House Speaker Paul Ryan’s announcement that he will not seek re-election is important but not entirely surprising. Public as well as private speculation was growing that he would bow out this year.

In 1989, first lady Barbara Bush publicly disclosed that she had struggled with depression after her children had grown. The women's movement, she added, was a contributing factor.

On Monday, George Yancy, a black professor of philosophy at Emory University, wrote a lengthy piece in The New York Times detailing the awful death threats he has received from white racists. I can sympathize—throughout 2016, I received my fair share of death threats.

There is no question. Change is coming to the 1st Congressional District. Change can be scary. It can also be healthy. It is certainly inevitable.

Phony "news" stories aren't the only toxic content being spread on social media these days. Bad people are pitching digitally touched-up rear ends and modified thighs as real, dismaying teens and young women unable to attain what's being sold as perfection.

In 2013, after Syrian dictator Bashar Assad crossed President Obama's red line and used chemical weapons on innocent civilians, a U.S. official told the Los Angeles Times that Obama's retaliatory strike would likely be "just muscular enough not to get mocked" but not so devastating that it would elicit a response from Iran and Russia. In the end, Obama backed away from even such a small, feckless strike.

Here’s how parents are being brainwashed into fear for their kids and contempt for their communities. Remember: This fear is new. Our parents weren’t browbeaten into thinking that anytime a child opened the door and stepped outside, the parent was a negligent hussy and the kid was dead meat.…

President Trump's decision last year to launch 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at a Syrian air base was intended to send the Assad regime a message that its use of chemical weapons would no longer be tolerated. But the strikes also had a broader purpose: showing other regimes that the Obama era of U.S. weakness was over, and that America's adversaries would have to adjust their calculations about our willingness to act in response to their provocations.

House Speaker Paul Ryan’s surprise retirement after 20 years in Congress surfaced this obscure fact about Wisconsin politics: When someone is elected to the House from Wisconsin, they often spend a long time there.

In the year 2018, at the height of The Russia Scare, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was hauled in front of a tribunal of tech-illiterate politicians and asked to explain himself. “It was my mistake, and I’m sorry,” Zuckerberg told senators who are upset about the company’s exploitation (and fu…

There's an elderly gentleman in my community who is known by most of the gas station attendants, baristas and store managers as "Ray."

WASHINGTON

Washington seems to be in the grip of hyperpartisan gridlock these days. Important bills are passed on party-line votes (when they are passed at all) and the investigative committees of Congress appear to be sideshows, unable to agree on basic facts.

There are few sympathetic characters in the landmark lawsuit between Marquette University and a suspended professor that's heading later this month to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Farmers keep asking why Donald Trump is hurting them on trade when they helped elect him. The better question is: Why did they help elect him?

Have you ever seen the moon? You will likely answer that you have, many times. But a new short video by filmmakers Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh may have you reconsidering whether you’ve ever actually seen it at all.

Last month, news anchors at Sinclair Broadcast Group’s TV stations were required to read a script critical of “fake stories” and general bias in the major news networks.

You still have a job? Really? That’s so strange.

There was a wave election on Nov. 2, 2010. Republicans won the Governor’s Office, Assembly and Senate. It drowned Democrats, who had controlled the Governor’s Office for eight years and the Legislature for two years.

You could call it the Nebraska bird eclipse. At the first dart of morning light, so many sandhill cranes take off from the banks along the Platte River they darken the sky. This primeval spectacle, part of a massive spring migration from South America to the northern reaches, draws viewers f…

During the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump excoriated President Barack Obama for "the way he got out of Iraq," which Trump said "was the founding of" the Islamic State. As president, Trump reiterated during a meeting with Iraq's prime minister that "we should never ever have left. A vacuum was created."

Now that the nation has a $1.3 trillion budget, lawmakers can resume debate about whether to pinch pennies.

On Friday, a bombshell will hit America’s theaters.

The irony of the diverse and wide-ranging #neveragain movement to reduce gun violence is that -- even as it has captured the nation's attention -- it has underscored racial stereotypes about victims and survivors.

For Laura Ingraham, the decline came well before the fall. The Parkland teens’ success in pressuring advertisers to flee her Fox News Channel show could cut her career down to tweet size. Ingraham made the mistake of mocking student leader David Hogg’s reaction to being turned down by severa…

A state representative in Pennsylvania has proposed a bill that would fine the parents of “bullies” up to $750 and make them attend parenting classes.

Some very wise men once said, "There will be no second chance to get the 2020 census right ... [and] we will all live with the results for a decade."

Hear the echoes of April 2011 in Tuesday’s Supreme Court election between Milwaukee County Judge Rebecca Dallet and Sauk County Judge Michael Screnock?

Maybe we should just skip to the end.

Why on earth would anyone bother to make the bed when his wife is out of town?

This week, retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote an op-ed in The New York Times that advocated a position most liberal pundits and activists have been incrementally working toward for a long time: repealing the Second Amendment. And while many liberal columnists argued that S…

At some point during last Saturday’s March for Our Lives in Columbus, Ohio, I walked behind two young girls wearing star-spangled blue capes.

Boy, there's nothing like research findings to make you feel like a big-time liar.

When the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution of the United States, they feared the possibility of partisanship overtaking rights-based government. To that end, they crafted a system of checks and balances designed to pit interest against interest, promoting gridlock over radical change. …

How did it come to this? How was Mark Zuckerberg able to prance the globe vacuuming up the ad revenues that rightly belonged to the news organizations providing his content? How did he not notice the unauthorized use of Facebook subscribers’ data by the Trump campaign? And how did he get awa…

Some who watched the Stormy Daniels interview on "60 Minutes" claimed it contained nothing new. On national television, an adult performer alleged that Donald Trump engaged in an extramarital fling, that his minions legally and physically threatened her to discourage public disclosure of the affair, and that Trump's fixer paid her $130,000 in hush money to secure her silence immediately before the 2016 election. People should just go back to their knitting. Nothing to see here.

“I always thought if I lost a child, I wouldn’t be able to stop screaming,” Liz Alderman, a suburban mom of three, told journalist Mark Miller. But then one of her children, Peter, age 25, was killed in the World Trade Center on 9/11, and she found out what really happens, at least to her:

Recent elections give the lie to the notion that America wants fiery liberal activists to run the country—an idea put forth mainly by fiery liberal activists. It turns out that even Democrats don’t necessarily want them.

Legislators have ended the regular 2017-18 session and gone home. Time to score who—Republican Gov. Scott Walker or Republicans who control of Assembly and Senate—decided 13 controversial issues.

In the opening moments of the new documentary "Dolores," an elderly but still spry Dolores Huerta is asked what she hoped for as a young girl. Her response is haunting: "I guess my only dream was just to be accepted, I think that's what a lot of young children feel."

“It is my ass,” she declared. “I control it and I’ll give it to whomever I want.”

Sen. Rand Paul, a libertarian Republican and certainly no sycophant to Donald Trump, put it plainly: Andrew McCabe, the deputy director of the FBI, was fired for leaking information to the press and then lying about it to the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility.

Only three students were shot at an American school Tuesday. Two of them were hospitalized, and only the 17-year-old gunman died. This made the attack at a southern Maryland high school a fleeting news item. The Austin, Texas, bombings edged it out.

I hold this truth to be self-evident: If the dead Austin bomber had turned out to be a Muslim, Trump would be interrupting his current presidential duties to rail anew about the urgent need to thwart dangerous foreigners with walls and travel bans.

What the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal lacks in relevance it sure makes up for in melodramatic rhetoric. Take Bloomberg, for instance, which reported, “The revelations of the apparent skulduggery that helped Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential election keep sending shock waves acro…

WASHINGTON

If you followed the soap opera drama that the mainstream media orchestrated against the Trump administration last week, you got your money's worth.

Quick quiz: Is the average binge drinker likelier to be a kid or an adult?

On March 14, high school students from Parkland, Florida, led a school walkout in favor of gun control. The media have already appointed student witnesses of the horror at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School untouchable moral authorities; their opinions are not to be questioned.

The poisoning of a Russian ex-spy in the English countryside has roused Britons to two truths: Vladimir Putin regards their country as an easy mark, but it's also an extremely pleasant place for his oligarchs to live. Americans, take note.