Cultures are full of great lines – single sentences that come in loaded with meaningful freight. They are short-cut ways of carrying whole ideas or images, and they might come from proverbs (“a bird in the hand”) or from literature (“methinks she doth protest too much”), or movies (“an offer…

Uh-oh. Joe Biden is talking unity again.

With President Biden gaining control, among other things, of U.S. foreign policy, the European allies and other partners are once again at the receiving end of American exhortations if not outright pressures. The same Europeans who feared the worst for America when Donald Trump was close to …

There has been some cheering about the 10 House and seven Senate Republicans who voted for impeachment. All honor to those who took the difficult path. But, good God! The president attempted to steal the election. He launched an insurrection against Congress. That only a handful of Republica…

Though I rarely feel I see the future clearly enough to make predictions, this is a moment when I envision these two as highly probable:

"The enemy within" is the phrase that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi used to describe the chaos brewing just beneath the surface of the Republican Party. She was referring to how the fencing at the Capitol complex may physically keep protesters out, but there are far more sinister views and schi…

While cleaning out the garage of an elderly friend who died recently, what did I find under a pile of 1967 Playboys but a typewriter. It wasn't just any typewriter but a vintage IBM Selectric II. I moved all 37 pounds of it to the trunk of my car.

The death penalty in the United States is on the verge of being snuffed out.

While glued to the coverage, both riveting and chilling, of the Senate trial of former President Donald J. Trump, and watching the House prosecutors and the Senate jurors, I kept wondering how much – or how little – our elected representatives look like the people and the places they are ele…

George Zimmerman was acquitted in the killing of Trayvon Martin on a Saturday night in 2013. The next morning, I went to church wearing a hoodie.

I feel for Mike Pence, as I think about all that he did for four years and how all that ended up.

It may be coincidence that the best policy idea to come out of the 117th Congress was offered by the one guy who has demonstrated the integrity to brave harassment and death threats to do what's right vis a vis former President Donald Trump. Mitt Romney has an excellent plan to reduce child …

OK, I have good news and bad news about the murder rate in America.

On April 1, 2018, when Thad Cochran retired after 40 years as a U.S. senator from Mississippi, he made history; Cochran was the last Republican in Congress to have ever voted to increase federal taxes. He had done so on Dec. 19, 1990, when Republican President George H.W. Bush, deeply concer…

This is not a feel-good story.

President Biden took his first steps into the international minefield like a soldier marching ahead with the attention necessary to avoid pitfalls at a time when the domestic crisis requires him to focus on two huge issues – the urgency of vaccinating Americans and the stickiness of an econo…

The board of Goya Foods has just forbidden its CEO, Robert Unanue, from talking to the media without first obtaining board permission. Do you know how extraordinary that is? Well, these are extraordinary times.

Two weeks into spring semester at the University of Florida, groups of unmasked college students – 30 or more at a time, many hollering as they partied – stood in lines to enter bars and clubs in Gainesville.

It is unclear how much the Republicans in Congress will have the power to obstruct whatever the new American president seeks to do legislatively, but it does seem clear that the Republicans, with 50 seats in the Senate, will work to thwart him where they can. (And if the filibuster remains i…

One of the attributes of the American dream is that the little guy can become the big guy. Or rather, through the creative destruction of the free-enterprise system, a small entrepreneur may destabilize and replace a larger competitor through innovation, cost savings and better ideas.

So last week, Sen. Josh Hawley complained that he was being “silenced.” He lodged this complaint on Fox “News” and in The New York Post.

In the movie "Field of Dreams," the lead character hears a voice while standing in his cornfield. "If you build it, he will come." So, the man builds a baseball field. The ghost of his ballplaying father appears, and so does a whole group of famous dead baseball players.

I've been getting a lot of mail from critics lately asking if I'm happy with the Biden administration. They point to some of the new president's executive orders – the one about the Keystone XL pipeline, or the one rescinding the "Mexico City" policy withholding funds from international orga…

I’m often told that people on the right cannot be reached by facts or logic. I don’t see, however, how that can be. Some Republican supporters run successful businesses. That must require facts and logic.

Listening to President Biden’s inaugural speech, not many have noticed an important fact, that in that speech he made scant reference to the foreign policy of the United States under his stewardship. Understandingly, Joseph Biden is fundamentally concerned with the urgent task of regeneratin…

Finally, we have a new president.

"We must end this uncivil war," Joe Biden proclaimed shortly after he became the 46th president on Wednesday. Hours earlier, in his last moments as the 45th president, Donald Trump extended "best wishes" to the "new administration." Graceful words, but accompanied by sharp and, in some cases…

In the brand-new year ahead, get ready for some brand-new moves to change the nation's criminal justice system as we know it. In some states, it's already happening.

The Civil War was a terrible bit of history, not least because it isn’t just history. It’s still with us.

Everyone keeps telling me I need to move on. But I don't think I can, nor do I think the conservative movement can.

Many Americans are very upset that President-elect Joe Biden will replace President Donald Trump. For most of them, it’s not that they will miss Trump’s unconventional and often unacceptable behavior. Instead, it’s that they fear that the size and scope of government will grow so fast that i…

It wasn't just Donald Trump's detractors who felt a sudden sense of relief when they heard that Twitter was blocking his feed after the storming of the Capitol and the disruption of the reading of the Electoral College results on Jan. 6. While President Trump's exact words to the crowd on th…

Throngs of self-styled conservatives and Republicans have now reached the thunderous realization that Donald Trump is not just a harmless clown. Former White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney acknowledged to Chuck Todd that Trump's rhetoric was incendiary, but insisted that this kind of inc…

The two previous columns I’ve published that involved the two kittens I adopted last year – “Fortunate kittens” and in “Observing my kittens in an evolutionary perspective” – doubtless conveyed, in addition to the ideas I had in mind, my love of those two good-hearted felines.

Most of us who miss our mothers can name moments when our longing is most acute. For me, it sneaks up when I see people wielding God as a weapon.

Theologian John Calvin once noted men's hearts are "a perpetual factory of idols." As people across the political spectrum move away from religion and fill the void with politics, idol worship runs rampant.

As the United States tries to survive a dangerous phase of its existence as a democratic republic, it is imperative to understand the high risk that the political movement engendered by the pro-Trump ideology may lead to a more violent, well-disciplined and radicalized organization whose dyn…

So, President Donald Trump has been booted off Twitter, as of now forever. Facebook also gave him the heave-ho. Apple and Google, meanwhile, have tossed the riot-friendly Parler app out of their stores.

There seems to be only one area of common ground in our country today: agreement that something is wrong.

It's the beginning of a new year. It's almost the beginning of a new presidential administration, too. In theory, now is a perfect time for some resolutions: to start fresh, fix the mistakes of the past or do what we never got around to doing. In that spirit, I offer some advice to the Biden…

So what now?

The policies of defeated one-term presidents are not as easily reversed as their victorious successors, suffused with campaign rhetoric, sometimes suppose they will be. Even when, as now, the winning party has majorities in both houses of Congress.

It was a desecration of our government's seat of power. A sacrilege against our democracy. A shameful episode carried out by a relatively small mob of violent criminals who disgraced the otherwise peaceful, lawful assembly of thousands of earnest Americans who had traveled to Washington to e…

President Donald Trump, it turns out, was being quite literal when he told us Jan. 6 would be "wild."

Not since the British stormed the United States Capitol has it been invaded by those out to end the American constitutional system. But it happened this week at the hands of American citizens. Encouraged by President Donald Trump – and let's not mince words here; he told them to march on the…

Like so many of you, I remember what I was doing when I first heard that insurgents had stormed our nation's Capitol.

Call it “The Problem of ‘Herd Immunity.’”

While sitting in the Delta lounge in the Atlanta airport waiting for my flight back to Washington, a white gentleman approached me and struck up a conversation.