ArcaMax

At the White House Monday, Trump signed another one of his infamous executive orders, this time announcing, "If you burn a flag, you get one year in jail."

Not so fast.

If the executive order said that, as Yale Law Professor Jed Rubenfeld persuasively argues in The Free Press this week, it would be unconstitutional on its face. Under current...Read more

It's been 20 years since Hurricane Katrina made landfall on Aug. 29, 2005, breaching New Orleans' protective levees, unleashing unprecedented destruction. It was one of the deadliest natural disasters in U.S. history, killing over 1,800 people, mostly poor residents of New Orleans' historic Black neighborhoods. Katrina was also the U.S.' ...Read more

Just when you think President Donald Trump can't get worse, he gets worse.

Now he threatens to send soldiers and federal agents to Baltimore and Chicago next. Woe is U.S.

I live in lovely, green and safe Washington, where crime is down. The Smithsonian museums are free. The river and marble memorials make the city gleam at night. It's far ...Read more

At about 12 years of age, I began working for my father, loading bundles into the two delivery trucks used in his small business. This required that, first, I back the trucks down an alley and into the loading bay. Thus, I learned to drive going backward, which probably says something fundamental about me.

But even at 12, I didn't get stuck ...Read more

Seems like only yesterday when warnings that Donald Trump qualified as a neo-fascist and that what he was selling qualified as neo-fascism guaranteed rolled eyes, dismissals that the warnings were hysterical, and cries of "Trump Derangement Syndrome," a neat little expression utilized by those who argued that the evidence in front of our faces...Read more

I don't always say that. Sometimes the California governor and would-be 2028 contender drives me slightly crazy with his transparent stunts to get attention.

But this is not a stunt. The redistricting bill that the California legislature passed and Newsom signed aims to counter what Texas is doing with its mid-census redistricting plans. They...Read more

The first time I encountered a police checkpoint was in the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan. My first reaction was excitement. I'd read about this facet of autocracy; here it was! It quickly gave way to fear. The men posted on the Almaty street intersection were armed. They had the power of the state. They could do anything they pleased. ...Read more

In May, my son and I gathered with hundreds of our neighbors at a community meeting to protest a pickleball and tennis complex planned for our local park. We're not against the sports. My son likes to play tennis with his dad. What we objected to was clearing trees and utilizing green space for a bricks-and-mortar complex. Fortunately, our mayor...Read more

As any pooch owner knows, a dog will eat its own vomit.

Catholic theologians hundreds of years ago used this doggy behavior to illustrate how humans return to their sins time after time after time.

In America, sometimes our conscience gives a great heave and we vomit up our thick, ugly racism.

But we always come back to eat it again.

Some ...Read more

President Donald Trump's energy policy is utterly screwed up -- if you assume America's interests, and not pleasing his fossil fuel friends, is the objective.

This came to the fore when trade adviser Peter Navarro hollered at India for buying Russian oil. Navarro called the purchases "opportunistic and deeply corrosive" of efforts to isolate ...Read more

Some headlines are just too stupid to pass by. Yes, this is the Trump era, and Trump being Trump and all that. But even so, there should be some things a president doesn't say -- or do. This is one.

"Trump Says Smithsonian Focuses Too Much on 'How Bad Slavery Was,'" The New York Times screamed this morning. Yes, he really said that.

In a ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- It's a truism that American presidents change in office. The youthful Barack Obama grew gray. Put another way, the office changes presidents.

Stepping off the train from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln was no abolitionist. Within two years of the Civil War, he had a revolution within and became the greatest abolitionist of all time.

...Read more

A gaggle of self-righteous multimillionaires is now in charge of America's poverty agencies and policies, and they've been flaunting their deeply held ignorance about poor families -- almost none of whom they actually know.

Consider the national embarrassment of Brooke Rollins, a patrician ideologue, who is President Donald Trump's ...Read more

Departing Alaska after a mega-hyped meeting with Vladimir Putin that gave the Russian dictator plenty to smile about, President Donald Trump trotted out the customary hogwash. It was, he proclaimed, "a great and very successful day in Alaska." For some lucky salmon fishermen, perhaps, but not for Ukrainians, who have been victims of Russia's ...Read more

Why do the world's poor make a beeline for New York City? It is now home to over 3 million immigrants, the largest influx coming from the Dominican Republic, China, Jamaica, Mexico, Guyana, Ecuador, Bangladesh, Haiti and India. How can these overwhelmingly poor new arrivals stay if no one can afford to live there?

Answer: They crowd into ...Read more

Deep in the Florida Everglades, a new immigration detention facility has appeared almost overnight. It's the latest example of the Trump administration's extreme approach to immigration enforcement, and it's drawing significant, well-deserved outrage.

In just eight days, a former airstrip was converted into a large-scale immigration detention...Read more