Mitt Romney has emerged as the Lone Ranger Republican, willing to speak out about our corrupt president. When the news of Trump's phone call with Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelenskiy broke, Romney said the situation was not just "troubling" but "appalling." He insisted we needed to know more and encouraged the impeachment inquiry to go forward. Not surprisingly, Romney's rationality called down the ...

With every damage control tour he goes on, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg does more damage. And there have been a lot of tours. In an interview Monday with "NBC Nightly News" anchor Lester Holt, the 35-year-old billionaire may as well have arrived with a defibrillator and paddles for his latest round of reputation resuscitation. Clear! Zuckerberg managed to lose another round in the bout to keep ...

One day last winter, before Florida passed a law allowing teachers to carry guns in schools, my high school students were settling into the languid routines of study hall. Some asked for library passes. Others sprawled over laptops and textbooks or pulled copies of "Monster" by Walter Dean Myers from my bookcase. Despite being told to put their electronics away, earphone cords hung like IV ...

If it's true that "a riot," as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, "is the language of the unheard," then a lot of people around the world are becoming fluent in that particular dialect. Hong Kong, with its epic showdown between street demonstrators and police over demands for more democracy, has grabbed most of the world's attention. But there also have been violent demonstrations in ...

There've been so many things wrong with Mick Mulvaney's series of explanations for why his office delayed nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine, it's hard to know where to begin. In summary, though, the acting White House chief of staff did two things no public official should ever, ever do. He denied saying what he was recorded saying at a public briefing session with reporters, ...

The defining questions of our time might be, How is America going to reduce inequality and reform its dysfunctional political institutions? At the national level, with the 2020 presidential election approaching, the choice appears to be between a coalition of voters from large urban areas, and another made up of voters from rural areas. No matter who wins, the overwhelming likelihood is that a ...

In Joe Biden's statement on the Clinton impeachment released to the Congressional Record on Feb. 12, 1999, he cautioned his fellow senators, calling impeachment "the most obviously anti-democratic act the Senate can engage in - overturning an election by convicting the president." He also said that impeachment had "no place in our system of constitutional democracy except as an extreme measure ...

President Donald Trump is wrong. Kurds have not been natural enemies of Turks, fighting for hundreds of years. In fact, Kurdish lords were allied with the Ottoman rulers against Iran in the early 16th century, and that military and cultural connection stayed strong for centuries. Said Nursi, the most influential Muslim modernist thinker of Turkey, for example, was Kurdish. Yet it's no secret ...

Even people who say they believe in climate change may be in denial - the same kind of denial that allows us to ignore our own mortality. This tendency to turn away from disturbing facts manifests itself not in what people say but what they do. In one recent study, for example, many people in hurricane-prone regions failed to take basic precautions to protect their homes, whether or not they ...

Many presidents, starting with Thomas Jefferson, have faced calls for impeachment. Most presidents and members of their administrations, starting with the presidency of George Washington, have come under fire for serious breaches of law and conduct. How can we understand our present crisis against the long record of presidential wrongdoing? Until the presidency of Richard Nixon in the 1970s, ...

When "Sesame Street" adds a character and a storyline to its fabled neighborhood, people notice. In May, the show's creators introduced Karli, a Muppet in foster care, and this month they revealed the reason for her situation: Her mom struggles with substance abuse. In supplemental "Sesame Street in the Community" videos available online, Elmo's dad explains to him that "Karli's mother has a ...

In the battle against President Trump, liberals, progressives and Never Trumpers must try not to become the thing they hate. We have to fight hard but not dirty. That's difficult the more we grasp how low the president is willing to go. But still. When possible, let's try to implement Michelle Obama's golden rule: "When they go low, we go high." I can personally speak to one category of ...

The Supreme Court will hear a gun control case in December that could significantly limit the ability of state and local governments to regulate guns for public safety reasons. The case involves a New York City regulation on transporting handguns that was repealed in July. Although that original rule is no longer in effect, for now the court has not determined the matter to be moot, so the ...

Media outlets across the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan region are currently recognizing some of the most influential and powerful women in the area, acknowledging and praising achievements in many fields. To learn about these leaders is inspiring and illustrates women's myriad contributions to society. Such progress fuels hope for continued advancement and its positive implications for our ...

Every time we think the humanitarian situation in Syria has bottomed out, it gets even worse. More than 160,000 Syrians have been displaced so far in the new chapter of this crisis, and many more are expected to suffer. President Donald Trump's abrupt and capricious decision to withdraw American troops from northern Syria is not the first betrayal of Syrians by our policymakers. Nor is it the ...

Beto O'Rourke has a terrible idea. The Democratic presidential candidate and former Texas congressman wants the U.S. government to take away the tax-exempt status of religious organizations - including churches and mosques - that oppose same-sex marriage. When asked about this last week, O'Rourke said: "There can be no reward, no benefit, no tax break for anyone or any institution or ...

For the nearly 1,000 days of his presidency, Donald Trump has shown the nation the dangerous repercussions that can arise when a democratic society succumbs to cynicism about its own government. It's not pretty. Undermining norms. Installing anti-government figures to go at the bureaucratic framework like ravenous termites. Slashing tax revenues to "starve the beast," which lays the groundwork ...

As if the differences among the top Democratic presidential contenders and President Trump weren't stark enough, Tuesday's debate opened with the 12 candidates on stage all holding forth on why they support the House impeachment inquiry and, in many cases, Trump's removal from office. Yet the Democrats know that if they win the nomination, they'll face the same set of voters that Trump will in ...

It was the tweet heard 'round the world, especially across the Pacific: "Fight for Freedom. Stand With Hong Kong." The Houston Rockets' general manager, Daryl Morey, posted it in support of protests against China's crackdown on Hong Kong's freedoms. The tweet was deleted and Morey apologized for any offense. But the reverberations keep rolling like ocean waves. The NBA has lost Chinese ...

Over the summer, President Donald Trump tweeted that his administration was working on an ethanol package that would be "Great for all!" Now that we have the Environmental Protection Agency's draft proposal, we can see he was half right. It's great, all right - for the politically connected. It's costly for everyone else. The Renewable Fuel Standard, commonly known as the ethanol mandate, ...

The oldest known instance of a country deploying economic sanctions against another dates from 432 B.C., when Athens imposed severe restrictions on Megara. The Megarian Decrees denied the city-state use of the Athenian empire's harbors, cutting off its trade. But tiny Megara was an ally of Athens' great rival Sparta, and disagreements over the sanctions were among the reasons that precipitated ...

For the first time, pigs have been documented using tools, according to a recent study published in the journal Mammalian Biology. Ecologist Meredith Root-Bernstein and her team recorded a family of rare pigs at a zoo in Paris picking up pieces of bark and digging with them while building their nests. Pigs are friendly, inquisitive and smart animals who are at least as sensitive and ...

The Trump administration has been flouting Congress' oversight power with abandon, withholding documents, proclaiming that this or that aide or Cabinet member simply will not testify, deciding by fiat that the whole shebang is unconstitutional. The House's slow-mo response - belated contempt votes and lawsuits - is fueling a Beltway refrain: Congress' subpoena power is "weak." In fact, the ...

News, of course, is defined as that which is new. Which might explain why the resignation Friday of acting Homeland Security chief Kevin McAleenan barely stirred the surface of President Trump's infamous swamp. When you're the fourth person in less than three years - 999 days and counting - to leave the same top government job, that's less of a news event than it is following a new tradition. ...

Is Beto O'Rourke a double agent, insinuated into the Democratic presidential race by Christian conservatives? Of course not, but his suggestion that religious groups should lose their tax-exempt status for opposing same-sex marriage is exactly what such a plant would say. On last week's CNN Equality Town Hall, moderator Don Lemon asked the former Texas congressman: "Do you think religious ...

Ever since Donald Trump assumed the presidency on a tide of vile hatred and racist attacks upon Mexican migrants, the administration has been chipping away at our asylum laws and protections for refugees. As someone who has been part of this system for decades as an immigration judge and refugee officer and most recently a supervisory asylum officer, I have an up-close view of just how ...

John Bolton's most accurate threat assessment when he was President Trump's national security adviser may have been his description of former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani as a "hand grenade who is going to blow everybody up." A former colleague of Bolton's in the White House, Fiona Hill, reportedly shared Bolton's description of Giuliani on Monday at a private hearing held by three House ...