ArcaMax

Former U.S. Congressman Barney Frank used to mock those pretending not to be influenced by cash funneled into their pockets. "I can't be bought," Frank put it, "but I sure as hell can be rented."

These days, it's Performative Primary Politics 101 for Democrats, catering to a left-tilting base that swallows every accusation against Israel hook...Read more

Another exercise in nonpartisan cooperation ended sadly, as Donald Trump undoubtedly planned. Every year, the nation's governors meet with the president to discuss common concerns. Trump had initially banned two Democratic members of the National Governors Association from attending -- governors Jared Polis of Colorado and Wes Moore of ...Read more

Stephen Colbert was right to be mad. His bosses at CBS put the kabosh on an interview he wanted to do with a Texas Senate candidate on his late-night talk show. But you can't just blame CBS. The fault lies, as it so often does these days, in the Trump administration, which last month announced new "guidance" from the Federal Communications ...Read more

"Move fast and break things," Mark Zuckerberg famously ordered his employees at Facebook. His thought wasn't original. "Inaction is death," Benito Mussolini wrote nearly a century earlier. "Fascism is action in which doctrine is immanent." Do first, think later -- or perhaps not at all.

Clearly, the Trump administration subscribes to rapid-...Read more

This year marks the 100th anniversary of Black History Month. While we celebrate this milestone, we are also grappling with efforts to remove or revise Black history in the classroom as well as the exhibits found at federal parks and museums. But Black history cannot be erased; it is preserved because individuals and communities decide to step...Read more

A recent mass shooting at an ice rink in Rhode Island sent us on the hunt.

When someone commits a mass shooting, people of the most extreme political genders set out to find reasons why that would bolster their own beliefs.

What you want to look for is a sexual identity that differs from yours, Nazi sympathies, membership in cultlike ...Read more

A poster depicting an enormous face gazed from the wall. The caption ran, "BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU." So wrote George Orwell at the open of his dystopian novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four."

Big Brother's image was everywhere, on printed material and on telescreens blasting state propaganda in homes, workplaces, streets and shops. The fictional ...Read more

It's just that they are so shameless about it.

On Thursday, the Commission of Fine Arts will welcome the newest, youngest, and least qualified member in its 116-year history. She is Chamberlain Harris, the president's 26-year-old receptionist/executive assistant, the only job she has ever had. She has zero background in the arts and ...Read more

In early 1862, Union generals, soldiers and even the commander in chief of the Civil War were literally at a loss. Morale ran low.

Engaged as we are now in a great civil war, a leader tearing the nation in two, it's well to look back to this time.

Taking the oath of office in March 1861, President Abraham Lincoln of Illinois was a newcomer ...Read more

Except for Zorro and Batman, people who put on masks to hide their identity when going to work are rarely up to any good.

And as Americans learned decades ago when Ku Klux Klanners covered themselves from head to toe, the bigger the mask, the greater the evil hiding behind it. Which brings us full circle to "Operation Metro Surge."

OMS is the ...Read more

Time was when throwing your political opponents into prison on trumped-up charges was the deplorable domain of despots over whom we claimed moral superiority: Saddam Hussein or the Iranian mullahs, say. Or pick your Soviet premier. Or Vladimir Putin.

Those were the good old days.

Now it's us.

But for the smarts and guts of a small group of ...Read more

May we talk about spiritual matters? "In the beginning," the Bible opens, "God created the heavens and the earth." Several lines down, God says, let humankind "have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon ...Read more

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth made headlines when he summoned hundreds of senior military leaders to a military base in Quantico, Virginia, and made troubling comments about equity in the military. President Donald Trump's address to the generals was also alarming, calling for troops to be deployed in U.S. cities as "training grounds" and to...Read more

My hero for the week is yet another federal district judge, who is holding the line on the worst of the Trump administration's excesses. Richard Leon is a former President George W. Bush appointee to the District Court for the District of Columbia. On Thursday, he issued an order at least temporarily blocking Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ...Read more

Ten years ago, the shuttering of The Tampa Tribune shocked Media World. Last month, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette disappeared, turning western Pennsylvania into a news desert. Now The Washington Post is entering a death spiral. Hell, D.C. never got over the Washington Star.

We remember what we lost recently, not what we lost in total. When Jeff ...Read more