Politics
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Editorial: In the face of Iranian 'demands,' tighten the squeeze
President Donald Trump’s chief negotiating strategy consists of keeping the other party guessing about what he might do next. As this pertains to Iran, the president has repeatedly threatened Tehran with additional military action only to back off once new “peace talks” are on the table.
But it has become increasingly apparent that this ...Read more
Michael Hiltzik: Trump's new orders on child vaccines are even more dangerous than they seemed at first
No one can claim to have been surprised by the executive order President Donald Trump issued Monday calling for a radical transformation of childhood vaccination practices in the U.S.
After all, Trump has been beating the anti-vaccination drum for years. His secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is an established anti-...Read more
Editorial: If you're not wealthy, you're making concessions on big-ticket purchases
America’s affordability divide is increasingly visible in Americans’ biggest purchases.
The wealthy may be doing just fine. It’s the Americans below them who increasingly are recalibrating what they can afford — a divide now showing up vividly in two big-ticket purchases: cars and houses.
When it comes to nice cars, people accustomed ...Read more
Editorial: RFK's anti-vax crusade is cause for his removal
President Donald Trump and his dangerous health secretary Bobby Kennedy Jr. struck another blow against public health by issuing an executive order intending to space out childhood vaccinations and to separate out the common measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, replicating a push at the CDC that had been blocked by a federal judge.
RFK Jr....Read more
Commentary: Should we talk about Ariana Grande's body?
Over the past week, I’ve been inundated with requests from journalists to talk about pop star Ariana Grande’s body. A week ago, Grande blamed “endless, ongoing public scrutiny” for her decision to step back from the public eye at the end of her current world tour. Online chatter about the role Grande’s visibly shrinking body played in ...Read more
Editorial: Republicans have supercharged deficits. For what?
Faced with soaring deficits, an aging population, a teetering pension system, unsustainable health-care obligations, $1 trillion in annual interest costs, rising long-term bond yields and net public debt at around 100% of gross domestic product, what’s a country to do?
For the 119th Congress, the answer has been simple: Tax less and borrow ...Read more
Commentary: Our conservative and liberal Union
How are Americans supposed to make a more perfect union when we can’t agree on whether we need to turn our cultural clocks forward or backward?
This question is among the more difficult that people can pose to their fellow countrymen. Not just because it has no obvious or easily agreed upon answer, but because it’s more likely to be asked ...Read more
Stephen L. Carter: America's surveillance problem is much bigger than Flock
“You are being watched” was the tagline that opened every episode of the television series Person of Interest, which ran from 2011 to 2016 and already feels ancient. The conceit of the show was that the good guys, aided by a friendly AI, could use information from a sea of cameras and microphones to stop crimes before they happened.
That ...Read more
Commentary: ALS doesn't wait. Our health care system still does
Health care innovation is built for patients who have time. ALS patients don't.
ALS reshapes time in ways that are hard to fully appreciate from the outside. Certain losses arrive earlier than expected, and once they begin, they don't reverse. Speech can be one of the first to go. When it does, the window to preserve a patient's actual voice ...Read more
Commentary: The case for intergenerational AI advocacy
If Allison Baker and Maria Garcia apply for the same job against Matthew Owens or Joe Alvarez, and Matthew or Joe gets the job despite everything else being the same, that would seem to be a typical case of gender discrimination by the employer.
However, the names and scenarios I described were not drawn from a human example, but from AI. ...Read more
Commentary: Don't military families deserve education freedom too?
If you choose to serve in the U.S. military, you should also be able to choose the best education for your children. Today, nearly 22 million children, or 40 percent of all K-12 students in the U.S., have access to some form of school choice. Why shouldn’t military families enjoy the same freedom regardless of where they’re stationed?
...Read more
COUNTERPOINT: Congress shrinks safety net when families need it most
Sometimes you lose even when you win. That’s what it feels like trying to make ends meet in today’s economy — and our ever-shrinking safety net isn’t helping.
After years on a waiting list for subsidized housing, I finally made it to the front of the line. It should have been a moment of relief. Instead, because I received housing ...Read more
Commentary: Answering the call, lawyers must lead the defense of democracy
This year marks the 250th anniversary of our founders’ Declaration of Independence from Great Britain. But the constitutional democracy it enabled — designed to promote life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — is now threatened, not by a foreign adversary, but from within.
Persistent constitutional and statutory transgressions, ...Read more
POINT: OBBBA puts safety-net spending back on its pre-pandemic path
Congress enacted some of the biggest reforms to two of America’s welfare programs in decades — the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly referred to as food stamps, and Medicaid, which provides healthcare for one in four low-income Americans.
Critics may argue the paring-back reforms in the One Big Beautiful Bill are ...Read more
Commentary: Boeing can turn its latest problem into its next growth spurt
Boeing’s latest figures reveal an industrial paradox. The company ended the second quarter late last month with a record backlog of about $715 billion in outstanding orders, including for more than 6,200 commercial aircraft. That’s not as encouraging as it sounds, though, because its central problem is not how to sell more planes. It is how ...Read more
Editorial: Applause for Gen Z and their love of the moviegoing experience
Movies are back! (Again.)
We’ve seen stories in the recent past about how going to the movies was becoming a thing again — see “Barbenheimer” in 2023 — only to see consumers retreat to their in-home streaming lives. But 2026 may actually be different.
If so, we’ll have Generation Z — the first generation to grow up entirely in ...Read more
Daniel Borenstein: California taxpayer pension costs grew eightfold since 1999; new plans add billions more
California lawmakers are poised to raise already unaffordable public employee retirement benefits — doubling down on a mistake 27 years ago that has helped drive up taxpayer pension costs by more than eightfold.
This time, state legislators have a quarter century of painful experience to consider and have been warned of the multi-billion-...Read more
Commentary: How Democrats can repair the broken Supreme Court
It’s no secret that the Supreme Court has become an extension of our partisan politics over the past decade. The decisions handed down in the 2026 session prove just how broken the court has become and how unrepresentative it is of the views of the American people. Reactions show how little confidence the public has in its fairness.
Future ...Read more
Commentary: Just like in the film 'The Dink,' pickleball was the best medicine for my husband
If you aren’t among the millions of pickleball players, the fastest growing sport in America, watch “The Dink” on Apple TV to get a glimpse of what you’re missing.
Jake Johnson plays Dusty, a former tennis prodigy whose career was thwarted early when he broke his wrist during a match with the for-real tennis star Andy Roddick. Now he ...Read more
Commentary: The Saudi Arabia-Pakistan-Turkey deal provides the US with an opportunity
Every U.S. president over the last 20 years has tried to move the United States out of the Middle East, an area so steeped in bad history and poor policy that one wonders why Washington bothers to be involved in the region at all. Barack Obama campaigned on ending the George W. Bush-era war in Iraq, only to direct a surge of 50,000 U.S. troops ...Read more




















































