ArcaMax

"You should have never started it," President Donald Trump said on Tuesday, accusing Ukrainian leaders of having started the war with Russia. "You could have made a deal." He followed up the next day on social media, branding Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine's leader, as a "dictator without elections" who had "done a terrible job" in office.

Even...Read more

You made it. There are any number of reasons you should not have been confirmed, but Republicans were afraid to buck Trump. They voted in lockstep (except polio survivor Mitch McConnell, who Trump then ridiculed), and now you are the most powerful man in the world when it comes to health care. There are many people -- especially sick people --...Read more

Maybe.

That's the best constitutional scholars can say right now.

But I'm putting my money on the federal courts.

So far, it is the federal courts that have stood in the way of our presidents' (that's Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who's kidding whom) efforts to strip Congress of its power over appropriations and rewrite the Constitution. ...Read more

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order barring transgender girls and women from playing as girls and women at federally funded schools, colleges and universities. Nearly all schools receive federal funds.

A day later, the NCAA, the governing association for college sports in this country, followed suit, barring ...Read more

In an insightful column last week entitled "Don't Believe Him," Ezra Klein unearthed an old interview with Trump whisperer Steve Bannon, who summarized what would become the first two weeks of Trump's reelection administration. Bannon told "Frontline" in 2019:

Steve Bannon: "The opposition party is the media. And the media can only, because ...Read more

It's enough to make you -- and certainly me -- sick. In the midst of a national tragedy, he can't help himself. At a time when almost nothing is known for certain about the cause of the terrifying plane crash in Washington, he can't stop himself from playing the blame game. There is absolutely no evidence that it had anything to do with the ...Read more

I am writing this in La Paz, Mexico, a beautiful oceanfront city that is the capital of Baja California Sur and the home of a UNESCO wildlife preserve where today my daughter went diving with the sea lions. Breathtaking. All week, we have been taken care of by the good people of this beautiful country. I'm supposed to be relaxing, but ...Read more

The Justice Department has ordered its civil rights division to halt any ongoing litigation from the Biden administration and not pursue any new cases or settlements, according to a memo sent to the temporary head of the division that was obtained by The Washington Post. It's a freeze on everything, which is a prelude to an about-face when/if ...Read more

The fires got the new president's attention. In his inaugural address, he pointed to them: "From weeks ago, without even a token of defense, they're raging through the houses and communities, even affecting some of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals in our country, some of whom are sitting here right now. They don't have a home any ...Read more

Of course the state has a legitimate interest in preventing minors from accessing porn online that is intended for adults. Who could be against that? Certainly not the state of Texas, which overwhelmingly passed a law requiring porn sites to verify the age of users seeking access to their sites. Sort of like showing your ID when you're buying ...Read more

While I've been mainlining local news to see if my house, on the edge of an evacuation zone, was going to survive, my daughter (who I've been staying with) has been doing research on the air. As depressing as it has been to see these fires destroying my adopted hometown, it's been worse to hear my daughter's reports on the air around us, and ...Read more

What was Donald Trump's reaction to the deadly and devastating wildfires literally burning down a county that didn't vote for him?

This is what he wrote on Truth Social.

"Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt...Read more

This year, Jan. 6 was a routine day. Congress certified the election of Donald Trump. They did it in 30 minutes, instead of the overnight session in the wake of riots four years ago. As one Democrat put it, there were no election deniers on the Democratic side. The rule of law triumphed, routinely. Imagine how different it might have been had ...Read more

According to figures released last month, there are a grand total of 19 Black students in the first-year class at Harvard Law School, down from 43 in last year's entering class. You have to go back to the 1960s to find so few Black students in the entering class. In the years since 1970, the number of first years, or 1Ls, who were Black has ...Read more

What a Christmas present! In its report released last Monday, the bipartisan House Ethics Committee cited "substantial evidence" that from 2017 to 2020, former Rep. and would-be Attorney General Matt Gaetz "regularly paid women for engaging in sexual activity with him," including an underage 17-year-old, and from 2017 to 2019, had in his ...Read more

Something very scary happened in Washington this week. The world's richest man flexed his political muscle.

And the House collapsed.

All in a day.

Republicans and Democrats had negotiated for months about a spending bill to avoid a government shutdown -- complicated negotiations to keep the government funded through mid-March including $110...Read more

Pitiful.

That's the best I can say about ABC's decision to settle the defamation suit that Donald Trump brought against ABC News because star anchor George Stephanopoulos said he had been held liable for "rape."

Trump's claim: he was not held civilly liable for "rape," but for "sexual assault."

In fact, the judge had already rejected Trump'...Read more

What does it mean that an alleged murderer has become a folk hero, that literally millions of people in this country have taken his side -- in social media, at least, if not as potential jurors -- in a case of cold-blooded murder? What does it mean that the McDonald's employees who reported him have had to resort to police protection to deal ...Read more

The first woman combat veteran to serve in the Senate, and a sexual assault survivor, Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst understandably had serious questions about the nomination of Pete Hegseth to be Secretary of Defense.

Initially, she said he would "have his work cut out for him" to be confirmed and told Fox News that she was not yet a "yes" on his bid,...Read more

In an interview taped Wednesday for Megyn Kelly's radio show, Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth said Trump told him he wanted a "warfighter" who would clean out the "woke crap."

What "woke crap"?

The "woke crap" that allows some 15,000 qualified transgender service members -- the best estimate I could find -- to risk their lives for ...Read more