Politics
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Commentary: We still rely on gasoline. Why is California adding to the cost and the pollution?
California is a state of contradictions. We lead the nation in environmental regulation, tout our clean energy goals with pride and champion a rapid transition away from fossil fuels. Yet despite this green image, our economy — and daily life — still very much run on oil and gas.
Fossil fuels account for roughly 8% of California’s $3 ...Read more

Patricia Lopez: ICE doesn't need another $100 billion
One of the biggest spending items in the Republican budget bill has hardly gotten any attention: $170 billion for an unprecedented crackdown on immigration. By some calculations, it would make the annual budget of Immigration and Customs Enforcement larger than Israel’s entire defense budget.
The supplemental funds — to be spent over the ...Read more

Commentary: Charlie Chaplin's 100-year-old film 'The Gold Rush' has timeless lessons on how to keep going
The wisest among us realize that what we normally think of as opposites are also associates. There’s life and death, joy and pain, fulfillment and absence. And, as Charlie Chaplin understood, and helped millions to understand, comedy and tragedy.
Cinema was about a quarter of a century old when Chaplin’s “The Gold Rush” premiered June ...Read more

Commentary: Presidentially corrected economic talk
Whether U.S. bombers recently “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capability (President Donald Trump’s preferred wording) or “severely damaged” it (per the CIA) matters so much to Trump that he’s threatened to sue news outlets reporting the CIA’s terminology.
The common presidential desire to shape the narrative has been especially ...Read more

Commentary: I fought to keep VOA independent. Now it's gone
The Trump administration has accomplished something that Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and other dictators desired. It destroyed the Voice of America.
Until mid-March, VOA had been on the air continuously for 83 years. Starting in 1942 with shortwave broadcasts in German to counter Nazi propaganda, America’s external voice had expanded to nearly 50 ...Read more

Commentary: Prophets, not spectators -- The class of 2025 and the work of repair
Within the hearts and faces of the Class of 2025 is a mixture of anticipation and apprehension—on the edge of a world that is, by turns, irreverent and weary, defiant and desperate for something more. These are not gentle times. Our society, economy, and politics all feel stretched and fraying, sometimes broken. But that, my friends, is ...Read more

Mihir Sharma: RFK Jr. is playing with babies' lives
When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was appointed secretary of health and human services, everyone knew he was capable of doing great damage. He had a long history of indulging conspiracy theories, particularly when it came to vaccines.
Already, his attempt to reassess immunization schedules in the U.S. has outraged pediatricians. But his latest ...Read more

Editorial: Why Illinois is aging faster than the rest of the country
Illinois is down young people — by a lot.
To put it bluntly, our pipeline is drying up. We’ve lost than 185,000 people ages 18 and younger compared with 2020, a 6% decrease. Cook County lost the bulk of these youngsters, with its 18-and-under population decline accounting for over half of the state’s total.
Meanwhile, the retiree ...Read more

Noah Feldman: The Supreme Court's majority is playing the long game
Many legal commentators apparently believe that, in the term that just ended, the Supreme Court further enabled President Donald Trump. The court did, in fact, issue a series of conservative decisions that Trump likes. However, under the leadership of Chief Justice John Roberts, the court also simultaneously pursued a careful strategy aimed at ...Read more

Adrian Wooldridge: The Middle Ages are making a political comeback
In one of the most memorable scenes in “Pulp Fiction,” a film replete with memorable scenes, a Los Angeles gangster, Marsellus Wallace, turns the tables on a man who has kidnapped and abused him. He’s going to get a couple of friends to go to work on his assailant “with a pair of pliers and a blow torch,” he says, and ensure that he ...Read more

Editorial: US diplomats, not bombers, must finish the job in Iran
American and Israeli forces have done the world a favor by setting back Iran’s nuclear program, whether by a little or a lot. But, unless the U.S. now binds the regime to a deal with strict, long-term constraints on its nuclear activities, the risks they’ve taken may well be for naught.
The Beltway debate over whether Iranian nuclear ...Read more

Michael Hiltzik: With 'Alligator Alcatraz,' Trump and DeSantis define their immigration policy as a tragic farce
Just as you may have thought that it was finally safe to think about American politics without thinking about Florida's Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, he has slinked his way into the national news again.
The occasion was a tour he hosted Tuesday for Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem of what has become known as "...Read more
Jackie Calmes: In the halls of Congress and on the canals of Venice, the new Gilded Age has a moment
The juxtaposition at the weekend was apt: one big, ugly bill in Washington and one big, garish wedding in Venice.
This is what days of Senate debate over President Trump and Republicans' nearly 1,000-page legislation had in common with the days of revelry at the $50-million nuptials of the world's-third-richest-man, Jeff Bezos, and ever-couture...Read more

David M. Drucker: Mamdani's rise is a gift Republicans are already using
Zohran Mamdani isn’t the most famous Democrat in America. But the frontrunner to serve as New York’s next mayor is well on his way — and he’ll get there, if Republicans have anything to say about it.
Immediately after the previously little-known state assemblyman from Queens won the Democratic nomination for mayor, stunning his party’...Read more

Anita Chabria: Elon Musk learns that bullies aren't your friends. Now what?
The thing about bullies is they don't have real friends.
They have lieutenants, followers and victims — sometimes all three rolled into one.
Most of us learn this by about third grade, when parents and hard knocks teach us how to figure out whom you can trust, and who will eat you for lunch.
Elon Musk, at age 54 with $400 billion in the ...Read more

Allison Schrager: America's broken politics is breaking economics, too
The political realignment has come for economics. At least since the days of Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes in the last century, the divide in economic thinking roughly corresponded to the political split. In the mainstream, everyone was a capitalist and saw some role for government. The right/left divide was mostly over exactly how big...Read more

Commentary: In a democracy, protest is good for the soul, even if it does not change anyone's mind
For the last several months, I have organized a weekly “Stand-Up for Democracy” rally/protest on the busiest street corner in my hometown. On Fridays at 5:30 pm., students, teachers, townspeople, and senior citizens come together, hold signs, and wave at passing drivers, some of whom honk their horns in solidarity.
I live in a very ...Read more

Gustavo Arellano: Trump was winning with Latinos. Now, his cruelty is derailing him
The Pew Research Center is one of the most trusted polling firms in the country, especially when it comes to Latinos. Last week, it published findings that should have been a victory lap for Donald Trump and his tortuous relationship with America's largest minority.
According to Pew, Trump won 48% of Latino voters in the 2024 presidential ...Read more

Commentary: I tried this new abomination at Whole Foods so you don't have to
I love pickles. Dill pickles, kosher dill pickles, cornichons, full-sour pickles, half-sour pickles, quarter-sour pickles, quick pickles, gherkins, German senfgurken. Not bread and butter pickles. Those are not pickles. The flaccid, round slices with their fluorescent yellow tint and sickeningly sweet flavor are a disgrace to the pickle name.
I...Read more

Martin Schram: Peace through power – It's electric!
For several hold-your-breath weeks, as spring sizzled into summer, the nuclear dealmakers of President Donald Trump’s USA and the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s Iran seemed astonishingly close to a deal.
So close that it seemed they’d soon reach out and seize the deal. But no one was willing to reach out.
First, on May 13, Iran�...Read more