ArcaMax

We have a madman in the house, the White House.

By that I mean Donald Trump is a bit insane, drunk with power and revenge, and full of fury, at the one-eighth mark of his presidency.

One-eighth.

Time to grapple with the grave reality, that the president captured the Constitution's restraints, Congress and the Supreme (Extreme) Court.

Under...Read more

Big news! The Trump4Sale shop next door to the Office of the President has just issued an exciting new product: "Trump Fragrance." Yes, it's officially certified President Donald Trump perfume, allowing you and your loved ones to reek of the essence of The Donald at only $249 for a 3-ounce bottle.

I wondered, with so much going on, why he is ...Read more

By nightfall on Oct. 7, 2023, enough details of what several thousand Hamas gunmen had done to about 1,200 Israeli civilians had emerged to make clear the scope of their savagery: youngsters executed en masse running for their lives from a dance festival, families tied together and burned alive or machine-gunned to death as they sat trembling ...Read more

There are a lot of things Donald Trump does not like. Find a common theme, and one may conclude that Trump doesn't like America. This thought is not original to me. Democratic strategist James Carville offers it as his theory of why Trump wreaks so much damage on this country.

Trump knows what he's doing and apparently takes pleasure in the ...Read more

On military bases across the globe, books are disappearing from shelves. Posters of historical figures, such as Frida Kahlo, are being removed from walls. Black History Month celebrations are being canceled.

This rampant censorship is the result of the Department of Defense's new policies banning books, classroom discussions, events and ...Read more

"If they can do this sort of thing to Abrego Garcia, to 238 people that nobody knows, and send them to CECOT forever with no due process, they can do that to anyone," Erez Reuveni, a former Justice Department lawyer who has filed a whistleblower complaint with the Senate Judiciary Committee told The New York Times. "It should be deeply, deeply ...Read more

Years after his apparent suicide in a Manhattan federal lockup, the notorious sex offender and financial manipulator Jeffrey Epstein has returned from the dead to haunt Donald Trump and instigate a massive rupture in Trump's government and MAGA movement.

Having long encouraged the proliferation of conspiracy theories on the right -- from the ...Read more

Elon Musk says he is going to start a new third party. Assuming he's serious, he'll soon learn that the Democratic-Republican duopoly has made it insanely hard to break into their -- emphasis intentional -- system. As The New York Times observes, "Launching a new national political party in the United States may be more difficult than...Read more

When I first heard about eastern hellbenders, I thought they sounded like a motorcycle gang, not large salamanders the color of river rocks. I also had no idea they were important ecosystem indicators for clean water.

The story goes that the amphibian got its name from early settlers who thought the thing was so ugly it must be a creature from ...Read more

I knew a guy in Kansas City, and he got arrested for something involving somebody else's money.

The guy was looking at a sentence of maybe five years, but he didn't have much of a record, and his mother put up her house for bail, and his defense attorney took the deal, and the guy got three years of supervised probation.

After he completed ...Read more

Every year, there's a song of summer. It's often something to argue over when conversation lags at the barbecue.

In 2013, feminists attacked Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" for allegedly glamorizing sexual violence. "Blurred Lines" was a huge hit. According to Rolling Stone, "It held the whole world in its slightly skeevy grasp all summer long...Read more

Speaking of his budget bill, which will kick millions of people off the health insurance rolls, give tax breaks to the wealthy and add $3 trillion to our kids' debts, President Donald Trump said last Thursday in Des Moines:

"(Democrats opposed the measure) only because they hate Trump. But I hate them, too. You know that? I really do. I hate ...Read more

The village egg toss on the Fourth of July sings of democracy to me.

An exuberant gaggle of 100-plus people lined up for the competition. A little bit of everybody joined in, all ages, sizes and colors, with partners.

The playing field by the fire station and elementary school filled up in an overflowing line.

The price: free.

Just come as...Read more

A major political group says that to solve America's environmental problems, we must let Big Oil have more control over public policy. That group is Big Oil.

Indeed, such giants as Exxon and Shell Oil have long complained that environmentalists, consumers, and other busybodies keep using legislation and lawsuits to interfere with their ...Read more

On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court ruled that excluding same-sex couples from civil marriage was unconstitutional. I was outside the Supreme Court that day, celebrating the advocacy achievement that seemed impossible a decade prior when bans on marriage for same-sex couples passed by wide margins in state after state. Couples, families and ...Read more

The late Charlie Munger, who with longtime friend Warren Buffett turned Berkshire Hathaway into a behemoth, attributed his investment successes to his ability to pay sustained attention. "I did not succeed in life by intelligence," Munger recounted. "I succeeded because I have a long attention span."

Americans are notorious for having a short...Read more

The flooding in Texas is cataclysmic. It was a hellscape as dozens, many of them girls from a summer camp, were swept to their deaths. Such tragedies spawn questions over whether the National Weather Service could have better warned the public. But this one is different in that the Trump administration is shrinking the weather service and vows...Read more