What do Pennsylvania, Illinois, Nebraska, Mississippi, Michigan, Utah, Minnesota, Maine, South Carolina and Massachusetts — states that span U.S. regions and the political divide — have in common?

All 10 have seen recent attempts to redesign their state flags.

In Mississippi, public pressure led the state to abandon their Confederate-...Read more

An ironic side-note to Donald Trump’s status as the most demonstrably dishonest president America has ever had (more than 30,000 verifiable lies during his first term, reports The Washington Post, with the pile now growing ever-larger in his second term) is his penchant for occasionally blurting the quiet part out loud.

That’s apparently ...Read more

The student loan program is a case study in government mismanagement.

Last month, the Department of Education announced it will resume collecting on defaulted student loans. It hadn’t done so since March 2020. At that point, a pause was understandable. The COVID crisis was unfolding. Shutdown orders were about to grind the economy to a halt, ...Read more

For today's sermon on courage, I would like the church to open their King James Bibles to Matthew 27:24: "When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it."

While Pontius Pilate knew ...Read more

Warren Buffett is stepping down as chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., the company he built alongside his later partner Charlie Munger for the past six decades. It’s a final show of humility by a man many consider the greatest investor of all time.

Operating in an era replete with purported Wall Street soothsayers, the 94-year...Read more

Buried – and virtually out-of-sight – after a landslide of poll-driven OMG! insight-journalism that quantified America’s wide and deep discontent with the first 100 days of Donald Trump’s 2.0 presidency, is a two-sentenced quote that historians may someday declare historic.

But it was easy to overlook. It was tacked onto the end of yet ...Read more

Most climate-change deniers don’t even bother fighting the established science anymore: The planet is warming, human activity is the cause, and we can do something about it if we really try. Modern deniers will concede all that, but fire back that the “do something about it” part is too hard, too expensive to be worth trying. We have to be...Read more

One way to hasten a long-delayed home renovation is to set the house on fire. Having helped torch much of the federal bureaucracy, Elon Musk says he plans to move on from his work at the Department of Government Efficiency. Here’s hoping a sounder reform of the civil service can now begin.

DOGE began with much hype. It promised some $2 ...Read more

Should a blatantly sectarian educational institution qualify for public funding as a charter school? The Supreme Court wrestled with the question Wednesday. The answer must be no.

Charter schools are public schools; we’ve said this many times, as have fellow advocates for the innovative instructional models they deliver. They are free and ...Read more

The Trump administration’s recent moves to cut federal funding for Medicaid are nothing new. The cuts proposed in the budget resolution resemble similar Republican proposals such as the 2017 Better Care Reconciliation Act, which failed to pass the Senate due to both disunity among Republicans and a swell of organized opposition against it.

...Read more

Reports that the White House may propose nearly a 50% cut to NASA’s Science Mission Directorate are both mind-boggling and, if true, nothing short of disastrous.

To make those cuts happen — a total of $3.6 billion — NASA would have to close the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, and cancel the mission that will bring back samples ...Read more

In my family, voting isn’t just a right — it’s a lifeline.

My parents were sharecroppers in Arkansas until 1951, when my dad dared stand up to his boss for not paying him a fair wage at the agricultural weigh station. Under threat from the KKK, he left town in a wagon, covered in hay so he wouldn’t be discovered. Three months later — ...Read more

President Donald Trump’s campaign promise to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours once he was elected has proved to be utter nonsense as experts grade his first 100 days in office. One day, he blames the cause of the war on Ukraine, and then, finally, he criticizes Vladimir Putin after a Russian ballistic missile attack on the Ukrainian city of ...Read more

For economists, America’s organ shortage is a perplexing public health problem. About 37 million Americans suffer from kidney disease, and more than 800,000 live with kidney failure. At this advanced stage, patients either receive a kidney transplant or remain on dialysis — an expensive and often debilitating treatment — for the rest of ...Read more

Dr. Charles DeCarli, co-director of the UC Davis Alzheimer's Research Center, got the news in a call from a colleague on March 24.

"Your study was terminated."

DeCarli had been conducting a six-year examination, funded by the National Institutes of Health, of brain and vascular conditions that can be risk factors for dementia. The study, ...Read more

Even in our ultra-polarized era, the public and private sectors seem to have reached a consensus on the common scourge of our time: bureaucracy.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon can’t hide his disdain for it, mentioning some form of the word 21 times in his April letter to shareholders and going so far as to say it “kills” companies. ...Read more

Men and women have long behaved differently in the political realm, with the former more inclined to vote for Republicans and the latter more likely to support Democrats. But significantly, these differences did not historically apply to 18-to-29-year-olds. For many years, both younger men and women have leaned decidedly left.

No longer. The ...Read more

The Trump administration has turned a spotlight on Harvard, one of the nation’s most esteemed institutions of higher learning, primarily over allegations of antisemitism. Last month the White House froze $2.2 billion in federal funds designated for the university, and Harvard has responded with a lawsuit.

But the school’s defense suffered a...Read more

In the months and years after 9/11, going to the U.S. was scary for many of us. Border security became harsh and unforgiving, and we could feel our rights drop away upon entering American airspace. Novels were written and movies were made about how an encounter with hostile, suspicious border officials could radicalize even those who previously ...Read more