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How a party manages to offend its voters

Gavin Newsom won’t be the Democrats’ 2028 presidential nominee unless he wins a significant share of the African American vote. So how’s he courting it? Promoting his new memoir to a largely black audience in Atlanta, the California governor decided to forge a connection by boasting about his poor SAT scores and difficulty reading. “I’m like you,” he said. “You know, I’m a 960 SAT guy” and “you’ve never seen me read a speech. Because I cannot read a speech.” Newsom suffers from dyslexia, but he obviously wasn’t assuming he was addressing a room full ...

Northeast digs out from brutal snowstorm

NEW YORK (AP) — Millions across the northeastern United States on Tuesday contended with treks to school and work as they dug out from a major — and in some areas record-breaking — storm that blanketed the region with snow, canceled flights, disrupted transit and downed power lines. Even as the snow moved north Tuesday, giving way to sunshine in parts of the region, the National Weather Service warned another storm originating in the Great Lakes was right around the corner, though it’s not forecast to be nearly as severe. Many large school districts remained closed, including ...

Pennsylvania residents question police response to student ICE protesters

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Some residents in the Philadelphia suburb of Quakertown are calling for the police chief to resign after a scuffle between police and high school students protesting immigration enforcement policies left several juveniles in custody for four days. Video circulating online shows an older man in street clothes approach a group of young protesters outside a delicatessen and put his arm around the neck of a teenage girl as other teens swing at him and they both fall to the ground. The American Civil Liberties Union and others identified the man as 72-year-old Police ...

States sue Trump administration over changes to vaccine recommendations

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — More than a dozen states sued the Trump administration Tuesday over its rollback of vaccine recommendations for children, calling the move an illegal threat to public health. The states argue that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put children’s lives at risk when it announced last month that it would stop recommending all children get immunized against the flu, rotavirus, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, some forms of meningitis and RSV. Under the new guidance, which was met with criticism from medical experts, protections against those diseases ...

Human redemption

Having covered the late Rev. Jesse Jackson off and on since the 1960s, I am still amused to receive an email from one of my many critics who wants me to know that you don’t have to be white to find something to criticize about Black people, as if I didn’t know. In fact, I’ve made an impressive collection of what I call “I’m not racist, but...” letters, postcards and emails from readers — many of them well-meaning, I should mention — informing me that I should appreciate white people like Jesse Jackson does. One quote I still receive occasionally is from Jackson ...

Will we see Supreme Court vacancies?

Few things in Washington, D.C., generate as much as excitement and intrigue as a Supreme Court confirmation showdown. For decades, since the eponymous “borking” of then-Supreme Court nominee Bob Bork in 1987, political battles surrounding the membership of the nation’s high court have been among the most contentious and raucous of Beltway affairs. Which is why it’s rather curious that very few outside the most fervid of court-watchers seem to be discussing the distinct possibility that there could be one or two Supreme Court vacancies after the current term ends this ...