This month, a brief, ambitious and many would say calamitous experiment came to an end: Oregon rolled back Measure 110, its policy decriminalizing the possession of small amounts of illicit drugs. Rather than handing out small fines with a nudge towards treatment, the police are once again giving misdemeanors to people who are found with opioids...Read more

Over a decade ago, when political parties didn’t treat their rivals as mortal enemies, the Republican president of the Florida Senate, Jeff Atwater, would remind his colleagues: “Don’t fear the debate.”

I remember them as simple words uttered as tensions mounted during particularly contentious partisan disagreements. But anyone with a ...Read more

Trained as a physicist, Sean M. Kirkpatrick has spent most of his career in government, much of it as an intelligence and technology expert for various Pentagon agencies, culminating in an 18-month stint as the government's lead investigator of UFOs.

It was in that latter position — as the first director of the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly ...Read more

It was always a given that dehumanizing rhetoric around immigration would intensify as the presidential election approached. Unfortunately, in the turn to dangerous lies about established communities of immigrants in American towns, it has gotten much worse — and, in Western Pennsylvania, closer to home — than even most cynics expected.

...Read more

Say you’re a ruthless narcissist and a natural-born dictator, and you’re reviewing footage of this month’s presidential debate in Philadelphia. It’s obvious that you got far too little time during the sparring, and inspired not nearly as much fear and awe as are your due. So you decide to spring your “October surprise.”

I’m not ...Read more

As investigators sort through what appears to be a second assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump last weekend, partisans are predictably blaming each other for incendiary rhetoric and extremist politics. One thing that might ease the tension is for the two presidential candidates to keep doing what they’ve been doing in recent ...Read more

Scientists have pieced together enough clues to Earth’s past climate to graph the average temperature from 485 million years ago to the present — back to a time long before dinosaurs and even trees, when the land was either barren or hosted mostly moss, millipedes and primitive insects. This new work shows temperatures spent hundreds of ...Read more

The 2024 election is shaping up to be a “Better the devil you know than the devil you don't know" kind of contest.

That saying is rooted in ambiguity aversion bias. Even if a situation is bad, individuals would rather stay with what they know rather than face uncertainty.

So it goes with our presidential nominees, Vice President Kamala ...Read more

Since the avalanche of accusations against Harvey Weinstein in 2017, we’ve always suspected that there were probably more incidents of sexual misconduct against the former movie power player than were publicly acknowledged.

Now, one more such allegation has come to light in the form of a new indictment against him, involving a purported ...Read more

One of the few things Democrats and Republicans agree on these days is that it’s past time to raise the federal minimum wage, which has been stuck at $7.25 an hour for 15 years. Vice President Kamala Harris supported President Joe Biden’s effort at the beginning of his administration to increase it to $15. Donald Trump’s running mate, Ohio...Read more

The way Florida handles low-level marijuana possession is ineffective, destructive, racially biased and detached from modern sentiment. It’s a good thing voters have a chance to rectify all that in the Nov. 5 election. Legalizing adult-use recreational marijuana can’t get here soon enough. Our justice system snares too many otherwise law-...Read more

Of all Donald Trump’s rhetorical predilections, one that goes largely unmentioned is his addiction to superlatives. No one has ever seen anything like virtually everything he brings up. Why does he do this? And what does it reveal?

Much of the disinformation in Trump’s nonstop perjuries comes in the form of gross, almost comic exaggeration:...Read more

URGENT. Attention must be paid. The world’s leaders and chroniclers, who have wasted a year flailing but failing to fully recognize what really happened on Oct. 7 and ever since, have just one last chance to finally get it right.

We are talking imperatively today to United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, President Joe Biden and ...Read more

Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson only has one decent option now: Quit the race for governor.

But despite a damning CNN report Thursday on his shocking internet postings from years ago, Robinson said he won’t take the decent option. Instead, he’s staying in the race and compounding the damage from the CNN report by denying it.

Robinson ...Read more

In 2015, Donald Trump shocked the political establishment and many Americans when he came down the escalator at Trump Tower to announce his first presidential candidacy and attacked Mexican migrants:

“They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people,” Trump said at the time.

...Read more

Among the most damaging and distressing developments in St. Louis’ modern history is its epic population loss over the past half-century. In light of that continuing crisis, new data showing that the city and surrounding region has become a top urban magnet for immigrants is unambiguously positive news.

What’s even better about that good ...Read more

The past few years have been rough flying for Boeing, with much of it self-inflicted.

Their machinists recently voted to strike, after executives offered a significant pay increase and job security for their manufacturing and assembly workers in the Seattle area. The downstream impact of the strike will be felt across its entire supply chain ...Read more

Donald Trump is a late convert to restoring the federal income tax deduction of state and local taxes (SALT) that were capped at $10,000 when he signed his big Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2018. But Trump’s support is still most welcome and his fellow Republicans in Congress should follow his lead. The current law is simply unfair, putting an ...Read more