The passing of President George H.W. Bush this week presented Americans with an opportunity to reflect on a life lived in service to the United States. A child of privilege, at age 18 Bush nevertheless volunteered for the military after Pearl Harbor. A bomber pilot who survived after his plane was shot down, Bush would […]

A new Gallup poll last week once again confirmed that Americans are decidedly unimpressed by the GOP's "Tax Cuts and Jobs Act" passed in December. Coming just weeks after a Fox News survey found Obamacare enjoyed greater popularity than the Republican tax cuts, Gallup's latest tally revealed that respondents continue to disapprove of President Trump's […]

Like a recurring biblical plague, they descend across the country. Despite the repeated warnings from both experts and lay persons of good faith and common sense, the media and tens of millions of people are nevertheless still shocked by their arrival. As predicted, they devastate everything in their path, leaving a swath of destruction in […]

When Senator John McCain was laid to rest on Sunday at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, the nation lost one of the giants of American public life. For six decades, McCain served his nation as a naval airman, a military liaison to Capitol Hill, a congressman, a senator and as a two-time […]

During the 2016 presidential campaign, candidate Donald Trump gave full-throated support for resurrecting the Bush administration's regime of torture for terror detainees. But Trump's brand of state-sanctioned sadism promised to go much further. Trump warned he would seek reprisals against the kin of suspected terrorists, "because they may not care much about their lives, but […]

If nothing else, Donald Trump is a one-of-a-kind occupant of the Oval Office. His jaw-dropping corruption, staggering incompetence, mind-numbing policy ignorance, puerile penchant for payback, and unprecedented deceit put the Trump presidency in a class by itself. Nevertheless, Trump's courtiers, sycophants, and water-carriers have tried to elevate his leadership to a place among the greatest […]

Many Congressional Republicans were shocked--SHOCKED!--this week at Donald Trump's humiliation in Helsinki. Like the rest of the world, they watched in real time as an American president kowtowed on foreign soil to a dangerous adversary of the United States. Siding with Russian President Vladimir Putin over the repeated conclusions of the unified American intelligence community […]

Just in time for the Fourth of July, Gallup released the results of its latest survey of patriotism. Its primary finding? For the first time in Gallup's 18-year history asking U.S. adults how proud they are to be Americans, fewer than a majority say they are "extremely proud." Currently, 47% describe themselves this way, down […]

It was a tough week for supporters of Donald Trump's draconian policy of separating the families of undocumented immigrants at the border. (Those supporters are overwhelmingly Republican: a Quinnipiac University poll showed only 27 percent of all respondents--but 55 percent of GOP backers--endorse the practice.) It began when former CIA and NSA chief Gen. Michael […]

When it comes to the culpability for the dismal state of American politics and the accelerating erosion of our governing institutions, failure has a thousand fathers. At the top of the list of the usual suspects is Donald Trump, whose presidency of staggering incompetence, unsurpassed corruption, and lying at the speed of light has already […]