Politics
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Editorial: Want kids to learn? Start by removing smartphones from the classroom
Hand your child a phone when you are ready for their childhood to end.
We’d suggest another spin on that online proverb: Let kids bring their phones to class when you want them to stop learning.
Last spring, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker championed a bill banning cellphones from classrooms. It didn’t pass, but he’s indicated he’ll be ...Read more
Commentary: Subsidizing insurance just props up dysfunction. Empower consumers instead
Congress ended its impasse to reopen the government, but the Democrats’ reason for the shutdown remains unresolved: the renewal of expiring subsidies for insurance premiums under the Affordable Care Act.
Republicans offered an olive branch to end the standoff by proposing to make payments into Americans’ health savings accounts or flexible ...Read more
Editorial: Palisade fire aftermath burns up government's credibility
Anyone who believes that the government can solve their problems needs to spend some time in Southern California.
This month, Sens. Rick Scott, R-Fla., and Ron Johnson, R-Wis., held a public hearing on the destructive Palisades Fire. Earlier in the year, it killed 12 people and destroyed almost 7,000 structures. Many of them were homes in the ...Read more
LZ Granderson: Men like Trump represent what the founders were fighting against
George Washington was quite the man.
Life handed him the keys to this brand-new country, and instead of clinging to the steering wheel until he drew his last breath, he pulled over and let someone else drive.
It was this peaceful transfer of power that made America exceptional — and Washington the defining figure of American masculinity. ...Read more
Lara Williams: There's already a deal to beat dirty fossil fuels
A United Nations climate summit has once again failed to strengthen a pledge made two years ago to transition “away from fossil fuels.” Instead these dirty drivers of the climate crisis went completely unacknowledged last weekend’s COP30 agreement. It’s disappointing, certainly, but a more ambitious outcome wouldn’t have been much ...Read more
Commentary: The unfolding democratic insurgency
The Democratic Party stands at the precipice of a profound internal reckoning. For decades, it has balanced precariously between populist aspiration and corporate capture, a tension that has now reached its breaking point.
The election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City has shattered the illusion of establishment inevitability. What ...Read more
Commentary: Even with SNAP, workers face food crisis
Although the longest federal government shutdown in our nation’s history has formally ended, and payments to the one in eight U.S. residents who rely on the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) have resumed, the problem of hunger in America remains unsolved.
Kids are still going hungry, inflation is out of control and the ...Read more
Commentary: What are American values?
There are fundamental differences between liberals and conservatives—and certainly MAGA adherents—on what are “American values.”
But for both liberal and conservative pundits, the term connotes something larger than us, grounding, permanent—of lasting meaning. Because the values of people change as the times change, as the culture ...Read more
Ronald Brownstein: The GOP tried loyalty, then rebellion. Both failed
For Republicans, November was bookended by two ominous developments: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s resignation and the party’s resounding defeats in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races.
The Republican candidates in those races — Jack Ciattarelli in New Jersey and Winsome Earle-Sears in Virginia — tried one strategy for ...Read more
Noah Feldman: How constitutional limits become negotiable
The most astonishing feature of Donald Trump’s decade as one of the most dominant figures in American politics is his ability to make the unthinkable seem not only thinkable, but possible. The president’s latest attempts to push the boundaries of what is conceivable — and legal — in our system of government include claims that his ...Read more
Commentary: Comey and James may not be in the clear just yet
The dismissals of the indictments against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James were a victory for the rule of law, but the victory may be short-lived.
On Monday, a federal judge concluded that the appointment of interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan was invalid, thereby voiding the indictments she ...Read more
Allison Schrager: The American middle class is shrinking, and that's OK
The good news is that Americans have never been richer. The bad news is that most of them don’t feel like it.
There has been tremendous growth in income and wealth in the U.S. in the last half century, even for poorer and middle-class households. But because of the nature of that growth, as well as the changing structure of the national ...Read more
Editorial: That bizarre day when the 'fascist' met the 'communist' and found common ground
We ply our trade with words and we like to think they have weight. But the wild Donald Trump-Zohran Mamdani news conference at the White House Friday almost convinced us of the opposite. When it comes to saying what we mean, or not, America has gone totally bananas.
Consider: Mamdani has often said Trump is a “despot who betrayed the country�...Read more
Commentary: Why the tri-merge system is vital for fair homeownership
For generations, home ownership has been part of the very definition of capturing the American dream. First-time buyers face a process that can be both exciting and daunting—the right home, in the right community, and with the right financing.
As housing costs continue to rise and first-time home purchases are being delayed more than ever, ...Read more
Robin Abcarian: Trump's decades-long pattern of attacking women crossed a new line
When the president of the United States pointed angrily at a reporter and called her "piggy" last week, I wish she had gone full Muppet: "Who? Moi?"
Of course, Bloomberg White House reporter Catherine Lucey did nothing of the sort. She was a consummate professional and did not respond to President Donald Trump's gratuitous insult after she ...Read more
Commentary: Pillars of humanitarianism have ceded the field. That's our cue, everyone
The bloodstains are visible from space.
In the last weeks, the Rapid Support Forces — one party in Sudan’s years-long civil war — captured the desert city of el-Fasher after a 17-month siege. Since then, fighters have embarked on a campaign of horrors: lining up and executing civilians, systematically killing patients in the city’s last...Read more
David Fickling: BBQ gas is helping to cool a warming planet
There are plenty of sophisticated materials that the world is counting on to limit global warming. Polysilicon for solar panels. Rare-earth magnets for wind turbines. Lithium for electric vehicle batteries. But propane?
Believe it or not, the fossil hydrocarbon — produced from oil and gas wells, and mostly used as a cooking and heating fuel ...Read more
Michael Hiltzik: Reaching a new low, CDC discards science in claims about vaccines and autism
For followers of medical disinformation, the claim that autism is linked to childhood vaccinations is the reddest of red flags. The issue is among the most intensively studied in the scientific literature, and the results among the most conclusive: There's no connection.
That's why the revision by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ...Read more
Editorial: Judge tosses Comey, James indictments -- for now
A federal judge has dismissed indictments against former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. The move should be a lesson for the White House.
On Monday, U.S. District Judge Cameron Currie, appointed in 1994 by President Bill Clinton, sided with Comey, who had argued that the prosecutor who brought the case ...Read more
Commentary: The high cost of escaping torture
By now, Americans have become familiar with seeing masked federal agents snatching people off the street and outside courthouses. Separations of families of asylum seekers and other non-citizens, and occasionally even citizens, are all part of the malevolence of U.S. immigration policy.
But far less attention has gone to another measure that ...Read more






















































