Should the federal government give subsidies to parents who stay home to care for their young kids? Absolutely. Should it also subsidize childcare for working parents? For sure. This shouldn’t be an either-or question, but the Trump administration’s new childcare subsidy plan makes it one.

Under the draft proposal, as previewed in a leaked ...Read more

The fall harvest is looming, and you might think Illinois’ farmers and landowners would be preoccupied with bringing in the corn and soybean crops. But they’re also focused on reaping taxpayer money from a federal government that just keeps pouring it on.

The practice of farming the government for subsidies is thriving in the heartland.

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At Republicans’ recent midterm convention, Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, began his remarks with his own version of a land acknowledgment.

“I’d like to acknowledge that we stand here today in the great state of Texas and the United States of America is the ancestral homeland of great American patriots, pioneers and explorers who put down ...Read more

Another cry for help came from the billionaires building the artificial intelligence machinery that threatens to upend — if not end — the world: Save us from ourselves before it is too late!

Dario Amodei, the head of Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, posted a 3,800-word essay over the weekend that called for a global ...Read more

Nevada gas prices aren’t the only thing California Gov. Gavin Newsom wants to raise.

Newsom recently put out a release touting California’s economic growth. He says the state is adding jobs at a strong pace, and its GDP is growing. It’s quite easy to imagine Newsom spouting off statistics like these as he campaigns for president.

It’s ...Read more

At the Republican National Committee’s midterm convention in Dallas, Democratic Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman appeared in a prerecorded video. It was a stunning and unconventional moment.

In the clip, Fetterman praised what he called “common-sense leadership,” criticized “extremes” on the left and used language that echoed GOP ...Read more

A camp counselor was offered a job, and then lost it. An editor was denied entry to a business. A dog trainer was physically assaulted in downtown Chicago.

And I was denied service on a rideshare — all because we were wearing medical masks.

While some see medical masks — such as KN95s or N95s — as unnecessary relics of a bygone era, ...Read more

It’s no secret that 2026 has tested our democracy. This year alone, the Supreme Court has continued to dismantle the Voting Rights Act, state legislators are rushing to execute a generational gerrymander in the South to undermine Black and Latino voters, and state houses across the country are considering more than 330 laws that make it harder...Read more

For 15 years, I worked in financial regulation and consumer protection, most of that time at the Conference of State Bank Supervisors. My job involved bringing Republican and Democratic state regulators together to go after payday lenders who were writing loans engineered never to be repaid and debt collectors chasing debts that did not exist.

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Gavin Newsom, the California governor who loves to heckle Donald Trump and talk about the “big swings” he’s taken at policy while in office, is now a lame duck.

Within a few short months, he will be termed out of office and return to being a regular citizen, if not an average one. Newsom’s presidential ambitions are stronger than ever, ...Read more

The next U.S.-China summit is scheduled for Sept. 24 in Washington, D.C., and expectations are low. It will be Chinese President Xi Jinping’s first White House visit in more than 10 years and will include a state dinner with all the related pageantry.

President Donald Trump will enter these talks considerably weakened by an Iran war that ...Read more

Earlier this month, as I was reporting a column about the unceremonious deportation to the U.K. of the immigrant-hating, right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, the world got word that a true political giant, Gloria Steinem, had died.

Ten years ago, Yiannopoulos made a splash with his "Dangerous Faggot Tour," courting chaos and violence on ...Read more

During a recent cable news appearance, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick claimed no American lives had been lost in the Iran war, an error he blamed on confusion with President Donald Trump’s earlier invasion of Venezuela. And perhaps it is difficult to keep one’s wars straight in an administration that has attacked seven countries in less ...Read more

Years ago, I worked for a nonprofit focused on supporting the spouses and children of members of the U.S. military. The people I worked with and the people we served would sometimes stumble onto a topic that’s not supposed to be discussed, the third rail of American militarism: empathy for the families of civilians abroad who’ve been killed ...Read more

Kevin Warsh has rightly called into question the effectiveness of the Federal Reserve’s communications — but his arrival as chairman only seems to have made the problem worse. To put this right after the next Fed meeting this week, he’ll need to rethink his approach to explaining where things stand.

Friday’s release of inflation data ...Read more

It is an unintended feature of President Donald Trump’s Plan B for defeating Iran — economic strangulation — that the more successful the policy becomes, the more risk the men who run the Islamic Republic are willing to accept to fight it. Judged on that metric, the American blockade and sanctions are working, but they’re also raising ...Read more

The High Holy Days, observed by Jews worldwide, are a time of solemn resolution, remembrance and repentance. This New Year is particularly fraught for Israel and its closest ally, the U.S.

Yet there’s welcome news from Israel regarding the crisis in the West Bank, where fanatic settlers commit what the Times of Israel describes as “near-...Read more

Cardinal Blase Cupich, archbishop of Chicago, along with two orders of nuns, the Carmelite Sisters for the Aged and Infirm and the Little Sisters of the Poor, filed a lawsuit to block Illinois’ assisted suicide law. These two orders operate eldercare facilities in Illinois, putting them on a clear collision course with a new Illinois law to ...Read more

As longtime participants in movements for social justice, we have come to realize that the threat posed by artificial intelligence is not separate from those posed by war, climate change, attacks on immigrants, economic inequality and authoritarianism. It has, in fact, the potential to accelerate all of these.

AI gives governments new tools for...Read more