ArcaMax

The latest figures from the Pentagon on the war against Iran amount to $38 billion, with future costs running at $3 billion a month. And contrary to some of the president's earlier statements, it's not about to be over.

And who is paying the price? Look to your left. Look to your right. Look in the mirror.

Don't take my word for it. This is ...Read more

Greg Abbott, the right-wing hack who is governor of Texas, probably doesn't know what a "petard" is, but he's now been hoisted by a big one. "Hoist on a petard" is a Shakespearean phrase for a bomb maker being blown sky-high by his own creation.

Abbott's bombastic saga began last year, when he noticed that high-tech billionaires were waving ...Read more

The German term "Fuehrerkult" means what it sounds like: the cult of the leader. It refers more precisely to the cult created by, for and about one German leader in particular, and you can probably guess who.

The cult of Adolf Hitler that dominated and devoured the Third Reich until the Nazis were defeated -- and in some quarters even ...Read more

This is a generalization, I know. As Mark Twain is said to have said, "All generalizations are false, including this one." But there is growing evidence that women tend to be more protective of our American democracy than men. They are more willing to put their foot down when partisan schemers try to game the electoral system, mostly by ...Read more

J.A.'s life has been impacted by addiction for over two decades, and he needed support. He didn't have access to clean syringes, so he reused used syringes and contracted countless skin infections and as well as hepatitis C. But he finally got the support he needed: A Washington syringe service program (SSP) run by Gather Church provided him ...Read more

Lindsay Clancy deserves to spend her life in prison. She strangled her three children, one after another. She knew what she was doing and knew it was wrong. She did it anyway. She is a murderer and should be treated as one.

Of course she was mentally ill. So what? Many -- maybe most -- people who commit heinous crimes are not mentally healthy...Read more

Last week there occurred a watershed moment in the history of American political cartooning. A major American newspaper, The Baltimore Sun, published an editorial cartoon created not by a cartoonist or graphic artist but by unidentified staffers using artificial intelligence.

One year ago, the Sun fired its Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, ...Read more

To contemplate the quarter-century that has passed since the 9/11 attacks, with all the momentous change that day wrought on our society, is to confront a disturbing fact: As a nation, we have learned almost nothing that episode should have taught us.

The consequence is that again we are facing extreme and even existential peril, stripped of ...Read more

A man who worked in the cafeteria at my husband's workplace disappeared. My husband talked to him each time he stopped in for lunch. One day, my husband noted how happy the man seemed. He told my husband it was because he had his final green card interview with immigration the next day. My husband never saw him again. He was just gone. My ...Read more

I was working at a medium-sized city newspaper on Sept. 11, 2001. No one had stormed the Capitol yet, there had been no George Floyd riots, we hadn't started the war we were going to lose in Afghanistan, and ICE hadn't killed anyone in the street.

My city had a primary election that day. They considered canceling that election but didn't, ...Read more

I'm not a big fan of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, but this week, he did something important that his predecessors had refused to do. On the eve of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, New York City released over 170,000 pages of documents about the toxic air quality levels after the Sept.11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center.

The numbers are ...Read more

"True is it that we have seen better days." -- William Shakespeare

Pearl Harbor brought out the best in the American people. We responded by pulling together for a major mobilization when an act of war landed on our soil in 1941. That December day, which Franklin Roosevelt eloquently declared would "live in infamy," is within living memory.

...Read more

Growing up, I received a wealth of working-class values from my parents, including this nugget about egalitarianism: "Nobody is better than you," they said, "and you're no better than anybody else."

That's the ethical underpinning for "We're all in this together" -- it's what Thomas Jefferson enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and ...Read more

Smoke still rose from the ruins of the World Trade Center, and the smell of nearly 2,000 deaths lingered miles uptown. A reporter asked New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani whether he worried that the city's Muslim neighborhoods would be attacked in revenge for that Islamist-inspired atrocity. Giuliani responded that he would make sure that didn't ...Read more

For those who remember the way savagery shattered serenity on Sept. 11, 2001, the last 25 years haven't dimmed the memory of the evil that occurred that day. One remembers the photos of the missing, murdered plastered on Manhattan's buildings and street poles and The New York Times obituaries -- bunches each day -- of those pulverized in the ...Read more

Last August, President Donald Trump manufactured a phony "crime emergency" to surge National Guard troops and federal agents into our nation's capital. This deployment came on the heels of similar surges in Los Angeles, Chicago and Portland, Oregon. He even told military leaders that the National Guard was fighting "a war from within," and that ...Read more