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6 Things I Did Before the Apocalypse
Old guys like me always believe the world is getting worse.
You're young and strong and you're hell in a fistfight, and you figure if you lose your white-collar job, you can just go tend bar somewhere until you get another job.
Yeah. That's beautiful, but it doesn't last. If you're not careful, in your later years, you start being nostalgic ...Read more
The Real Problem with Joni Ernst
What do you do about Joni Ernst? The Republican senator from Iowa is being mocked by liberal media and beyond for her snarky response to a question about cuts in Medicaid: "We all are going to die."
That clumsy remark has been skewered for its insensitivity, but its greater significance lies in the bigger issue. Ernst answers to Donald Trump ...Read more
Winners and Losers
That's what tax bills are all about -- who pays more and who pays less, who gets the benefits and who ends up holding the bag.
President Donald Trump's "Big, Beautiful Bill" should come as a surprise to no one. It's a bonanza for the rich. The research is incontrovertible.
The U.S. Treasury Department estimates that nearly 60% of the tax cuts,...Read more
A Long Walk to Protest ICE
On foot and carrying flags, they crossed the Mason-Dixon line -- the old American border between slavery and freedom - walking to Washington, D.C., over the course of three weeks in May.
They canoed across the broad, grand Susquehanna River. They walked more than 300 miles from New York to deliver a peace protest to Congress and the people ...Read more
Should The "Local Shrimp" You Buy Come From 8,000 Miles Away?
Let's say you like shrimp. Whether you go for a chain restaurant's happy hour shrimp boil or a pricey plate of "shrimp a la grandioso" at President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort -- a good question to ask is: Where do they get their shrimp?
Even if the restaurant has an ocean view and a shrimp boat out front, chances are its crustaceans ...Read more
1930s Redux: Stoking Resentments, a Demagogue Does His Thing
Hillary Clinton took quite a lambasting in 2016 when she used the word "deplorable" to describe the Donald Trump phenomenon that had captivated so much of America, but the word choice has long since proved apt, even perfect. Oxford Dictionary suggests that the word's best synonyms are "disgraceful" and "shameful," which do seem to fit pretty ...Read more
Feeling Sorry for Elon Musk Is Not Impossible
Elon Musk may have thought that dropping more than $250 million into Trump's reelection campaign would have bought permanent affection from the president. No, it was a show of obeisance that labeled Musk as one to be played. Besides, in Trump's dog-eat-dog view of wealth, the far-richer Musk may have needed cutting down to size.
Trump knows ...Read more
The Supreme Court Cases To Watch
The Supreme Court's docket this term includes many of the complex issues American society is currently facing, including immigration, free speech, religious liberty, LGBTQ rights and voting rights.
The ACLU has served as counsel or filed friend-of-the-court briefs in all of the cases addressing these hot-button issues. In addition to its ...Read more

How to Protect Our Judges
One of our highest priorities in this darkness must be to protect the people who are doing the most right now to push back against Trump’s tyranny: our judiciary.
In some 180 judicial rulings so far, federal judges have at least temporarily stopped Trump from (1) deporting and/or imprisoning people without due process, (2) firing federal ...Read more

Hey, guys, Democrats want your votes. They really do
Where are the Democrats? What are they doing about the damage President Trump is doing to ... everything?
I hear that a lot from my liberal friends these days, ever since Trump swept the battleground states six months ago and proceeded to dismantle government as we Americans used to know it.
With the fury of a man who is trying to make up for ...Read more
I'm a Harvard Reject
Growing up in the Boston suburbs, in the shadows of Harvard, there was only one school I wanted to go to: Radcliffe, which in those days was the name of the undergraduate school for women at Harvard. I had a great uncle who taught at Harvard Medical School, which is the closest anyone in my family got to Harvard. I did everything a middle-...Read more
Biden's Many 'Original Sins'
"Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again," by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, pulls from 200 interviews in order to expose Democrats' coverup of Joe Biden's cognitive and physical decline from his son Beau's death in 2015 through his presidency and into his misbegotten 2024 reelection campaign...Read more
Abe Lincoln and the Penny
The penny, which costs more to make than it's worth, will be going away. That's a shocking reversal of government policy. Usually, the government doesn't stop producing anything that's overpriced or just plain worthless.
I'm just about old enough to remember little pieces of candy that sold for a penny at a little wooden-floored store near my...Read more
No Consent Decree for Louisville or Minneapolis: 'We Won't Let This Go'
Five years ago this week, "the summer of protests" erupted. On May 26, 2020, in Minneapolis, protesters responded to George Floyd's murder. The previous day, a white police officer had kneeled on his neck. On May 28, 2020, protesters responded to the police killing Breonna Taylor. Taylor had been murdered March 13, 2020, but it wasn't until May ...Read more

FOR SALE: Trump sneakers, bibles, watches – and pardons!
It goes with the territory. As a political commentator, I read a pile of political books every year, some of them worthwhile, most not. But one of the best political books I read this year is “Pardon: The Politics of Presidential Mercy” by CNN’s Jeff Toobin.
Citing the broad pardon power given the president in Article II, Section 2, ...Read more
Red America Is Making Money Off Green Energy
Wyoming is the second windiest state, after Nebraska. It's obvious why the wind power industry is investing $10 billion there. And it's hard to see why any state politician would oppose this. But some have. Wyoming is one of those fossil-fuel producing states in which so-called conservatives feel obligated -- or are paid -- to stop competition...Read more
Donald Trump's Memorial Day Message
This was Donald Trump's Memorial Day Message:
"HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY TO ALL, INCLUDING THE SCUM THAT SPENT THE LAST FOUR YEARS TRYING TO DESTROY OUR COUNTRY THROUGH WARPED RADICAL LEFT MINDS, WHO ALLOWED 21,000,000 MILLION PEOPLE TO ILLEGALLY ENTER OUR COUNTRY, MANY OF THEM BEING CRIMINALS AND THE MENTALLY INSANE,THROUGH AN OPEN BORDER THAT ...Read more
The Catastrophe In Gaza, 600 Days And Counting
"Six-hundred days on, the humanitarian situation in Gaza is at its darkest point yet," reads the latest statement by the U.N.'s Humanitarian Country Team of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which coordinates Palestinian aid. Israel has kept Gaza under a near total siege for three months, preventing food, medicine, fuel and clean water from ...Read more
Now Trump Cuts Close to Home
Let me count the ways.
Donald Trump excels at broadsides against bright places and people that burnish our world.
But now, it's getting personal.
Trump is stealing what I hold dear. I'm not even speaking of press freedom or his suing CBS News, where I loved my first job.
I mean the Library of Congress and the Kennedy Center for the ...Read more
What Starlings Could Teach Trump's Mean Government
There is a species of birds named "superb starlings," and I propose that we elect one of them to be our next president.
These wise creatures have figured out how to make egalitarianism central to their society, with a diversity of birds actively supporting each other. When bringing food back to their chicks, for example, adult starlings ...Read more