Don’t give up hope. Even though you’ve now endured your fourth night of crosstalk cacophony that has passed for debating in the 2023 run amok run-up to Campaign 2024.

Of course, you realize history will dismiss all four so-called debates for their obvious irrelevance to the ultimate decision-making of your fellow 2024 Republican voters. ...Read more

It’s a common accusation: “You just hate Trump.” But this dismissive assertion always implies a subtext: “Your hatred of Trump blinds you to his virtues and accomplishments.”

Sometimes this “hatred” of Trump is called TDS—Trump Derangement Syndrome; again, your derangement has made it impossible for you to evaluate Donald Trump ...Read more

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California state government's bank account has dwindled from a nearly $100 billion surplus 18 months ago to a projected $68 billion deficit.

How could that possibly happen?

Three reasons:

•Sacramento politicians haven't had the guts to fix a very flawed roller-coaster tax system that generates barrels of revenue in ...Read more

As the former superintendent of Joshua Tree National Park — and a 38-year career employee for the National Park Service — I have seen the undeniable benefits that come with conserving our public lands. Nowhere has this become more clear than in the California desert, where conservation efforts have nurtured a growing and sustainable outdoor ...Read more

A nation that few Americans could find on a map, the oil-rich South American country of Guyana, is in trouble. It has a large and aggressive neighbor, Venezuela, run by an authoritarian leader who maintains close relationships with Russia, Iran, Cuba and other authoritarian states.

In a move reminiscent of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of ...Read more

You’ve got to hand it to the California state attorney general’s office: It knows how to put an accurate title on a proposed ballot initiative. Consider the new anti-transgender proposal in California: “Restricts Rights of Transgender Youth.”

Because, yes, transgender minors do have rights in this state under the law. They can play on ...Read more

A band of raiders never stops at just one scalp. Just minutes after the University of Pennsylvania’s president Liz Magill pulled the plug on her stormy 17-month tenure, under intense pressure for her handling of antisemitism questions on Capitol Hill, her chief inquisitor — GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York — was back on the battlefield ...Read more

Rep. Elise Stefanik set a clever trap at a House hearing on antisemitism on campus, snaring the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard and MIT. The presidents, Liz Magill of Penn, Claudine Gay of Harvard and MIT’s Sally Kornbluth, walked right into it and Magill has now lost her job over her fumbling response.

The question was:...Read more

With former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney’s comments that she’s considering an independent bid for president against Donald Trump, experts are beginning to game out how she and other third-party candidates could affect next year’s election.

A political action committee backing independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign announced that it�...Read more

Kate Cox, a 31-year-old Dallas-Fort Worth married mother of two, might die. She’s not recovering from some tragic accident, nor does she have some kind of untreatable ailment. The best path to her health is eminently clear and medically proven: an abortion to terminate an unviable 20-week pregnancy, as recommended by her doctors.

Those ...Read more

You don't read a book like former Wyoming U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney's tell-all looking for literary pearls.

You read it to find out what was going on behind the scenes in Congress after the 2020 election, as Donald Trump's Republican sycophants and enablers schemed with him to overturn the results of a legitimate U.S. election. You read it to ...Read more

Lubna Elayan was a teenage violin student who wore huge black-rimmed glasses and dreamed of becoming a professional musician and playing in international competitions.

In a Facebook photo montage of her practicing and mugging for the camera in her school uniform, her enchanting smile is infectious. That is, until you read in the caption that ...Read more

The question to former President Donald Trump last week was a softball, served up as an opportunity to rebut his critics.

"They want to call you a dictator," Sean Hannity told him at a Fox News town hall. "Do you in any way have any plans whatsoever, if reelected president, to abuse power, to break the law, to use the government to go after ...Read more

The Transportation Security Administration screened more than 2.9 million people on Nov. 26, the highest number on record. As the volume of passengers continues to rise, what will airport security checkpoints look like in 2035, when such high daily volumes are the norm?

To understand this future, one need only look at where the TSA is making ...Read more

We regret to inform you that Ken Paxton is at it again.

When the Texas Senate declined to remove him from office during an impeachment trial in September, Paxton immediately went back to his regular activities, which is to say he started using the office of attorney general to sue anybody and everybody, usually in service of some political ...Read more

The deepening troubles of Christian and Bridget Ziegler would be just another local news story if they were two private people. But they are highly public figures who are suddenly in a heap of trouble, and their sex life is in headlines.

He is chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, close to both Gov. Ron DeSantis and former president ...Read more

Amid wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, Western governments have limited capacity to deal with another humanitarian crisis. Yet a decision by Pakistan to expel hundreds of thousands of Afghans threatens to create a new wave of refugees and destabilize an already volatile region. Preventing the chaos from spreading needs to be a priority for ...Read more

If there’s one climate-change solution everybody seems to agree on, it’s that trees are good. Even Donald Trump, who has called climate change a Chinese hoax, has proposed planting a trillion trees.

So it might seem that the holiday tradition of chopping down one of these precious planet-savers and dragging it into your living room to ...Read more

A culture and legal system that is pro-life is healthy for Texans, for Americans, and a society that hopes to value life, from conception to natural death and continue to thrive.

However, life is messy and imperfect. Texas law after the fall of Roe vs. Wade makes only a narrow, rare exception for abortion — to save a woman’s life. That ...Read more

When Nikki Haley was elected governor of South Carolina, one of the first things she did was require all state employees to answer their office phones with: “It’s a great day in South Carolina.”

This continued for five years until she left to become Donald Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations. The forced cheeriness was annoying to ...Read more