If Donald Trump doesn't kill Elon Musk before Musk offs Vivek Ramaswamy, together the three best bros have a chance to achieve something every administration promises, but none has delivered: Rid the federal budget of waste, fraud and inefficiency.

President-elect Trump tasked Musk, the X and Tesla chairman and richest man in the world, and ...Read more

We commend Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg for standing firm and opposing the dismissal of the hush money/Stormy Daniels case that resulted in Donald Trump’s 34 felony convictions in New York last spring.

Now Acting Manhattan state Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan should do the right thing and stay Trump’s sentence until he ...Read more

“Here is the reality,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders in his analysis of Donald Trump’s strong electoral victory and support from some traditional Democrats: “The working class of this country is angry, and they have reason to be angry. We are living in an economy today where the people on top are doing phenomenally well while 60 percent of ...Read more

The U.S. fiscal outlook has dramatically deteriorated since the last time we ran a surplus in 2001, and President Joe Biden — like Democratic and Republican presidents before him — shares some responsibility for our high and rising debt. But it’s not too late to start turning things around.

During his time in office, Biden approved more ...Read more

A friend recently showed me some messages she’d received from a couple of relatives, one of whom she had planned to see on Thanksgiving. Ostensibly, these were political messages, castigating her for her failure to support Donald Trump.

But really, they were just old-fashioned bullying — taunting, ridiculing, calling her names. She never ...Read more

The Santa Ana winds caused a massive wildfire this month in Ventura County, with stunning visuals of orange skies in Oxnard reminiscent of 2020 in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Although the Mountain fire is now just about contained (as is the Sandy fire in Monterey County), it was the most destructive fire to hit Southern California in six years...Read more

President-elect Donald Trump’s announcement of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as his choice to be secretary of Health and Human Services has provoked a lot of objections, many of them explaining how he would be a danger to both scientific progress and public health. But too little has been said about the economic damage he could do as leader of one of ...Read more

After winning the presidency by focusing on immigration, inflation and a vague notion that life was better in 2019, Donald Trump is widely expected to proceed with plans to … eliminate the Department of Education. It’s hard to see how this makes sense — for him, his party or the country.

The Department of Education is not above criticism,...Read more

Postelection analyses continue to ignore the political and economic power of Latinas. The big story about the Latino vote is that the electoral bets the Trump and Harris campaigns made to galvanize men of color paid off for MAGA extremists. But both candidates’ willful neglect of Latina voters is another threat to American democracy.

Many are...Read more

Proposition 6, the ballot measure that would have amended the California Constitution to prohibit involuntary servitude in prison, failed. That’s troubling. Do voters really believe forced prison labor is acceptable?

The state Constitution (like its federal counterpart) has long outlawed slavery and involuntary servitude except “to punish ...Read more

Education policy received little to no attention during much of the presidential campaign. But, in the final phase, Donald Trump was asked during a “Fox & Friends” interview how he would fix schools. His reply: “No transgender, no operations.… There are some places, your boy leaves the school, comes back a girl.”

That was a lie. But ...Read more

Like it or not, the Constitution’s First Amendment gives the media special protection in the American republic. That amendment says, “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom … of the press.”

With one of the recent presidential candidates unconstitutionally threatening to shut down media outlets or take away their (...Read more

Do reporters have more rights under the First Amendment than ordinary Americans? Should they?

The answer to both questions is “no.” Unfortunately, a bill passed by the House of Representatives and is sitting in the Senate wants to change that.

The PRESS Act would allow the media to operate outside the law and withhold information vital to ...Read more

Employers and workers may not realize it, but they just dodged a bullet.

They can thank a federal judge in Texas who just tossed out a Biden administration rule that tried to increase the salary threshold for overtime pay by 65%, from $35,568 to $58,656 per year (a range that includes about 12 million workers). That new threshold would have ...Read more

After winning the presidency by focusing on immigration, inflation and a vague notion that life was better in 2019, Donald Trump is widely expected to proceed with plans to … eliminate the Department of Education. It’s hard to see how this makes sense — for him, his party or the country.

The Department of Education is not above criticism,...Read more

Five months ago, Taylor Casey, a 42-year-old Black trans woman from Chicago, vanished from a popular tourist destination, the Sivananda Yoga Retreat Center Bahamas, an ashram once endorsed by Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness company Goop.

Casey is not just a statistic. She is an Army veteran who served her country and a leader who served her ...Read more

The crypto party seems to be getting restarted. Bitcoin is surging and big players are celebrating amid expectations that President-elect Donald Trump will make the U.S., as he put it, “the crypto capital of the world.”

Lest this experiment go awry, regulators need to keep some guardrails in place.

In its current incarnation, crypto has at...Read more

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will have no shortage of targets when they burrow into the bureaucracy in an effort to make the federal government more efficient and cost effective. But one quarry stands out: the Pentagon.

Last week, the Department of Defense failed its seventh audit in a row, unable to account for portions of its $824 billion ...Read more

In any contest to name the cruelest and most useless health care "reform" favored by Republicans and conservatives, it would be hard to beat the idea of applying work requirements to Medicaid.

Yet, it's back on the table, teed up by congressional Republicans as a deficit-cutting tool.

In a rational world, this idea would have been consigned to...Read more

President-elect Donald Trump has said repeatedly that he will invoke the Insurrection Act so the American military can round up migrants for his program of mass deportations and suppress political protests.

In his first term, Trump wondered aloud why soldiers couldn't just shoot Black Lives Matter protesters, former Defense Secretary Mark Esper...Read more