I used to be a mall Santa. From the ages of 17 to 27, I dressed up as a hairy, overweight elf to bring joy to children throughout the Pittsburgh area. It was good honest work. OK, it was honest work. For 3 to 4 hours a day, seven days a week, starting after Thanksgiving, I would put on a fat ...

During the Christmas season when I was a boy, my mother used to take my brothers and sisters and me down to one of the roughest neighborhoods in San Francisco — to visit some animals that were gathered there. This was the Tenderloin District, which attracted drug dealers, drug users and a ...

When anyone is sick, hurt or needs help, we want to be sure high-quality, affordable health care is accessible to everyone. My Senate Republican colleagues and I have been hard at work the past two years advancing and implementing commonsense health care policies that do that, benefitting all ...

President-elect Donald Trump calls the recent election results the most historic in U.S. history. Although that may be an exaggeration, it is worthwhile looking at past major political realignments to gain an historical perspective The First (and greatest) Political Realignment in America ...

Turbulent times can make people feel helpless and hopeless, but we have more agency than we might think. We can still choose to live life on our own terms — whatever that means for each of us individually. This is what the McCaffertys did. “So many people have fallen prey to this idea ...

I have a talking dog. We didn’t know it when we got him, of course. He didn’t reveal this talent to us right away. He would vocalize occasionally in dog-speak, but no one really had any idea what he was saying because he spoke in his language, and we spoke in ours, and there was no ...