Abraham Lincoln vs. Stephen Douglas it was not.

Thursday night’s debate between two of America’s best-known governors — Democrat Gavin Newsom of California and Florida Republican Ron DeSantis — was intended to be a prime-time look at the sharp red-blue political divide in this nation.

But host Sean Hannity and Fox News executives set ...Read more

President Richard Nixon was work-vacationing in his Western White House estate at San Clemente and not far away, the White House press corps was about to be briefed by the world’s most famous anonymous authority on all foreign policies.

Which is to say, another ritual Vietnam War policy/press corps kabuki was about to start.

It began the ...Read more

Fox News host Sean Hannity set Gavin Newsom up, and let Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis knock him down. The duo ganged up on California’s governor and, unfortunately, Newsom sometimes responded with weak defenses. But we give him credit: He was game for a fight Hannity and DeSantis were determined he wouldn’t win. He was articulate and quick-...Read more

How many people do you think it takes to hammer out a global climate agreement? 500? 5,000? 50,000?

Apparently, the correct answer is 70,000. That’s about how many people are expected to turn up in Dubai over the next few weeks for COP28, the latest United Nations climate confab, which started on Thursday. This is up from 49,704 at COP27 ...Read more

Sept. 11, the day in 2001 that terrorist attacks took the lives of 3,000 people and injured twice as many, is embedded in American memory. Like Dec. 7, 1941, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, it is a day of infamy in this country. But what has disappeared from public consciousness, despite its having been momentous in its own right, is Sept. 12,...Read more

America Ramirez Lomeli, named for the Mexican soccer team, did everything right as an immigrant.

Growing up in California's capital, she excelled in school. She volunteered, racking up more than 2,000 hours of extracurriculars by the time she graduated. She collected toys for the children's hospital that helped her brother after he fell from a ...Read more

Whether it's because the current partisan environment has us fixated on age in America, or because everyone is seeking an explanation for Americans' discontent with a growing economy, or for some other reason, an old yarn about a generational war in the country has been making the rounds lately.

Over just the last four weeks, the idea that ...Read more

As President Joe Biden founders in the polls, he’s decided to revive a hackneyed progressive standby: The rampant inflation Americans have experienced under his administration is actually the fault of evil corporations.

“Let me be clear,” Biden said Monday. “To any corporation that has not brought their prices back down — even as ...Read more

A federal appeals court panel handed down a decision last week that would hobble enforcement of the Voting Rights Act by holding that only the U.S. attorney general, not aggrieved citizens, can file lawsuits to enforce one of the landmark civil rights law’s key protections. The Supreme Court, which has a checkered history when it comes to ...Read more

In a federal indictment this week, Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams unveiled an indictment against Nikhil Gupta, an alleged Indian narcotics trafficker who prosecutors say had attempted to hire a hitman— who turned out to be an undercover federal agent — to assassinate Sikh separatist leader Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a U.S. citizen. ...Read more

America’s high schools face a growing crisis: Millions of students who entered ninth grade in the fall of 2020, at the height of the pandemic, are set to graduate this spring, with little hope of recovering from the learning loss incurred while schools were shut. Simply put, they’re running out of time.

Since the start of the pandemic, the...Read more

Yajaira Gonzalez became a U.S. citizen and a registered Democrat on the same day.

She arrived from Mexico 20 years ago, and was granted temporary legal status in 2012 after President Barack Obama established DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The policy allows some immigrants who were brought illegally to the U.S. as ...Read more

There can be few American public institutions more widely detested than the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

The NCAA spent decades promoting the ideal of the amateur "student-athlete," barring football and basketball players from compensation while their coaches and university athletic directors collected millions of dollars a year. ...Read more

The Supreme Court’s new code of ethics is little more than a naked attempt to gaslight our nation after a year of disturbing reports showing that the justices have been engaged in what would be considered highly unethical conduct in any other branch of government.

Chief Justice John Roberts would have Americans believe that the justices’ ...Read more

His timbre was just one reason I always looked forward to hearing Henry Kissinger, who died this week after living a full century, expound on international relations. It was gravelly and deep, and grew only more so over the years. But it wasn’t just the voice. It was his unique accent, eccentric to some but strangely familiar to me.

I’ve ...Read more

Saying that public officials should be “ethical” is like saying that sunshine and puppies are good things. The tougher questions are what “ethical” means, how to tell if public officials meet that standard and what to do if they don’t.

So, we should be wary of the current campaign to exert control over the Supreme Court by creating a ...Read more

I have to hand it to the inimitable Charles Pierce of Esquire magazine.

A few days after media critic Margaret Sullivan complained in the Guardian that journalists were not effectively conveying the dangers of a second Trump administration, the headline on his essay did not mince words: "Nazi-Curious Madman Currently Under Indictment For 91 ...Read more

Sam Altman’s dismissal and rapid reinstatement as CEO of OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, confirms that the future of AI is firmly in the hands of people focused on speed and profits, at the expense of all else. This elite will now impose their vision for technology on the rest of humanity. Most of us will not enjoy the consequences.

The ...Read more