not a date Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is likely to forget anytime soon.

Some of the most iconic and biggest spending brands in American life -- including Coca-Cola, The Hershey Company and Ford Motor Company, have joined a call for the suspension of advertising on Facebook this month. From Adidas to Verizon, many of the brands you ...Read more

The U.S. economy is slowly getting its groove back as millions of businesses are beginning to call back their employees. But for the millions of Americans who continue to receive unemployment benefits, it may actually pay more to stay away from work than to go back to their jobs.

A temporary provision in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and ...Read more

On a bitter cold spring night 14 months ago, back in a more magical time when all things seemed possible in the 2020 president race, I stood on the steps leading down to Washington's great Reflecting Pool waiting to hear from the most unlikely and arguably intriguing Democrat of all, the businessman and political neophyte Andrew Yang.

Before ...Read more

So here we are again, back where this presidency began: Trump and Russia. Russia and Trump.

News that Russian President Vladimir Putin was paying bounties for killing U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, and that President Donald Trump was briefed about it and took no action, is the latest shocking/unsurprising twist in a long and sordid saga. Some ...Read more

In the time since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana law that sought to regulate abortion clinics out of business, it's become increasingly obvious that there was only one clear winner. That would be the legal concept of stare decisis or the rule of precedent. Having decided just four years ago that a similar Texas law was ...Read more