The severe drought in California and much of the West is a reminder that civilized life is a paper-thin veneer that overlays the deep upheavals of nature. Humans carry on blithely, holding fast to the illusion that the natural world can be tamed and exploited with no unavoidable consequences. Then we get slammed by a hurricane, a flood, a tornado, a wildfire, a drought or a freezing polar vortex that lets us know how wrong we are. 

Yet, after each disaster, we forget again -- which is the reason so few of us give any sustained attention to the climate change peril. It is similar to the way we think about death. We know it’s coming, but we would drive ourselves crazy if we thought about it all the time. As a result, we revert to living in the moment or counting on promises of heaven. 

With climate change, either we suspect it is too late to do anything about it or we just deny it is real. And even the vast majority of climate scientists who know it is a real phenomenon are quick...

How odd is it that the two contenders in the Super Bowl -- the Seattle Seahawks and the Denver Broncos -- hail from the two states in the Union that have legalized sale and use of marijuana? Are there two activities more different than the amped-up aggression of professional football and the laid-back mellowness of smoking a joint?

I’ve got nothing against Denver -- a perfectly fine city, as far as I’m concerned. But, as many of my readers know, I am a Seattle boy. My great-grandparents arrived in the muddy little town on the shore of Puget Sound in the 1880s. The cloudy skies, magnificent mountains and inland waterways are home to me. 

Having grown up there, I am well aware that, in the realm of sports, Seattle has had only occasional success. The University of Washington Huskies had a long winning streak under legendary football coach Don James before they got hammered with NCAA sanctions. The Seattle Mariners had a few good years when Ken Griffey Jr., Randy Johnson and...

When John McCain gets censured by members of his own party – McCain, the 2008 GOP presidential nominee who has one of the most conservative voting records in the Senate – it is clear that the biggest problem facing Republicans is the looniness in their own ranks.

Largely a rural, Southern, aging white people’s party, the GOP faces a big demographic challenge down the road, but this year the party has a clear shot at winning control of the Senate by gaining at least six seats.

The liveliest Senate races are expected to be in South Dakota, Montana, West Virginia, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alaska, North Carolina, Iowa, Georgia and Kentucky. With the exception of Iowa, what those states have in common is that they voted against President Obama in 2012. That is nine red states up for grabs, and taking six should be easy.

Easy, that is, unless the loonies take charge of the campaign.

McCain is not up for reelection this year – that will come in 2016, if he decides to run...

In his sixth State of the Union address, President Obama called for a “year of action,” but 2014 is more likely to be a year in which voters ratify gridlock. 

Listening to Obama’s sometimes meandering, sometimes inspiring speech, one thought would not leave my mind: Words are not enough to undo the damage done by six years of ceaseless vitriol and obstruction from the right. When, for instance, he said, “Climate change is a fact,” I had no doubt that a majority of the Republicans in the House chamber were thinking, “Who says?” When the president said he would push for measures to deal with the plague of gun violence “with or without Congress,” there was no question that it would be “without.”

A central theme of the address was the growing gap between America’s richest citizens who keep getting richer and the far more numerous middle class and working poor whose incomes continue to stagnate, if not decrease. The...

Vladimir Putin wanted to bring the Olympics to Russia, and he wanted them to take place in his favorite Black Sea resort town, Sochi, even though it is not a locale that sees much, if any, snow and is situated dangerously close to a region roiling with rebels and terrorists who hate Putin.

Snow will not be a problem. Enough white stuff can be manufactured to cover a ski slope, if need be. But keeping terrorists from blowing up the Olympics is a bit more difficult.

A new video released by radical Islamist separatists in Russia’s Dagestan region promises that attacks are coming. And even though every soldier and security agent in Putin’s service seems to be lining up to create a "ring of steel" around the Games, it appears would-be killers may have slipped through. There have been sightings of at least one so-called white widow suicide bomber in the center of Sochi. The woman is one of several female suspects whose husbands have been killed in the fight against Moscow’s...

The richest 1% of Earth’s citizens own 46% of global wealth. That news comes to us from the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Even more dramatic is this statistic: The planet’s 85 wealthiest people have wealth equal to that held by the poorest half of all humans. 

Restated with all the zeros on display, that is a ratio of 85 to 3,500,000,000. 

The study that came up with these facts comes from Oxfam International, a British humanitarian organization. Oxfam concludes that this enormous concentration of wealth and power in a few hands perpetuates poverty, increases inequality and undermines democracy. The group is asking Davos participants -- some of the richest people in the world -- to step in to help close the income gap by supporting higher taxes on the wealthy and elimination of tax dodges, as well as living wages for workers, expanded educational opportunities and guaranteed healthcare for everyone. 

In the United States -- the country that is leading...

The Senate Intelligence Committee has delivered a damning report about the catastrophe at the American mission in Benghazi, Libya, casting the blame widely -- at the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department and even at one of the victims of the attack, U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens. But despite an addendum tacked on by Republican members of the committee that took a hard swipe at Hillary Rodham Clinton, not much damage was done to the former secretary of State’s prospects as a presidential candidate. 

Thursday on the Senate floor, Republican Sens. John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Kelly Ayotte tried to make it sound as though the report laid blame for the tragedy on Clinton, but the Democratic chair of the intelligence panel, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, quickly refuted that assertion. 

“The report approved on a bipartisan basis says no such thing,” Feinstein said. “As a matter of fact, Secretary Clinton is not mentioned a single time in the 58-page bipartisan...

Guns don’t kill people, popcorn kills people. Or maybe it’s texting. Or just being in the wrong place at the wrong time with some fool who thinks he needs to take a gun to the movies.

Each and every day it is possible to scan the news from across the U.S. and find an example of human stupidity turned lethal by the presence of a gun. This week’s top horror is the shooting of a father out on a kid-free date with his wife who was gunned down by an idiot with a pistol in his pocket.

Except he wasn’t really an idiot.

Gun-rights fanatics (these days there are few who are not fanatics) insist that only a few poorly trained, mentally unstable or criminally inclined gun owners give all the millions of God-fearing, Constitution-defending firearms enthusiasts a bad name. But can anyone think of a person more well-trained and responsible than a retired police captain, SWAT team leader and security guard?

That’s Curtis Reeves, 71, who left the Tampa police force with a...

Gov. Chris Christie is in extreme damage-control mode, apologizing to constituents and asking forgiveness for the dunderheaded shenanigans of some of his closest staffers. He is desperate to evade a growing reputation as a political bully that could scuttle his chance to become the Republican nominee for president in 2016.

As revealed by a series of email exchanges, three of Christie’s top aides closed down all but one of the traffic lanes at the entrance to the George Washington Bridge to punish the Democratic mayor in the nearby town of Fort Lee, who failed to fall in line behind the Republican governor in his recent reelection campaign. New Jersey commuters spent days stalled at the bottleneck, emergency vehicles were slowed down and one elderly woman died before she could be taken to a hospital.

In a two-hour news conference, Christie claimed he knew nothing about the scheme to exact political retribution by manufacturing a traffic nightmare. The three staffers have been...

President Obama must feel as though his Hawaiian Christmas holiday was way too brief. He has now left the palm trees of his birthplace far behind and is back in Washington, with a polar vortex chilling most of the country and Republicans still frozen in contrarian disagreement with everything he does and says -- some even disputing the location of his birth.

For once, the president’s vacation was not interrupted by an emergency of some kind. He played a lot of golf, went to a basketball game, hung out with his family and avoided most public appearances, except when he visited his favorite shaved ice shop. Reporters covering him had very little to do except thank the tiki gods that they were in sunny Honolulu and not back home waiting for an ice storm to hit.

On the political docket now is a three-month extension of unemployment benefits, a revived push for immigration reform and the ongoing convulsions over the Affordable Care Act, with every debate skewed by maneuvers by both...

I confess my intent is to be provocative by dragging Phil Robertson into another cartoon at a moment when the “Duck Dynasty” controversy seems to have simmered down. But, after all, provocation is the whole point of political cartoons and, now that I’ve got everyone’s attention, I want to share some thoughts about cartoons, religion and free speech.

My rumination was inspired by the 339 reader comments that came in reaction to my Dec. 26  “Horsey On Hollywood” cartoon and column. The cartoon depicted two A&E producers pleading with “Duck Dynasty” patriarch Robertson, to apologize for his Bible-inspired comparison of homosexuality to bestiality, murder and other grievous sins. In the cartoon, Robertson responds, “I say you queer-lovin’ God haters are goin’ straight to Hell.”

Some readers blasted me for putting words in Robertson’s mouth that he didn’t say. To that I plead guilty and note that the A&E...