ArcaMax

There is an obvious answer to what California Gov. Gavin Newsom is doing. He's running for president. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. He is nothing if not ambitious. He's termed out as governor and in two years will be looking for a place to land.

But he's doing it all wrong, and it's offensive to the very base he is going to ...Read more

"For more than two centuries," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote Tuesday in an extraordinary statement, "it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose."

"Not appropriate," huh? That's really going to scare them....Read more

They call it "Cancer Alley." It's an 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River that connects Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The name stems from the fact that the area's residents have a 95% greater chance of developing cancer than the average American. Some 200 petrochemical and fossil fuel operations are located in the area. About 25% of the ...Read more

I probably don't agree with anything Mahmoud Khalil has to say about Israel. He's the Columbia University student activist who has been arrested and threatened with deportation in the name of fighting antisemitism.

Trampling on free speech rights is no way to fight antisemitism. Neither is cutting off funding for much needed medical research....Read more

Should the government be able to tell a private university what to teach and how to teach it?

Is there a libertarian left in the house?

This is the letter that former and current Trump lawyer (officially the Interim D.C. U.S. Attorney) Ed Martin sent to the dean of Georgetown Law School:

"It has come to my attention reliably that Georgetown...Read more

There they were, dressed in hot pink, waving signs, banging on a cane.

If that is what counts as resistance, we are all in trouble.

The fact is that by showing up, the Democrats gave the president an audience he doesn't deserve. Would they all have shown up at a Donald Trump campaign rally? That's what it was. He doesn't deserve the respect ...Read more

The president and JD turned a meeting that was supposed to make nice in the White House into a segment for Fox News as they openly shouted at Ukraine's leader for not being thankful enough for America's aid and Donald Trump's leadership. After Vance accused him of being "disrespectful" by being insufficiently thankful, Trump joined in, telling...Read more

Good for Janet Mills, the governor of Maine. On Friday, at the White House, she did something that too many politicians have been afraid to do.

She stood up to President Donald Trump and stood for the rule of law.

The issue was Trump's threat to cut off federal funding for public education unless states comply with a recent executive order ...Read more

"But isn't there really a lot of waste, abuse and fraud in all the government spending?" my Uber driver asked.

I don't bring up these topics with strangers. Too dangerous. But my Uber driver raised it, wanting to know what I thought of Elon Musk and Donald Trump's latest doings in D.C. I thought I'd avoid the topic by just telling him I was a...Read more

"You should have never started it," President Donald Trump said on Tuesday, accusing Ukrainian leaders of having started the war with Russia. "You could have made a deal." He followed up the next day on social media, branding Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine's leader, as a "dictator without elections" who had "done a terrible job" in office.

Even...Read more

You made it. There are any number of reasons you should not have been confirmed, but Republicans were afraid to buck Trump. They voted in lockstep (except polio survivor Mitch McConnell, who Trump then ridiculed), and now you are the most powerful man in the world when it comes to health care. There are many people -- especially sick people --...Read more

Maybe.

That's the best constitutional scholars can say right now.

But I'm putting my money on the federal courts.

So far, it is the federal courts that have stood in the way of our presidents' (that's Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who's kidding whom) efforts to strip Congress of its power over appropriations and rewrite the Constitution. ...Read more

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order barring transgender girls and women from playing as girls and women at federally funded schools, colleges and universities. Nearly all schools receive federal funds.

A day later, the NCAA, the governing association for college sports in this country, followed suit, barring ...Read more

In an insightful column last week entitled "Don't Believe Him," Ezra Klein unearthed an old interview with Trump whisperer Steve Bannon, who summarized what would become the first two weeks of Trump's reelection administration. Bannon told "Frontline" in 2019:

Steve Bannon: "The opposition party is the media. And the media can only, because ...Read more

It's enough to make you -- and certainly me -- sick. In the midst of a national tragedy, he can't help himself. At a time when almost nothing is known for certain about the cause of the terrifying plane crash in Washington, he can't stop himself from playing the blame game. There is absolutely no evidence that it had anything to do with the ...Read more

I am writing this in La Paz, Mexico, a beautiful oceanfront city that is the capital of Baja California Sur and the home of a UNESCO wildlife preserve where today my daughter went diving with the sea lions. Breathtaking. All week, we have been taken care of by the good people of this beautiful country. I'm supposed to be relaxing, but ...Read more

The Justice Department has ordered its civil rights division to halt any ongoing litigation from the Biden administration and not pursue any new cases or settlements, according to a memo sent to the temporary head of the division that was obtained by The Washington Post. It's a freeze on everything, which is a prelude to an about-face when/if ...Read more

The fires got the new president's attention. In his inaugural address, he pointed to them: "From weeks ago, without even a token of defense, they're raging through the houses and communities, even affecting some of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals in our country, some of whom are sitting here right now. They don't have a home any ...Read more

Of course the state has a legitimate interest in preventing minors from accessing porn online that is intended for adults. Who could be against that? Certainly not the state of Texas, which overwhelmingly passed a law requiring porn sites to verify the age of users seeking access to their sites. Sort of like showing your ID when you're buying ...Read more

While I've been mainlining local news to see if my house, on the edge of an evacuation zone, was going to survive, my daughter (who I've been staying with) has been doing research on the air. As depressing as it has been to see these fires destroying my adopted hometown, it's been worse to hear my daughter's reports on the air around us, and ...Read more