From the Left
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What the Marriage Equality Backlash Taught Me About the Fight for Trans Rights
On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court ruled that excluding same-sex couples from civil marriage was unconstitutional. I was outside the Supreme Court that day, celebrating the advocacy achievement that seemed impossible a decade prior when bans on marriage for same-sex couples passed by wide margins in state after state. Couples, families and ...Read more
Attention Disorder: America Sleeps as Trump Hands Putin What He Wants
The late Charlie Munger, who with longtime friend Warren Buffett turned Berkshire Hathaway into a behemoth, attributed his investment successes to his ability to pay sustained attention. "I did not succeed in life by intelligence," Munger recounted. "I succeeded because I have a long attention span."
Americans are notorious for having a short...Read more
Trump Turns on Trump Country
The flooding in Texas is cataclysmic. It was a hellscape as dozens, many of them girls from a summer camp, were swept to their deaths. Such tragedies spawn questions over whether the National Weather Service could have better warned the public. But this one is different in that the Trump administration is shrinking the weather service and vows...Read more

Now the Second (and Worse) Stage of Trump’s Police State
Trump’s Big Ugly Bill delivers $170 billion for border and immigration enforcement.
This is on the scale of supplemental budgets passed by the United States when we enter war.
ICE will add 10,000 agents to the 20,000 already on the streets.
Its annual budget for detentions will skyrocket from $3.4 billion in the current fiscal year to $45 ...Read more

Old 'Welfare Queen' Legends Haunt Trump’s Budget Plan
As the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives neared passage of President Donald Trump’s beloved — and enormous — “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” my mind raced back as it often does in such debates to memories of the late Linda Taylor, a Chicago woman better known as “the ...Read more
What's Wrong With the Democrats? They Need More Democracy.
What's wrong with the Democrats and how can the party be fixed? When an insurgent outsider candidate from the party's progressive Left defeats a moderate endorsed by the establishment, Democratic leaders reject the results and deny the will of their voters. They refuse the infusion of new ideas and tactics every organization needs to evolve. ...Read more
SCOTUS Ruling Misses the Point of Reading
Literature fuels empathy and conversation. It can foster belonging and it can also fuel productive discourse. But only if you actually read. If you choose to opt out altogether, you only fuel ignorance, which is what the Supreme Court ruling on Mahmoud v. Taylor accomplished. Parents can now opt their children out of instruction that includes ...Read more
Cheap and Fast
I remember being impressed when the Jehovah's Witnesses in the city where I lived needed a new Kingdom Hall, which is what they call their churches.
That thing got built fast, I mean in just a few days. Religiously motivated volunteer labor doesn't dog it on the job. You go to hell for that.
Down in Florida, where hurricanes are the will of ...Read more

Freedom of the Press: Great While It Lasted
There was a time, not so long ago, when we celebrated the press for doing its job of holding elected officials accountable and telling the truth, no matter how much government pressure they encountered.
In 1971, for example, we hailed the New York Times and the Washington Post for defying the Nixon administration by publishing the Pentagon ...Read more
Musk Should Return to the Democratic Party
Elon Musk warned that if Republicans passed their big domestic policy bill, he would form a new "America Party" to primary those who voted for it. He doesn't need a new party. He has his old one, the Democrats.
Many Democrats have grown to intensely dislike Musk, and they have their reasons. His prancing around with a chainsaw as he gleefully...Read more
The Big Losers: Our Kids and Grandkids
There are so many losers and so few winners in Donald Trump's "Big, Beautiful Bill" that it's a minor miracle that, as of this writing, Republicans appear poised to pass it. I'm old enough to remember when Republicans were deficit hawks who would chafe at adding trillions of dollars to what future generations will have to spend just paying off...Read more
This July 4th, Declare Your Independence From Ice Prisons
Independence Day occurs as this imperfect union, publicly declared on July 4, 1776, faces an existential threat. President Donald Trump daily amasses more authoritarian control, unchecked by the Republican majority in Congress and the Supreme Court's conservative supermajority. Mass arrests and deportations of immigrants accelerate, sweeping up ...Read more
The Fourth of July: A Bittersweet Birthday
America's 249th birthday Friday will be no party. Call it bittersweet at best.
The guns of Gettysburg were stilled on July 4, 1863, after the Union Army whipped Robert E. Lee and Confederates brigades in a raging three-day theater of civil war.
Now somehow, without ever reading it, President Donald Trump tore up the Constitution's clear ...Read more
Bezos and Other Billionaires Defecate on Florida Town
Don't let it be said that the superrich care only about themselves, always taking from society and giving nothing back.
Consider the generous billionaires who live on an island in Florida's Biscayne Bay. Amazon kingpin Jeff Bezos lives there, as do Ivanka Trump and her hubby, Jared Kushner. Actually, their so-called island is fake, built in ...Read more
TikTok Runs the Table: After Mamdani, Democrats Mull Picking Their Poison
In Woody Allen's iconic film "Annie Hall," protagonist Alvy Singer instructs his new girlfriend that our existence is divided into two categories: the horrible and, if you're really lucky, the miserable. For many Democrats who find Donald Trump and his presidency an abomination, their alternative seems a Democratic Party dominated by a base ...Read more
Mamdani Probably Won't Be Mayor
Zohran Mamdani seemed to hit the political jackpot in besting former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary. Hyper commentary now portrays this once obscure state assemblyman from Queens as a political meteor.
The thing about meteors is that they burn bright for a while and then fall. Mamdani is unlikely to...Read more
What Is Habeas Corpus? Why Does It Matter?
The Trump administration floated an idea in recent weeks: suspending habeas corpus.
Why? Because over and over again -- including in the American Civil Liberties Union's challenge against President Donald Trump's illegal use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport people without due process -- courts hearing habeas corpus cases have stopped the ...Read more

New York’s Mayoral Race Could Be a Testing Ground for a Democratic Comeback
A seasoned veteran of Chicago politics once told me that it often takes Democrats a couple of four-year cycles out of office before they can pull their fractious factions together into a winning coalition.
There's a lot of truth in that, and that's why I am not surprised to see the off-year energy and enthusiasm well up around the neophyte ...Read more

Trump’s Giant Budget-Busting, Medicaid-Shattering, Shafting-the-Floor-and-Working-Class, Making-the-Rich-Even Richer Bill is a Travesty
One of my objectives in this column is to equip you with the facts you need. As the Senate approaches a vote on Trump’s giant “big beautiful” tax and budget bill, I want to be as clear as possible about it.
First, it will cost a budget-busting $3.3 trillion. According to new estimates by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the ...Read more
Who Is an American
So now all the babies born to undocumented parents in the 28 states that didn't challenge President Donald Trump's executive order will have to sue (anonymously, of course, lest this administration deport them, which it would if it could find them) to demand that the Constitution be followed in their state and get an injunction of their own. ...Read more