ArcaMax

President Donald Trump and the GOP have called themselves the party of free speech. But since taking office, the president has been tightening up his definition of freedom like a hangman’s noose.

We could hear it in the White House’s Orwellian decision in February to revoke the Associated Press’ long-held access to the White House, ...Read more

Amid the blizzard of breaking news, a familiar irritation poked through: ethnic labeling.

The issue unexpectedly emerged this week while the Senate considered a stopgap federal funding bill to keep the federal government running and avoid a possible shutdown,

After Trump said Democrats would be blamed and taxes would surge if Democrats didn’...Read more

My advice to congressional Democrats: If you’re going to embrace performative politics, be sure you give a good performance.

Instead, the Dems at President Trump’s speech to a joint session of Congress looked like an angry and lonely clown car.

They looked the very portrait that they have become in Donald Trump’s second term: angry, ...Read more

Marlean Ames of Akron, Ohio, is not gay or a member of a racial minority.

But, please, she points out, don’t hold that against her, as she alleges her employers have, as she takes her “reverse discrimination” case all the way to the Supreme Court.

I wish her well. As an African American male, I ...Read more

Colorful billionaire and presidential adviser Elon Musk sparked quite a reaction at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington last week when he leaped around the stage waving a chainsaw.

“This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy. CHAINSAAAW!” he politics/fromtheleft/clarencepage/s-3609505">Read more

It’s not easy to steal the spotlight from two seasoned publicity lovers like President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, but Musk’s 4-year-old son X AE A-Xii, or “X” for short, made it look easy during his Oval Office visit.

Now viral on the web, little X seemed to teach his dad a lesson I learned the hard way when I agreed to take my own son...Read more

Back when a public backlash began to rise up mostly among white parents against “critical race theory,” I joked as to whether Black History Month might be next.

I don’t joke about that anymore.

In the wake of President Donald Trump’s re-election, largely on culture war issues, we see how the mere mention of race, academically or ...Read more

As the investigation into Wednesday’s air disaster in Washington was still getting underway, President Trump didn’t bother to wait for actual evidence to figure out what was to blame: “DEI.”

That’s shorthand, in case you haven’t heard, for diversity, equity and inclusion programs, a controversial hiring practice that has become a ...Read more

Hindsight, as the old saying goes, is always 20/20. That thought came to mind after a couple of the roughly 1,500 Jan. 6 offenders given pardons by President Trump said they didn’t want it.

Finally, I thought, a bright light of sanity shows itself.

I am heartened by the example of Pamela Hemphill, 71, of Boise, Idaho, ...Read more

As we mark the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, ironically on the same day as Donald Trump’s second presidential inauguration, I am reminded of a famous quote from another King:

”Can we all get along?”

Yes, that plea came not from MLK but from Rodney King, no relation to the great civil rights leader, in May 1992 as riots ...Read more

When he showed up at the Chicago Tribune one day in early 1976, James Earl Carter, Jr., was announced by one of our young newsroom copy clerks as “that governor from Georgia who thinks he can run for president.”

Yes, as a young reporter in that newsroom, I remember Jimmy Carter as a former peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, and a former ...Read more

Just weeks before President-elect Donald Trump was scheduled to return to the White House, the coterie of American tech oligarchs who played a decisive role in re-electing him was busy exerting their own power in ways that suggest the MAGA coalition may be heading for a crack-up.

Trump famously invited fellow billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek ...Read more

As it has been doing yearly since 2009, the fact-checking organization PolitiFact has chosen the Lie of the Year. There was an abundance of nominees.

And, it turns out, they chose the same whopper I identified as a top contender months ago: President-elect Donald Trump’s unfounded claim that Haitian migrants were eating the household pets of ...Read more

Watching the year-end budget fights in Congress as we await the second term of President-elect Donald Trump, I find myself wondering: Will this era be remembered as the time when Trump was president and Elon Musk ran the country?

Trump earned such nicknames as “Captain Chaos” and worse for his unpredictable, constantly changing and easily ...Read more

When Merriam-Webster chose “polarization” as the word of the year for 2024, the timing was dramatic for many of us who make our living through words.

Defining the word as “division into two sharply distinct opposites; especially, a state in which the opinions, beliefs, or interests of a group or society no longer range along a continuum ...Read more

Just once.

Just once amid all the times that reporters asked President Joe Biden whether he would give a pardon to his son Hunter, who was facing a possible federal prison sentence, I wish I could have heard jolly Joe give the sort of response that the late Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley offered to such unwelcome questions.

I’m thinking of ...Read more

“Democrats are like the Yankees,” said one of the most memorable tweets to come across on X after Election Day. “Spent hundreds of millions of dollars to lose the big series and no one got fired or was held accountable.”

Too sad. But that’s politics.The disappointment behind that tweet was widely shared, but no one with...Read more

“Kakistocracy” is trending again.

The obscure term, coined as early as the seventeenth century and defined by Merriam-Webster as “government by the worst people,” has surged on Google Trends since the election.

What does government by the worst look like? To ...Read more