Politics

There was a time when running for president was actually a money-losing venture. In fact, over the last 30 or so years, most presidential candidates (including some who actually won) ended up with tremendous debts after the campaign. Being in the red during and after a campaign was so common that paying off a former…

“Police departments cannot be at war with the communities they serve,” said Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck in Washington, D.C., Wednesday.  “The criminal-justice system is not really broken. It’s producing the results it was designed to produce, and those are the wrong results. We have to change the way we think about crime,” said Chicago…

Let many a progressive pundit and New Hampshire poll tell it, and Bernie Sanders is catching fire. Raking in a cool $2 million postdebate, the Vermont senator is the hottest thing since his one-hit-wonder state compatriot, the former Gov. Howard Dean, in 2004. Look at other polls and he’s either catching up or “neck and…

I hate to say it, but Ronald Reagan was the father of the modern gun-control movement in America. Of course, that was at a different time in this country, when Reagan was governor of California and black radicals had taken over the Statehouse toting machine guns and chanting “Black power.” At that time, the solution to…

Oh yeah, that’s right: Democrats do have a primary after all. For an entire summer bleeding into fall, it sure didn’t feel like it. Republicans sucked up all the air, thanks to bigoted sound bites from their candidates and the Democratic National Committee’s own flawed assumption that it just needed six debates to get the…

The Republican presidential candidates, all 100 of them, have battled twice onstage, and those debates were everything you’d want them to be: tons of shade, side-eyeing and verbal elbowing in the race to become the party’s nominee. On Tuesday night, the Las Vegas stage is set for the CNN-hosted, first Democratic presidential debate, and, well,…

On Thursday morning, Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush told a group of voters at the State Historical Museum in Des Moines, Iowa, that he doesn’t support reauthorizing the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He said that the federal government no longer needs to watch over states’ voting practices “as though we’re living in 1960” because…

As the debate on criminal-justice reform continues to swing in the direction of sensible reforms, new legislation introduced in Congress Thursday continued the trend. Two big justice-reform bills offered in the House and Senate signaled that the “tough on crime” era of bad policy (which may have polled well for Election Day, but filled jails)…

American sports have always been a vast canvas upon which politicians can safely paint their personal theories of American life. Running for Congress and want to point out the abuses of management over labor? You can rail against the NFL’s decadeslong battle to hide the impact of concussions. Putting together a message of self-reliance and bootstrap…