ArcaMax

Despite the gloom and doom surrounding the results of November 5, it would be nice to end the year with a glimmer of hope: the certainty that at least one guardrail against a Trump dictatorship was still in place. Alas, that’s not the case.

Two other guardrails, the courts and the Congress, were already lost. The Roberts Supreme Court has ...Read more

It’s a ritual as old as America. A new president is elected. He then selects the leaders of his team, who are subject to confirmation by the Senate based on their experience and qualifications for the office to which they were nominated.

There’s only one thing lacking today: a laugh-out loud test, whereby some nominees would never be ...Read more

It’s hard to know who’s more to blame for the insane reaction to Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter: MAGA Republicans, the media or fellow Democrats. The response from all three has been overwrought, manufactured and pitifully sanctimonious.

Depending on which “absolutely horrified!” source you pick, Biden’s action was a “...Read more

“Kakistocracy” is trending again.

The obscure term, coined as early as the seventeenth century and defined by Merriam-Webster as “government by the worst people,” has surged on Google Trends since the election.

What does government by the worst look like? To the cynical, that question may call to mind Dorothy Parker’s famous response...Read more

By nominating the feckless Matt Gaetz as a ttorney g eneral, Donald Trump wanted to show how far he’s willing to go in blowing up the federal government. How fitting that cynical ploy blew up in his face.

Was Gaetz fit for the job? No way! He only practiced law for two years. He accomplished nothing in Congress except to lead the mutiny ...Read more

It’s already been a week. But I can’t get out of my head the last stanza of Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s magnificent “Casey at the Bat.”

“Oh, somewhere in this favoured land the sun is shining bright,

The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light;

And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout,

But there...Read more

The late, great Senator John McCain, who knew his share of tragedy, once famously quipped: “It’s always darkest – before it turns pitch black.” Which is how most of us felt Tuesday night. Just when we thought it couldn’t get any worse, it did.

It was hard to process the pain of watching Donald Trump win – after the most negative, ...Read more

With so many twists and turns, this presidential campaign is unlike any other: the incumbent president dropping out and endorsing his vice president; two assassination attempts against the former president; the Democratic candidate endorsed by a former Republican vice president, three former Republican members of Congress, the former Republican ...Read more

Most people today have never even heard of him, but I remember Pogo. During the ’50s and ’60s, cartoonist Walt Kelly’s weekly account of the little opossum Pogo was the most popular comic strip in America, syndicated in more than 450 newspapers.

If Pogo’s remembered at all, it’s for one episode created by Kelly in 1970 to mark the ...Read more

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who are you calling “fickle?”

Repeatedly labeling former President Donald Trump as a man of “fickle leadership” was a go-to line for Walz during the first and only debate between the vice president running mates of Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.

But it was Walz who came off as unsteady, wavering and ...Read more

You must admit, this is a campaign unlike any we’ve seen before. The incumbent Democratic president suddenly drops out and endorses his vice president. The Republican candidate survives two assassination attempts. Two back-to-back hurricanes wipe the presidential race off the front pages.

But history will show that one of the most crucial ...Read more

It probably didn’t change that many votes, but this week’s vice presidential debate offered an interesting contrast. If slick, smooth, and slippery counts over wobbly, J.D. Vance won. If truth and common sense count over total baseless assertions (Wait? Donald Trump SAVED Obamacare?), Tim Walz won.

It's just too bad CBS News didn’t ...Read more