ArcaMax

"Ending the Backlash on LGBTQI+ Issues" is the title of the report out this week from the respected liberal think tank The Center for American Progress. As you might expect, the Center report urges Democrats to stand firm in supporting transgender soldiers and gender-transition care. But when it comes to girls' sports, it's not what you think....Read more

If Republicans get their way, McCarthyism will be back -- and here to stay.

Leading the race to the soggiest pits of ethical crud, as usual, President Donald Trump repeatedly calls Democratic Socialists of America-affiliated primary winners "hardcore, godless communists" after DSAers swept the New York elections last month.

Ideologically, ...Read more

My son was furious when I picked him up from day camp, slamming the door when he got in the car. He had been downgraded from a "yellow" swimmer to a "red" swimmer. He hadn't forgotten how to swim. The YMCA had simply changed its policy.

My son loves to swim. He likes donning goggles and swimming underwater, not to mention perfecting his ...Read more

My cat, Jack the Cat, is looking a little worn.

He's 11 years old, and he's diabetic, and he was getting two shots of insulin a day, but he went into remission and there was great joy in the house.

Still, we keep an eye on him. In the last few weeks, he's had a glucose monitor attached to him twice and had blood drawn. Because of this, he ...Read more

"A Face in the Crowd" is the prophetic 1957 movie about a charismatic drifter "discovered" in an Arkansas jail. The face belongs to "Lonesome" Rhodes, a scoundrel whose folksy act catapults him to national prominence. "Lonesome" (Andy Griffith) abuses women, but the crowd only sees a lovable spinner of down-home yarns. He deflates after ...Read more

So far, the number is $37.5 billion. That's how much we've spent so far on the war against Iran.

What have we got to show for it, other than lost American lives?

What could we do with that money at home?

I'm not even up to those questions yet, because $37.5 is just the start of the story. The administration has also requested up to $90 ...Read more

Since the Fourth of July celebration of the nation's 250 years was a bust, let's look at the next anniversary, noting when a Puritan governor declared that we would be as "a city upon a hill" in 1630.

Almost 400 years later, in our summer of desperation, that's a quaint notion.

Massachusetts Bay Colony leader John Winthrop reached for a ...Read more

Executives climbing the corporate ladder to the top seem to lose IQ the higher up they get.

That might explain why John Deere's top corporate bosses have imposed an astonishingly stupid policy on America's farmers. For years, they've decreed that while a farmer "technically owns" a tractor or other John Deere product, the owner is prohibited ...Read more

Time-honored wisdom holds that if it looks like a duck, waddles like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. The explosion of venom, vitriol, vandalism and violence against Jews since Israel was attacked by genocidal killers on Oct. 7, 2023, begs the question: Is what certainly looks like anti-Semitism something other than anti-Semitism? ...Read more

Many of today's consumer loans are legal but abusive. Payday lenders and used car sellers often steer customers into costly contracts they barely understand. Low-income borrowers with jobs, and therefore, dependable cash flow to siphon off, are favored targets.

Sure, there's a sucker born every minute, as P.T. Barnum allegedly said. But now ...Read more

Just last week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement shot and killed a man in Houston who had lived in the country for 35 years; he was a father to three sons and a business owner. ICE didn't even allege that he posed a danger at the time or had committed crimes in the past. This wasn't a lone occurrence: Senior White House official Tom Homan ...Read more

The New York City Public School system is 62% Black and Hispanic. At its eight most prestigious competitive high schools, 80% of the students are Asian or White. Wait -- what's considered the most selective of the city's schools, Stuyvesant High, 777 students were offered slots. Of those, how many (or should I say how few) went to Blacks? Take...Read more

Right-wing Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, former Senate majority leader and key senior legislator, went missing for weeks. No one -- including President Donald Trump and the governor of his home state -- knew whether he was sick, wallowing in depression like a recently MIA congressman from New Jersey, on a wild incognito adventure,...Read more

The first thing Mariel Gardner mentioned was the sound.

Cicadas and katydids buzzed while butterflies and bees drifted among bright yellow blooms in Louisville's Chickasaw Park.

Gardner smiled. "This is what I wanted to hear," she said.

A new aptly named Butterfly and Bee Pollinator Meadow honors Muhammad Ali, but Gardner hopes it also ...Read more

Writers are weird people, and we start out as weird kids.

I was a weird kid. Worse yet, my family moved quite a bit, so I was often the weird new kid.

Our last long jump of a move was from Baltimore to a suburb of Kansas City, Missouri. Before that, we'd banged from town to town in Massachusetts.

And I was a weird new kid, and I was 12 and ...Read more