Politics
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Commentary: Save the law that helps add affordable housing
Newspapers report daily on the frantic efforts by elected officials to address America’s housing affordability crisis, including a recent story that President Donald Trump called Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., to discuss the issue. Trump seems worried about how a lack of progress could be politically damaging. He should be.
A 2024 report by ...Read more
Commentary: $1.5 trillion for the Pentagon is a recipe for waste and fraud
Less than three months ago we published "The Trillion Dollar War Machine," which chronicles and laments the enormous amount of money the U.S. was set to spend on “defense” this year – money that enriches special interests, but offers little real security to most Americans. Today, the federal government is preparing to double-down on this ...Read more
Commentary: In defense of AI optimism
Society needs people to take risks. Entrepreneurs who bet on themselves create new jobs. Institutions that gamble with new processes find out best to integrate advances into modern life. Regulators who accept potential backlash by launching policy experiments give us a chance to devise laws that are based on evidence, not fear.
The need for ...Read more
Commentary: Colleges aren't liberal-making factories. At least not where I taught
Open a newspaper or scan an opinion section, and you’ll likely encounter a familiar storyline: American universities have become ideological factories, churning out graduates stamped with a single political worldview. Students are portrayed as disengaged, fragile, glued to screens and uninterested in real work or real relationships.
That ...Read more
Lisa Jarvis: Even tech skeptics can cheer AI's promise in decoding the 'dark genome'
Google DeepMind, the artificial intelligence subsidiary of Alphabet, has made another leap in its efforts to illuminate human biology: progress toward using AI to interpret the many still-mysterious chapters in the text of life.
DNA sequencing, once a gargantuan feat, is by now cheap and easy. Deciphering the billions of letters in that code, ...Read more
George Skelton: Minneapolis killings expose government lies, brutality
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — We relearned something from the killings of two law-abiding citizens by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis: There’s a limit to how many government lies the public will tolerate.
When government officials arrogantly persist in blatantly lying, the public just might turn angrily against the prevaricators.
Or ...Read more
Martin Schram: The Trumping of two presidents
There we were, last Thursday, focusing on Team Trump’s tragic immigration protest killings and those other inhumanities committed in the ICEland of Minnesota.
We thought we were watching the decline and fall of President Donald Trump at his worst. But what we didn’t know (and couldn’t imagine in our wildest conjuring) was that Trump was ...Read more
Parmy Olson: Boosting your brain with a chip carries a price
If you could safely implant a chip in your brain to enhance your intelligence, would you?
Some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful technologists want that future, including Elon Musk, who recently said he would ramp up production of his Neuralink brain chips this year as part of a noble effort to ensure humans can keep pace with superintelligen...Read more
Commentary: War on drugs never has been, nor will it be, the answer
With news of multimillion-dollar lawsuits arising from President Donald Trump administration’s military incursion to apprehend Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, America’s drug problem remains front and center. The White House demonstrated it believes a military campaign against alleged drug trafficking from Venezuela is central to ...Read more
Robin Abcarian: When the government tramples people's rights, the people must take to the streets
Before June, when the ICE raids first began in Los Angeles, Daniel Sosa had not been active in the immigrants' rights movement. A cannabis dispensary owner, he'd previously directed his political energy to fights around legalization and the implementation of California's onerous rules around weed dispensaries.
On June 6, however, the first day ...Read more
Editorial: With 14 New Yorkers dead in the cold, Mayor Mamdani must restore homeless encampment sweeps
Mayor Zohran Mamdani must immediately reverse his policy of allowing homeless encampments to proliferate on the streets of NYC. Fourteen New Yorkers have already died on the streets amid record-breaking cold, and the encampment sweeps initiated by Mayor Adams could well prove a critical tool in averting any more needless fatalities.
With some ...Read more
Editorial: Sen. Schmitt's alternate reality
Anyone who tuned into the middle of Sen. Eric Schmitt’s furious floor speech on Wednesday might have been momentarily confused at why the MAGA Missouri Republican was condemning those who “deploy organized mob violence to undermine the expressed will of the people when democracy doesn’t go their way.”
No, he wasn’t talking about ...Read more
Editorial: They sold out to Trump and await history's verdict
The murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, followed by the victim-blaming slanders from Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller, may finally have exhausted the public’s patience with the Trump administration.
We can only hope.
It bears remembering that, aside from the agents themselves, the crimes of ICE are the responsibility of amoral politicians ...Read more
Editorial: Disease has a bright future in America -- especially in Florida
No, you don’t have to vaccinate your children. That is, if you don’t mind watching them die.
That’s not precisely how Kirk Milhoan, a Hawaii physician who chairs the federal Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, expressed himself the other day. But it’s the plain gist of the message he sent in a podcast interview that has ...Read more
LZ Granderson: Even as Trump shreds the Constitution, keep your eye on the Epstein files
The arrest of independent journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort, in connection with an anti-ICE protest that interrupted a church service in Minnesota, is a test for the American people. Well, some of us. Many of us already didn't like what we saw happening across the country. Many believed the un-American threats during the campaign and voted ...Read more
Anita Chabria: A California lawyer takes the civil rights fight home to Minneapolis
How do you find the missing?
If you do find them, how can you help?
Oakland, California, civil rights attorney James Cook has been on the ground in Minnesota for months figuring out answers to these question as he goes.
A fast-talking Minneapolis native who still lives in the Twin Cities part time, Cook is one of a handful of attorneys who ...Read more
Trudy Rubin: Trump betrays his pledge to Iran's protesters by letting clerics crush them
When President Donald Trump called on Iranian demonstrators to “KEEP PROTESTING — TAKE OVER THE INSTITUTIONS” in early January and pledged “HELP IS ON THE WAY,” I feared a shameful episode of American betrayal was about to be repeated.
“We are locked and loaded and ready to go,” he had promised these brave Iranians, fed up with ...Read more
Editorial: The Midwest is becoming a population magnet again. Here's a chance for Illinois to grow
The census data just released brought fantastic news for us hale and hearty Midwesterners: We’re growing.
It’s true. Our mighty region, overlooked — and often looked down upon, particularly by our coastal compatriots — was the one region in the U.S. where all states saw population growth from July 2024 to July 2025.
The region’s ...Read more
Commentary: The problem isn't apathy. It's about teaching students where power lives
American politics has become so nationalized that many people—especially students—no longer know where their participation ought to be focused. Every issue feels federal, every fight existential, and every outcome distant.
The result isn’t apathy so much as exhaustion: a sense that politics is something to watch, not something to ...Read more
Commentary: LA is ripping up 1,600 acres of pavement -- but is it too little, too late?
At the end of last year, Los Angeles County adopted a new target to remove and replace 1,600 acres of pavement with green infrastructure including trees, plants and rain gardens by 2045 as part of its ongoing Sustainability Plan. In doing so, the county aims to join a growing number of cities worldwide that are ditching pavement to respond to ...Read more




















































