Politics
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Editorial: Will California pols rethink their rail boondoggle?
Is the end nigh for the nation’s most embarrassing infrastructure boondoggle? Taxpayers can only hope.
California’s high-speed rail line from hell — intended to connect Los Angeles with San Francisco — remains buried in cost overruns, bureaucratic inertia and wishful thinking. Sold to state voters in 2008 as the transportation of a ...Read more

Commentary: Elon Musk and the dangerous myth of omnigenius
Elon Musk’s misadventures with DOGE might be the ultimate example of a powerful flaw in how we think about leaders. That’s our tendency to believe skills and accomplishments are portable, that someone who excels in one venue will be just as impressive in others. I call this exceptional — if imaginary — superpower “omnigenius.”
In ...Read more
Commentary: Small nuclear reactors are no fix for California's energy needs
It might seem like everyone from venture capitalists to the news media to the U.S. secretary of Energy has been hyping small modular reactors as the key to unlocking a nuclear renaissance and solving both climate change and modern data centers’ ravenous need for power.
On Monday, the Natural Resources Committee of the California Assembly will...Read more

Editorial: The immigration welcome mat for Cubans, which helped build Miami, is over
In a major legal blow to the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts, a federal judge this week blocked a plan to strip protections from more than half a million immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela — many of whom now live in South Florida under what’s known as the CHNV program.
The court order landed just in time ...Read more

Commentary: DOGE's ban on WFH will reduce government efficiency
Elon Musk recently cut his forecast for savings from the Department of Government Efficiency, which he once predicted would reach $2 trillion, to only $150 billion this year. This amounts to 2% of federal outlays — and even that is overstated, because it ignores the productivity the government will lose from its ban on working from home.
The ...Read more

Erin Lowry: The college talk more parents need to have with their kids
What is the U.S. without its federal Department of Education? The potential answers worry parents, educators, students and policy experts after President Donald Trump’s executive order to shut down the agency.
The intended — and unintended — consequences of the order will be felt for generations. High on the list of effects, because of ...Read more

Editorial: Florida, again, is scene of a campus shooting and it's devastating
“Active shooter on campus.” Those chilling words again. This time, the attack happened on the Florida State University campus in Tallahassee, just miles from the state Capitol where lawmakers are in meetings for their annual session.
Multiple people were injured, and two people have died, according to police. The suspected shooter is ...Read more

Commentary: President Donald Trump's war on due process should terrify us all
Masked guards march the captives in, holding their heads pressed down to waist level. They are forced to kneel while guards shout at them and shave their heads before they are stripped down to shorts. Their overcrowded and squalid cells, meant to hold about 80 men, are often crammed with nearly twice as many. Only two toilets per cell, no ...Read more

Commentary: The constitutional crisis is real
Is the U.S. facing a constitutional crisis? The answer, unequivocally and emphatically, is yes. But it also could get much worse.
In less than 100 days, President Donald Trump has taken an astounding array of unconstitutional actions to consolidate power and to stifle dissent. He has asserted the ability to eliminate federal agencies created by...Read more

Editorial: End Google's illegal monopoly: Judge's antitrust ruling is a positive step
Of course Google has an unlawful monopoly on online ads, as a federal judge found Thursday, just like a different federal judge found last year that Google has an unlawful monopoly on online searching; everyone knows that “googling” means online search.
A market economy only works if there is competition and choice and Google’s monopolist...Read more

Editorial: Dems delight in blasting president over economy – if it's Trump
How do you know Joe Biden is out of the White House?
Because Democrats care about the economy.
Specifically, they care about hammering President Donald Trump about the economy, and his tariff rollout/rollback’s effect on it. They are tickled pink to point fingers across the aisle.
Politico cited interviews with more than a dozen Democratic ...Read more

Commentary: Hello, World! America doesn't have your back anymore
America has your back. That has been the message of U.S. foreign policy to the world’s vulnerable since the end of World War II.
That sense that America is behind you was a message for Europe against the threat of the Soviet Union and has been the implicit message for all threatened by authoritarian expansionism.
From the sophisticated in ...Read more

Mark Z. Barabak: The fight over Trump's legal bullying campaign makes for odd alliances
Lawfare makes for strange bedfellows.
As part of his tightening grip on power, and his assault on 200-plus years of checks and balances, President Donald Trump has bludgeoned some of the nation's leading law firms into shameful submission, extracting hundreds of millions of dollars worth of free legal work for his pet causes.
More ...Read more

Commentary: Tackling climate change must be job no.1
Amid the historic and sweeping cuts to federal agencies and programs being carried out by the Trump administration, one truth has been overlooked: If we’re serious about cutting waste and protecting public funds, we must confront climate change head-on.
2024 was a disaster for the planet and its people. According to NASA, it was the warmest ...Read more

Editorial: DOGE finds more fraud -- where were the watchdogs?
Where there’s a will, there’s a way to commit fraud and waste money.
Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has unearthed far too much evidence of this in DC and beyond. His latest findings are eye-opening.
As the New York Post reported, DOGE claimed an initial review found that since 2020, 9,700 people whose birth ...Read more

Patricia Lopez: US citizens could be on a plane to El Salvador next
The White House made it clear during a visit from Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, that it plans to let Kilmar Abrego Garcia rot in the brutal prison to which — as the administration has admitted in court — he was deported by mistake.
The spectacle in the Oval Office on Monday was chilling. President Donald Trump warmly greeted ...Read more

Gustavo Arellano: Trump threatened Vietnam with a huge tariff. How's that going over in Little Saigon?
ABC Supermarket in the heart of Little Saigon is like a Donald Trump tariff rant come to fragrant, tasty life.
Sorghum liquors from China. Frozen seafood from Malaysia. Thai fish sauce. Japanese candies. A galaxy of products from Vietnam, of course.
All of these imports would be slammed by the massive tariffs that Trump threatened to impose on...Read more

Commentary: The FEC has opened the floodgates for big money to flood elections. Here's how we can fix it
Elections are getting bigger.
2024 was a blockbuster year in campaign spending, shattering the previous record — set just four years prior — as donors across the nation and the economic spectrum swooped in to pull control of every branch of government their way.
And they have a newly-powerful tool at their disposal: joint fundraising ...Read more

Commentary: Will Native tribes secure Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument?
On March 25, representatives of six Southwestern tribes announced the formation of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument Inter-Tribal Coalition. They are following the model of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, the moral force behind the 2016 establishment of Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument.
This elevation of Indigenous ...Read more

Commentary: What I learned in the bleachers as a youth-baseball immigrant dad
I spent a recent Sunday in Norwalk, California, watching 12-year-olds play baseball on a field nestled between a juvenile prison and two sets of railway tracks. It was a hot, dry day. Any trace of a breeze carried the smell of diesel fumes from the industrial zone over the tracks. Still, there was no place I’d rather have been.
Friends of ...Read more