Once again, politicians are trying to choose their voters to guarantee their own victories before the first ballot is cast.

In the latest round of redistricting wars, Texas Republicans are attempting a rare mid-decade redistricting to boost their advantage ahead of the 2026 midterms, and Democratic governors in California and New York are ...Read more

“What we’re fighting for is democracy,” Texas state Rep. Barbara Gervin-Hawkins said Sunday.

She didn’t say this at a news conference or in a committee hearing or a TV interview. She spoke the words in a Chicago church, with the blessing of Father Michael Pfleger who heads St. Sabina on the South Side of the city.

Can a house of ...Read more

The Social Security Trust Fund is less than a decade away from insolvency thanks to congressional and presidential inertia. The 90-year-old retirement program is so popular that the vast majority of politicians prefer to tolerate the deteriorating status quo rather than jeopardize their political futures by insisting on reforms.

Yet the program...Read more

President Donald Trump’s campaign against homeless people is not limited to the District of Columbia. On July 24, Trump issued an executive order titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets.” How exactly is that to be accomplished?

“Shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings for humane treatment ...Read more

Who can forget George Gershwin’s memorable song “Summertime and the Living is Easy”? Summers meant picnics in the park, vacations, camping, lounging at the pool, jumping in the lake, and reading favorite books.

That was then, this is now.

Now, we have children attending academically focused summer programs or athletic camps designed to ...Read more

If you want someone to blame for the recent crisis caused by President Trump’s rush to force a gerrymander of Texas’ congressional districts, and the harried responses from governors in California, Illinois and New York, you can start with the Supreme Court.

In 2019, in Rucho vs. Common Cause, the group held, 5 to 4, that challenges to ...Read more

Los Angeles just can't get a break.

The latest embarrassment is LA28 chair Casey Wasserman, the man tasked with making sure the 2028 Summer Olympics are a massive success. At a news conference this week announcing that President Donald Trump will head a federal Olympics task force, Wasserman offered L.A. a giant whoopie cushion.

With Wasserman...Read more

Edwin Feulner, the founder and longtime president of the Heritage Foundation, died last month. He will be remembered as one of the most consequential visionary leaders in modern conservatism. He will also be remembered as the person, more than anyone else, responsible for the Republican Party’s turn away from truth, expertise and good ...Read more

Texas officials didn’t have a problem sending thousands of migrants to New York, a sanctuary state, when the desperate asylum seekers illegally crossed the southern border.

They sent them here by the busloads.

But now, when a few of its lawmakers come to New York seeking sanctuary from an onerous redistricting vote, Texas leaders want to sic...Read more

Right now, something in your home may be talking to your child about sex, self-harm, and suicide. That something isn’t a person—it’s an AI companion chatbot.

These AI chatbots can be indistinguishable from online human relationships. They retain past conversations, initiate personalized messages, share photos, and even make voice calls. ...Read more

Let’s face it. The Democratic Party is in disarray. It will not win the 2026 congressional midterm elections if it limits its message to condemning President Donald Trump. And it will not win the 2026 elections if the party is seen as a cesspool of bickering and disagreement.

Americans are fed up with the inability of Congress to act, and ...Read more

Tax-advantaged employer-sponsored retirement savings accounts hit a milestone not long ago: At least half of all private sector U.S. workers now participate in a 401(k).

That is good news in this respect: The alternative of not saving money for retirement could prove crushing. Finance experts have long cautioned against relying solely on ...Read more

Not caring about the U.S. Constitution is a regular refrain for President Donald Trump, who now wants to exclude undocumented people from the 2030 census count — a nonstarter as much else is in this bizarro world we now inhabit, promulgated via a screed on his Truth Social platform — is both a terrible idea and certainly a rehash.

Trump ...Read more

Remember “I alone can fix it”? President Donald Trump, who made that laughable statement in his 2016 convention acceptance speech, is now testing the theory in Washington.

Trump and his party have been threatening a D.C. takeover for years and made it part of the Republican platform last year. But it was all just empty talk and random ...Read more

You're doubtless familiar with the term armchair quarterback, and probably with its myriad modifications for disciplines outside of football, like armchair meteorologist to connote enthusiasm for forecasting despite an obvious lack of expertise, but I heard a different usage yesterday that sounded truly groundbreaking.

Armchair epidemiologist. ...Read more

Once again, a willfully blind President Donald Trump is walking into a trap set by Russian leader Vladimir Putin — by agreeing to meet him for a summit in Alaska on Aug. 15.

No matter how many times Putin insults the president and ignores his calls for a total ceasefire in Ukraine, Trump returns for more humiliation. He refuses to recognize ...Read more

Gov. JB Pritzker is once again talking about gerrymandering — just not in Illinois.

This week, he welcomed Texas Democratic legislators to Oakwood, Illinois, to denounce Republican redistricting efforts in that state. But while Pritzker lectures red states about fairness, he continues to ignore the glaring problems in his own backyard.

Don�...Read more

President Donald Trump using an obscure emergency provision in federal law pertaining to Washington, D.C. to attempt to take full control over the capital’s local police force is not responding to any “emergency,” but just a pure power grab.

Coming a day after he’d sent federal agents to patrol the streets and moved to deploy the ...Read more

“If the United States is to deter a nuclear attack,” then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara said in a 1967 speech in San Francisco, “it must possess an actual and a credible assured-destruction capability.”

McNamara was elucidating a long-established defense concept known as “mutually assured destruction,” meaning that if ...Read more

Actress Gina Carano, Lucasfilm and its parent company Walt Disney Co. have settled the federal lawsuit filed in which Carano claimed that, in 2021, she was wrongfully terminated from her role in “The Mandalorian” after she expressed her conservative political views on social media.

The settlement details have not been made public, but ...Read more