Columns

I’ve always found the recurring spasms of anxiety and outrage that accompany the College Board’s every adjustment in what used to be called the “Scholastic Aptitude Test” to be overblown and unpersuasive.

We rarely get a deep dive into the thinking of any generation of the state’s voters, much less this generation that will shape the future of Arkansas politics following an era of dramatic political change in the state. But a new Hendrix College/Talk Business & Politics survey designed and analyzed by four Hendrix students from said generation does just that.

It's about race, still.

Trump's allegation of Justice Department treason is nonsensical.

A week after the fact, I had to force myself to go back and read The New York Times report on climate change: “Humans Are Speeding Extinction and Altering the Natural World at an ‘Unprecedented’ Pace,” which documents nothing less than the destruction of creation as we know it.

An ordinary hypocrite would know better than to demand absolute freedom of speech for his friends and deny it to his critics in the next breath. But then Donald J. Trump is no ordinary hypocrite.

Fixing legal matters for troubled presidents — make that Republican presidents — has been William Barr’s calling card for 30 years. He pushed for a grand jury to be convened in Little Rock to investigate Bill Clinton shortly before the 1992 election.

The beloved humorist Will Rogers surely put it best. "I am not a member of an organized political party,” he said. “I am a Democrat."

As we went to bed last Monday, I told my wife that maybe it was time I retired as a sports fan. It was never going to get any better than this. The Virginia Cavaliers had just won the national championship in a nerve-wracking overtime game against a tenacious Texas Tech team, and I was feeling jittery and euphoric. I can’t think when a ballgame has made me happier.

This year, state legislators in Little Rock have been staging an all-out, unrelenting attack on abortion access in Arkansas.

Republican officeholders, in Arkansas and everywhere, have found themselves in an impossible catch-22 — caught between mutually conflicting political demands by their voters. I’m talking about the political dilemma of choosing between the widely hated Obamacare and the highly popular provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

If you didn’t know Joe Biden was of Irish descent, you might think he was French, or Italian. The man exudes personal warmth. He touches people, leans in close, pats their shoulders, whispers in their ears, and plants unsolicited kisses. Upon women, that is.

Anti-women. Anti-poor. Anti-black. Anti-people. Anti-old-style Republicans.

So President Trump says the Mueller Report proves his innocence: “No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION.” As usual, he’s making it up.

If it’s news to you that social climbers see buying their children’s way into fancy, name-brand colleges as the functional equivalent of wearing Rolex watches or driving Maseratis, then I don’t know where to start.

Many people find cats aloof and mysterious, so much so that a small academic/journalistic industry has sprung up to explain the animals to their owners.

Anybody who predicts how the Trump administration will come to an end is begging to have his soothsayer’s license revoked. “Surprisingly,” is as far as I’m willing to go. NPR ran a story the other day about a 93-year-old World War II veteran whose dying words were “S***, I'm not going to see the Mueller report, am I

In the Age of Trump, it often seems that powerful, entitled men have taken to imitating the behavior of the great man himself: forcing themselves upon reluctant women (and sometimes girls), relying upon their power and money to protect them from the consequences. So go ahead and grab them, boys, because "when you're a star, they let you do it."

“Post Pundit 2020 Power Ranking!” is supposedly based upon the hopefuls’ “holistic viability to trounce Trump,” a jokey bit of alliterative jargon seemingly intended to make light of the whole enterprise.

It’s not astonishing to me that a Washington Post poll reveals that Virginia’s African-American voters favor giving Gov. Ralph Northam the benefit of the doubt by 58 to 37 percent. They’ve been dealing with history’s brutal ironies for 400 years