As the pandemic wears on, month after month, it's easy to assume nothing much has changed. But it has. We're making more progress than many people may realize.

Take Regeneron. President Donald Trump recently spoke of his efforts to usher this new therapeutic drug through the process for emergency use authorization and to make it available to ...Read more

Nelson Algren once described the great American city of Chicago as "the place built out of man's ceaseless failure to overcome himself." He could just as well have been writing about Donald J. Trump.

Just consider the trajectory of the final presidential debate on Thursday night.

Trump performed far better than his hesitant rival Joseph R. ...Read more

The Donald Trump who showed up for the debate Thursday was the glum one. Someone had told him to keep a lid on it, and he was visibly chastened.

"I get treated very badly," he moped early on. "No president should have to go through what I went through."

Trump was on such a short leash that he didn't even bring gusto to his usual scattershot ...Read more

More than 47 million Americans already have voted, and it's doubtful that many who still haven't cast a ballot are undecided about whom to choose for president. In Thursday's second and final presidential debate, President Donald Trump said nothing to persuade those who haven't made up their minds that he deserves a second term. Democratic ...Read more

Proposition 19 is simple: either aging homeowners get a big new property tax break or their offspring heirs keep an old one.

Either the parents benefit, or their children do.

Most of these California ballot propositions can be annoyingly complicated if you let them.

State Attorney General Xavier Becerra sometimes doesn't help by writing ...Read more

Nearly three years ago, amid a cultural reckoning that encouraged more people to speak out about sexual harassment and misconduct, particularly in the workplace, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti committed to reforming the city's harassment reporting and response protocols.

He mandated that leaders of city departments report any alleged incident ...Read more

I recently read a post by a friend written after the first presidential debate. She wrote that, while she opposed aspects of the Joe Biden/Kamala Harris platform, she felt alienated by the arrogance and unkindness displayed by Donald Trump and couldn't vote for a candidate who didn't represent her.

I can understand her feelings. I acknowledge ...Read more

Though most of us don't live near Washington, D.C., President Donald Trump seems to be everywhere — a rally on television, on our news feeds, on Twitter — constantly on Twitter — spewing racism, misogyny, hateful statements about fellow citizens and neighbors and flat-out lies.

The Christian church wouldn't normally condone these things. ...Read more

It appears that Rush Limbaugh is dying. He announced on his radio show Monday that his lung cancer had gotten worse and is "going in the wrong direction."

I have never cared for Limbaugh's kind of politics. I've always felt like the right-wing talk radio host's sole purpose was to further polarize America and push conservatives further away ...Read more

In the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government made a stunning declaration: Health care is a right, not just a privilege — a right that would be immediately funded and backed with more than $100 billion.

As one of the most unassuming side effects of the coronavirus, America, for the first time in its history, implemented...Read more

When you listen carefully enough and long enough to a variety of epidemiologists, you can start to see that their pandemic strategies are converging — or at least complementary.

This might seem surprising after the angry flap over the Great Barrington Declaration, which pushed a herd immunity strategy. A group more representative of the ...Read more

Almost every year on Election Day, someone, somewhere in America intentionally or accidentally rams their car into a polling place. It happens with such regularity that it's become a dark joke among public officials and other insiders who monitor elections — evidence that crazy and sometimes violent things happen when people gather to vote in ...Read more

A 42-year-old Frederick, Maryland, man is now in the national spotlight for behavior that can best be described as monstrous. In an act captured on a doorbell security camera, he is alleged to have recently delivered a letter threatening to beat presidential nominee Joe Biden and rape his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, telling the homeowners ...Read more

With a president who calls our best medical scientists "idiots" and sends supportive signals to white supremacists, nothing in today's discourse should shock us. But even I was surprised to hear an American Catholic priest look past 220,000 deaths during a pandemic, made worse by the irresponsible presidency of Donald Trump, and call Joe Biden ...Read more

The selectively pro-life Trump administration has brought back the federal death penalty with what I think we can safely call a vengeance during this tough-on-crime campaign season. Did Attorney General William Barr, only recently honored at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast for his "Christlike behavior," even flinch when ordering that a ...Read more

The prescription opioid crisis that has taken well over 100,000 American lives and ruined hundreds of thousands more wasn't just an accident of time or the byproduct of a dysfunctional society. It was in good part the deliberate result of unethical and occasionally illegal machinations by the pharmaceutical industry, particularly by Purdue ...Read more

In a strange twist of the legal system, the defamation claim by E. Jean Carroll, who alleges that President Donald Trump raped her in the mid-1990s and lied about it in June 2019, could come down to whether Trump was "acting within the scope of his employment" when he accused her of making false accusations and, for good measure, disparaged her ...Read more

State orders to close movie theaters and live performances last March were sad but necessary as COVID rampaged through the Empire State, especially when we knew little about how the virus spread and lacked the tools to figure out who was infected.

But New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who pledged to let science guide reopening, has offered little ...Read more

Counter speech doctrine posits that the best remedy for negative or inaccurate speech is more accurate, positive speech.

There are exceptions to this rule of thumb, of course, including obscenity and fraud and speech that incites imminent lawless action. Generally, though, offensive and inaccurate speech is protected.

Facebook's Mark ...Read more

There has been little focus on foreign policy in the election campaign, and the debates didn't much help.

Maybe that's because Donald Trump's most intense foreign policy concern has been with Hunter Biden's business interests abroad.

But a look back at four years of Trump's America First performance leads me to this conclusion: An imperfect ...Read more