Dear Mr. So-Called President: A few words in advance of your upcoming acquittal. That that’s how your impeachment trial will end is, as we all know, a foregone conclusion. The proverbial fix is in. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told us as much in December when he announced he ...

We have reached that time in every presidential nominating year when distinguished national opinion leaders beat up on Iowa and that admirable state’s influential role in determining the two major parties’ eventual presidential nominees and, therefore, the next president. The USA Today ...

When the economy shows signs of weakness, Wall Street analysts expect to see what they call a “flight to safety.” Investors sell stocks and buy bonds or gold. The same phenomenon can sometimes be found in politics. Understanding that George W. Bush was riding high in 2004, after what was ...

Dear Stephen King: I hope you’ll indulge me as I try to explain something I suspect you still don’t quite understand. Namely: why so many of us were so disappointed with your take on the lack of diversity in this year’s Oscar nominations. As the white-dominated and male-centric list of ...

Last week, the Mississippi Supreme Court upheld Willie Nash’s sentence: 12 years for possession. Of a cellphone. Read it twice, if you want. It won’t make any more sense the second time around. Nash, it should go without saying, is African American. And his victimization by ...

Donald Trump’s “phase one” agreement with China, expected to be signed this week, is intended partly to slow China’s move into new technologies like electric cars by protecting the intellectual property of American corporations. Which lends a certain irony to Tesla’s Model 3 ...

This column might win me no fans on college campuses, but there is something that must be said. Universities across the country are unconstitutionally punishing those accused of sex-based misconduct with no regard to the civil rights guaranteed of due process. They say they are acting ...

Retired Marine Corps Gen. Jim Mattis, the former secretary of defense and an exceptionally well-read warrior, has said, “Throughout history, we see nations with allies thrive, and nations without allies wither.” Mattis’ words brought to mind those 13 fateful days in October 1962 when, ...

There’s an old story — apocryphal, as the best stories always seem to be — that Richard Nixon asked Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai what he thought about the French Revolution, and Zhou said, “It’s too soon to tell.” At first blush, the minicrisis between Iran and the United States ...

So what in the world just happened here? That’s the question of the moment as we struggle to get our heads around the latest head-snapping episode in the bizarre presidency of Donald Trump. In the last few days, we’ve seen: 1) a U.S. drone strike in Iraq, killing Qassem Soleimani, ...

The day after he ordered the strike that killed Iran’s Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, President Donald Trump showed up at an evangelical church in Miami to cast himself as a modern-day savior of Christianity. This may be a bit confounding for those of you who remember that Trump rarely ...

My favorite picture of John Lewis is a mugshot. It’s from Mississippi in 1961, one of the earliest of an eventual 40-plus arrests he would undergo in the cause of freedom. Facing the state penitentiary in Parchman, Miss., and the many hells that portended for a black man in the Jim Crow ...

Is anyone here old enough to remember the urgent warning issued in a speech to the National Convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in August 2002 by an American vice president who had artfully avoided the military draft during wartime? Dick Cheney, after acknowledging he was convinced that ...

I’m here to say goodbye to Stephen King. Not that he’s going anywhere. Indeed, I imagine he’s at his desk even now, devising a fiendish fate for some schmuck unlucky enough to be a character in a Stephen King novel. But whatever that fate may be, I will know nothing about it — not ...

I’m starting to wonder if Donald Trump, bestselling author of “The Art of the Deal,” just isn’t good at making deals. His presidency has been a ceaseless torrent of promises about what he’ll achieve from negotiations with foreign leaders. But time and again, he ends up high and ...

Pity poor Republicans. They have only one argument left to defend Donald Trump for abusing the powers of the presidency by inviting a foreign power to intervene in an American election, the one transgression our Founding Fathers feared most. Even now that he’s covered in disgrace as only the ...

He was the last of the firsts. That’s probably how Richard Gordon Hatcher, one of the nation’s first black elected big-city mayors, most often will be remembered. Hatcher died Dec. 13 at age 86 in Mercy Hospital and Medical Center in Chicago. He was elected mayor of Gary at age 34 on Nov. ...

You won’t hear young Democrats deride Bernie Sanders with the “OK, boomer” dig. At 78, he’s actually too old for the cohort, but that’s not why he won’t get dinged. He’s the most popular Democrat among the under-35 crowd, and, judging by recent polling, he’s the second-most ...

Harvey Weinstein, once one of the most brash and powerful men in Hollywood, has lately been having issues with his ankle bracelet. The shunned former movie producer is wearing a court-ordered monitor while he awaits trial for allegedly raping one woman and forcing another to let him perform a ...

As we near the end of this decade, it is a good time to reflect on where we stand at this moment in history. It’s not really standard cheerful holiday fare, but here goes. Half the country hates or doesn’t want the duly elected president. The other half likes or tolerates him. The ...