Why We Lost Healthcare
For Obama to do his job, he needs progressives to do theirs: let progressives fight on the left flank to make room for the President to steer a middle course. Otherwise the "centrists" will always win.
Bankers must think we're stupid. How could they expect anyone to buy their performance at the recent White House/Wall Street confab during which, with hands on hearts, they swore allegiance to the American people? They want us to think they're Boy Scouts instead of profiteers who crashed our economy?
For Obama to do his job, he needs progressives to do theirs: let progressives fight on the left flank to make room for the President to steer a middle course. Otherwise the "centrists" will always win.
Climate change presents security challenges of a magnitude and a complexity we have never seen before. Preparing for it is not a choice -- it is an urgent necessity.
During the Bush years pressure on North Korea was greatly increased, not decreased, as the current White House and New York Times say. That the Obama team is taking credit now is a shame.
If Copenhagen is to be a success, all must pull their weight. This means avoiding the temptation to polarize the debate along the North-South divide, or wasting time looking for scapegoats.
Common sense should have told these gentlemen that when the President of the United States summons you to the White House, you check the weather ahead of time and plan accordingly.
If you want to put the Bible in schools but you think Mary might have aborted Jesus, if she didn't have to pay for it, you don't get to talk anymore. Even Chuck Norris should be able to process that.
If the Obama White House is going to change course in time to avoid hitting the looming 2010 electoral iceberg, the president and his advisors need to immediately jettison the notion that the public's widespread anger over joblessness and the bank bailout will be dissipated by the magic bullet of passing a health care reform bill.
You don't have to look very far to see the romance of the holidays is losing out to consumerism. I say we romantics of the world unite and take the holiday back.
For some this was, as Queen Elizabeth might say, "annus horribilis" -- a horrible year. For the rest of us, it was another lesson in public relations crisis management.
Until you work on these issues, it's hard to appreciate how difficult it is to diversify newsrooms. But it's time for TV outlets to cast their gaze beyond the usual suspects.
Years ago, a retired advertising executive confided to me that the key to a good pitch lay in the skillful manipulation of fear and desire. This is certainly true for hormone replacement therapy.
I'd ask, "What is the world coming to?" except the rest of the world seems to be making sense. Of the industrialized nations, it's only ours that doesn't provide some form of "universal" health care coverage to its citizens.
The United States Department of Justice announced a sweeping set of indictments levied
by a federal grand jury connected to a racially motivated killing and alleged police corruption in Shenandoah, PA.
The US is the only nation that has yet to signal its commitment to medium-term financing for developing nations. This is what developing nations are waiting to hear.
It may surprise many readers to hear that anti-Americanism represents one of the cardinal principles of current Russian domestic policy. Obama, however, is doing his best to change that.
Nancy Meyers -- attractive, blonde, quick-witted -- goes where Hollywood fears to tread: she makes rom-coms about later-life love. We're discussing her latest film, It's Complicated.
With no regard for history -- and here I mean the events of only 12 months ago -- the Republicans and Big Banks have the audacity to contend that the creation of jobs requires the lowest levels of regulation possible.
Stimulus projects designed for job creation have proven ineffective. To find out why, I spoke with a handful of the nation's mayors, both Democratic and Republican.
Something rather interesting is going on in Great Britain these wintry days: an official inquiry, broad-ranging in its declared scope, into the way that country got involved in a little conflict in Iraq.
The culprits for the current recession are more numerous than the Wall Street bankers who profited from it. The deeper culprits are the economists and politicians who pushed fake development for years.
Even in the absence of national and international commitments, we must not ignore the tremendous movement that is already under way to solve our environmental and energy problems.
Leon is a Vietnam veteran who has been homeless for six years. After serving "the greatest country in the world," he is lost somewhere in the pile of Veteran's Administration disability claims.