When Nancy Pelosi first ran for Congress, she was one of 14 candidates, the front-runner and a target.

At the time, Pelosi was little known to San Francisco voters. But she was already a fixture in national politics. She was a major Democratic fundraiser who helped lure the party's 1984 national convention to her adopted home town. She served...Read more

Immigration enforcement operations should not be taking place in and around a day care center serving little kids.

That we need even to type that sentence in this 177-year-old newspaper boggles our collective mind. But such is life at present in Chicago, where a spluttering, increasingly dangerous series of battles is being waged on our streets...Read more

By any metric, Tuesday’s elections were a blowout. Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani is the new mayor of New York City. The new Democratic governors in Virginia and New Jersey won with double-digit margins. Voter turnout was off the charts.

Democrats’ wins speak to Trump’s unpopularity, the chaos that has accompanied his administration ...Read more

H.L. Mencken wrote, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” Hello, New York City.

On Tuesday, a handful of states held off-year elections, and Democrats enjoyed a good night, comfortably winning governor’s races in New Jersey and Virginia. They also prevailed in a ...Read more

“I hope this is going to be enough,” said the coordinator at Silver Lake Community Church food pantry, wiping her forehead as she chopped off bad ends of donated celery. Every Wednesday morning for the past year, I, along with a dozen or so other volunteers, sort and pack donated food for about 150 families.

But a few months ago, the food ...Read more

The election Tuesday of the charismatic socialist Zoran Mamdani as mayor of New York sucked up a lot of media oxygen. Most pundits and editors live there and always exaggerate its importance. But when it comes to political foretelling, New York is merely the capital of New York.

Gotham City is its own peculiar beast with particular problems of ...Read more

The most indelible image from Donald Trump’s whirlwind trip to South Korea emerged when he was gifted a replica of a Silla-era gold crown by South Korean President Lee Jae Myung.

If relations between Seoul and the White House weren’t so tense — given Trump’s sweeping tariffs and the detention by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement ...Read more

I have been a close observer of American policing for most of my life. During my 30-year career in law enforcement, I served as a patrol officer, detective, trainer, and from 1972 to 1993 the chief of police in Madison, Wisconsin. I’ve seen brutality, courage and redemption in this line of work. But I have never seen a greater police-related ...Read more

President Donald Trump has long acknowledged that he doesn't read books, so perhaps he's never cracked the spine of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby." But hasn't he seen one of the several movies? Does he really not know that Gatsby is a tragedy about class, excess and hubris?

It seems not. On Halloween, there was Trump, dressed as ...Read more

New York City just elected a mayor who promises free child care, free buses, city-run grocery stores and a rent freeze on rent-controlled apartments, all paid for by taxing rich people who are beating a hasty retreat from the city.

What could go wrong?

Plenty, of course, but the election of Zohran Mamdani wasn’t about sound strategy, it was ...Read more

Like many progressive Democrats, U.S. Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia has accused President Donald Trump and Republicans of posing a threat to the future of American democracy.

It was just 20 months ago that Garcia, during a debate with Chicago Ald. Ray Lopez, who was challenging him during the primary, said, “I believe that most of the threats ...Read more

First, South Africans were the ones baffled by the bizarre sounds coming out of the White House. Now it’s Nigerians’ turn. And other Africans may be next.

Out of the blue, President Donald Trump claimed over the weekend that in Nigeria “they’re killing the Christians and killing them in very large numbers. We’re not going to allow ...Read more

Having now been elected mayor, Zohran Mamdani will have to change his ways if he wants to be effective in City Hall when his term begins on Jan. 1., less than two months away.

To start, and most personally, Mamdani will have to drop the pretense that he doesn’t foster antisemitism through his positions, stemming from his monomaniacal ...Read more

The president’s chief of staff was talking with aides outside his president’s waiting motorcade when he spotted me – and immediately began walking purposefully toward me for what figured to be one of those tough, and probably angry, confrontations.

Reporters know we can expect that when what we have written displeases the folks we cover. ...Read more

It’s hard to make history in Virginia these days, if only because the commonwealth has been at the center of so much of it. The first English settlers arrived on these shores more than 400 years ago, and the first democratically elected colonial legislature, the House of Burgesses, followed shortly after.

Yet, from the election of our first ...Read more

As a single mother of two, I know what it means to work hard and still struggle to make ends meet. There was a time in my life when I relied on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to keep food on the table.

During that time, I was in college and always held a job, sometimes two. I submitted income reports every month as ...Read more

The best thing about the Canadians' use of a Ronald Reagan video to taunt President Donald Trump's trade policies is that it exposes the 54% of today's Americans who weren't alive during the Reagan presidency to what a real conservative sounds like.

I was in another room when I first heard the commercial featuring Reagan's voice coming from the...Read more

Rahm Emanuel was our mayor. He was the U.S. ambassador to Japan. He’s a possible presidential candidate. He’s also an advocate against domestic violence.

Emanuel has co-founded ​​the WINGS Men’s Alliance to End Domestic Violence alongside attorney John Sciaccotta, and the group’s mission is to mobilize men as allies, advocates and ...Read more

In the last year of his life, former Vice President Dick Cheney issued one of his final public statements to defend the country against what he said was one of the most dangerous forces it had ever come up against — President Donald Trump.

“In our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our...Read more