On a recent Friday morning, President Claudia Sheinbaum stood inside Mexico’s presidential palace during her daily morning news conference and was asked by one of the reporters whether she had talked with President Donald Trump about a visit to the White House.

“We’ve talked about how nice it would be to meet in person, but there’s ...Read more

I’m a college professor and a liberal Democrat. It won’t surprise you to learn that I also despise Donald J. Trump.

But let’s imagine, for a moment, that I wanted Trump and his MAGA acolytes to prosper and thrive in the 2026 midterm elections and forever thereafter.

I’d cancel Bill Maher and Saquon Barkley.

That’s what many of my ...Read more

Whatever you think of the National Endowment for the Arts, or federal funding of the arts more generally, surely reasonable Americans all can agree that government agencies should not claw back previously approved grants when struggling nonprofit organizations had already started their projects after being told they could count on that money.

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The United States of America is at a precarious moment. Our constitutional republic is hanging by a thread when the president himself seems uncertain about his obligation to uphold the Constitution — while those who do are being honored for their courage, as though fidelity to our founding principles were exceptional rather than fundamental. ...Read more

What do Pennsylvania, Illinois, Nebraska, Mississippi, Michigan, Utah, Minnesota, Maine, South Carolina and Massachusetts — states that span U.S. regions and the political divide — have in common?

All 10 have seen recent attempts to redesign their state flags.

In Mississippi, public pressure led the state to abandon their Confederate-...Read more

An ironic side-note to Donald Trump’s status as the most demonstrably dishonest president America has ever had (more than 30,000 verifiable lies during his first term, reports The Washington Post, with the pile now growing ever-larger in his second term) is his penchant for occasionally blurting the quiet part out loud.

That’s apparently ...Read more

The student loan program is a case study in government mismanagement.

Last month, the Department of Education announced it will resume collecting on defaulted student loans. It hadn’t done so since March 2020. At that point, a pause was understandable. The COVID crisis was unfolding. Shutdown orders were about to grind the economy to a halt, ...Read more

For today's sermon on courage, I would like the church to open their King James Bibles to Matthew 27:24: "When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it."

While Pontius Pilate knew ...Read more

Warren Buffett is stepping down as chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., the company he built alongside his later partner Charlie Munger for the past six decades. It’s a final show of humility by a man many consider the greatest investor of all time.

Operating in an era replete with purported Wall Street soothsayers, the 94-year...Read more

Buried – and virtually out-of-sight – after a landslide of poll-driven OMG! insight-journalism that quantified America’s wide and deep discontent with the first 100 days of Donald Trump’s 2.0 presidency, is a two-sentenced quote that historians may someday declare historic.

But it was easy to overlook. It was tacked onto the end of yet ...Read more

Most climate-change deniers don’t even bother fighting the established science anymore: The planet is warming, human activity is the cause, and we can do something about it if we really try. Modern deniers will concede all that, but fire back that the “do something about it” part is too hard, too expensive to be worth trying. We have to be...Read more

One way to hasten a long-delayed home renovation is to set the house on fire. Having helped torch much of the federal bureaucracy, Elon Musk says he plans to move on from his work at the Department of Government Efficiency. Here’s hoping a sounder reform of the civil service can now begin.

DOGE began with much hype. It promised some $2 ...Read more

Should a blatantly sectarian educational institution qualify for public funding as a charter school? The Supreme Court wrestled with the question Wednesday. The answer must be no.

Charter schools are public schools; we’ve said this many times, as have fellow advocates for the innovative instructional models they deliver. They are free and ...Read more

The Trump administration’s recent moves to cut federal funding for Medicaid are nothing new. The cuts proposed in the budget resolution resemble similar Republican proposals such as the 2017 Better Care Reconciliation Act, which failed to pass the Senate due to both disunity among Republicans and a swell of organized opposition against it.

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Reports that the White House may propose nearly a 50% cut to NASA’s Science Mission Directorate are both mind-boggling and, if true, nothing short of disastrous.

To make those cuts happen — a total of $3.6 billion — NASA would have to close the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, and cancel the mission that will bring back samples ...Read more

In my family, voting isn’t just a right — it’s a lifeline.

My parents were sharecroppers in Arkansas until 1951, when my dad dared stand up to his boss for not paying him a fair wage at the agricultural weigh station. Under threat from the KKK, he left town in a wagon, covered in hay so he wouldn’t be discovered. Three months later — ...Read more

President Donald Trump’s campaign promise to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours once he was elected has proved to be utter nonsense as experts grade his first 100 days in office. One day, he blames the cause of the war on Ukraine, and then, finally, he criticizes Vladimir Putin after a Russian ballistic missile attack on the Ukrainian city of ...Read more

For economists, America’s organ shortage is a perplexing public health problem. About 37 million Americans suffer from kidney disease, and more than 800,000 live with kidney failure. At this advanced stage, patients either receive a kidney transplant or remain on dialysis — an expensive and often debilitating treatment — for the rest of ...Read more

Dr. Charles DeCarli, co-director of the UC Davis Alzheimer's Research Center, got the news in a call from a colleague on March 24.

"Your study was terminated."

DeCarli had been conducting a six-year examination, funded by the National Institutes of Health, of brain and vascular conditions that can be risk factors for dementia. The study, ...Read more