Politics
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Editorial: Turn on the cameras, ICE. What's taking you so long?
Thanks to U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis, we’ve finally learned something about what Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the U.S. Border Patrol are doing in the Chicago area from the perspective of ICE and the U.S. Border Patrol, which is helpful even if you don’t like what’s going on.
Todd Lyons, acting director, U.S. ...Read more

Patricia Lopez: Food prices could go even higher after these ICE raids
The U.S. Labor Department is sounding a stark warning that the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has devastated the ranks of agricultural workers and now may threaten the food supply.
It’s bad news for farmers, who have already been buffeted by this administration’s tariffs, as well as for U.S. consumers, who sent President ...Read more

Editorial: The danger of not deporting criminal illegal aliens
It’s a lot harder for a would-be rapist to harm women when he’s not in the United States.
Clark County prosecutors believe Carlos Nava is a serial rapist who has victimized more than a dozen women and underage girls. His crime spree began more than a decade ago. Prosecutors believe he frequently targeted prostitutes and assaulted his ...Read more

Commentary: Warrantless home abductions by ICE are a recipe for Wild West shootouts
Since the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second administration, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has significantly increased its enforcement actions nationwide. This shift has seen the use of more aggressive and combative tactics by ICE, including entering dwellings by force and without judicial warrants— as instructed by the ...Read more

Anita Chabria: Trump's AI poop post caps a week of MAGA indifference to Hitler jokes
An estimated 7 million Americans turned out Saturday to peacefully protest against the breakdown of our checks-and-balances democracy into a Trump-driven autocracy, rife with grift but light on civil rights.
Trump's response? An AI video of himself wearing a crown inside a fighter plane, dumping what appears to be feces on these very ...Read more

Commentary: What's in a name? The weight of the world
When our son, Naser, was 6 years old, he wanted to be called Kevin, a perfectly reasonable Midwestern name. This seems to be a rite of passage with children, to name and rename themselves.
But our son was not to know the agonies we went through to name him, honoring our respective South Asian and South American cultures and balancing the ...Read more

F.D. Flam: TikTok diets are helping people when medicine can't
As a species, humans possess a kind of superpower: the ability to survive on a remarkably wide variety of foods, allowing us to thrive everywhere from the Amazon rainforest to the Arctic tundra.
Now, thanks to social media, our dietary range is being tested again. TikTok and YouTube have made stars of influencers who tout — often with the ...Read more

Matthew Yglesias: What makes this shutdown so different
During the 2013 government shutdown I happened to be in Philadelphia, and I was surprised to find that the Liberty Bell — which sits in its own little room with big windows — was “closed.” You could stand there and look at it, but only through tourist-smudged glass.
This time around, the Liberty Bell Center and other buildings that are ...Read more

Commentary: Donald Trump brings the war on terrorism to the Caribbean
On Friday, the United States destroyed what the Defense Department alleged was a boat affiliated with the National Liberation Army, a Colombian rebel group, using the Southern Caribbean to smuggle drugs into the country. The latest operation, which reportedly killed three people, is the seventh since the aerial campaign began in September. It ...Read more

Robin Abcarian: Don't count Katie Porter out of the governor's race just yet
Oh my god, you guys! Did you hear about that brat Katie Porter? Swear to God on a stack of holy Bibles, she is such a mean girl! She can never be governor of California! And she's not gonna make fetch happen, either!
All right, can we please grow up for a minute here?
Like a lot of ambitious politicians, Katie Porter, the former Democratic ...Read more

Commentary: Let's be serious about merit-based college admissions
Citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard as its foundation, the administration of President Donald Trump has taken a number of steps in the name of merit-based admissions, with a stated goal of advancing a more meritocratic higher education system.
Not only has the administration attacked ...Read more

Commentary: Politicians seem incapable of balancing the federal budget
I was struck, no, dumbfounded by this: Debt funded all federal government spending in 2025.
The federal government plans to spend a total of $7 trillion in fiscal 2025 but only bring in $5.16 trillion in revenue. That leaves a deficit of approximately $1.8 trillion. The big four expenditures — Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, debt interest...Read more

Editorial: Most Americans don't think either Democrats or Republicans care about them
We spend a lot of time talking about the problem of polarization in today’s politics. If you get right down to it, however, most of that happens, well, at the fringes — either end of the pole, if you will.
What’s more normal, in our experience, is for the average American to question whether either political party cares about regular ...Read more

John M. Crisp: How do you know when you've become an autocracy?
Schemes of national governance are complicated and subject to generalization, but for the sake of argument, let’s put “democracy” at one end of a spectrum and “autocracy” at the other and consider the bright line that separates them?
There isn’t one. In fact, since 1997 the Center for Systemic Peace has maintained a 21-point scale ...Read more

Editorial: Will gold prices continue to soar? Either way, watch out for scams
The price of gold has hit one record after another this year, and if the past is any guide, the precious metal’s wild ride means bad news could be on the way.
Gold is the doomsday prepper’s favorite commodity, a store of value for difficult times. In the 1970s, gold prices shot up alongside runaway inflation and the end of a system that ...Read more

Commentary: The difference between fact and truth in Trump's America
In the 1987 book “Trump: The Art of the Deal,” Donald Trump introduced the notion of “truthful hyperbole,” which he called an “innocent form of exaggeration and very effective form of promotion.” The idea is to use sensational imagery or language to get attention and generate excitement — regardless if it has anything to do with ...Read more

Mark Z. Barabak: This Las Vegas Republican had high hopes for Trump. But a 'Trump slump' made life worse
LAS VEGAS — Aaron Mahan is a lifelong Republican who twice voted for Donald Trump.
He had high hopes putting a businessman in the White House and, although he found the president's monster ego grating, Mahan voted for his reelection. Mostly, he said, out of party loyalty.
By 2024, however, he'd had enough.
"I just saw more of the bad ...Read more

Commentary: By loosening standards, the FDA isn't doing rare-disease patients any favors
If you’re faced with a serious disease, you better hope it’s not a rare one.
After an often tortuous path to diagnosis, people with rare diseases are likely to find that good treatment options don’t exist and none is on the horizon. Many of these conditions are poorly understood, and conducting studies in tiny patient populations can be ...Read more

Editorial: American cities have issues. Troops won't solve them
As the White House threatens to send the National Guard into more U.S. cities, its rationale seems to vary by place — and by day. In some instances, it’s to fight crime. In others, it’s to protect Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. Either way, it’s a bad idea: To the extent those problems are legitimate, they’re better ...Read more

George Skelton: A gutsy move to increase housing and oil drilling. But not on high-speed rail
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Some witty person long ago gave us this immortal line: “No man’s life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session.”
Humorist Will Rogers usually is credited — wrongly. Mark Twain, too, falsely.
The real author was Gideon J. Tucker, a former newspaper editor who founded the New York Daily ...Read more