There's a Category 5 storm about to make landfall, and the president and the officials in charge of preparing for the approaching disaster don't seem to be particularly worried. Sound familiar? Just as Katrina exposed critical weaknesses in the priorities and competence of the Bush administration, the unfolding unemployment disaster is threatening to do the same for the Obama White House. The members of the Obama administration may not be attending a birthday party at John McCain's ranch in Sedona or shopping for expensive Ferragamo shoes in New York as a great American city is destroyed, but their decidedly lackadaisical response to what job losses are doing to multiple great American cities raises the question: will unemployment be Barack Obama's Katrina?
I know you've been on tenterhooks waiting for the winners of the contest with the longest name of any contest -- the Third Annual Huffington Post Tell Us What You're Cooking for Thanksgiving This Year that You Didn't Cook Last Year Contest -- and here they are.
The John Ensign affair is mysterious in only one way to me: the quiet Mrs. Hampton.
Relative to the size of the economy, America's deficit level does not come close to the levels hit in World War II. The idea that we are near some debt-driven crisis is absurd.
Obama promoted the architects of the financial disaster and demands that we hail them as heroes because they, and Wall Street, only wrecked the economy -- they haven't (yet) utterly destroyed it.
Between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day, 5 million extra tons of trash are created each week. It's easy to reduce your contribution to all that waste by greening your Thanksgiving.
What began as a "free money giveaway" in the middle of Paris ten days ago has now become the grim story of the "bus of fortune" that turned into a riot.
They used to tell adopted children that they were special because they'd been chosen. I've told my adopted child that I don't believe that. Neither adoption nor birth conveys status to a child.
I'm tempted to say that the US is plainly unable to cope with the economic crisis in a serious way. So long as economic thinking is mired in a world that disappeared with the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, we're stuck.
Obama's visit to China was certainly not overly exciting but it was far from the failure that the U.S. press has made it out to be.
Corporations need to take economic and social responsibility for their business practices. Environmental pollution is a major health threat with enormous economic consequences.
I would always back the guy willing to split 10s at the blackjack table because it is the right thing to do over the guy that stands on 16 simply because that's what everyone else does.
Are we all looking around for rules to break for the holidays? Focus groups and psychological research in advertising shows that we probably are -- the Gap ad is only the latest example in a long held tradition.
As Obama contemplates a new strategy for Afghanistan, he should consider integrating the conservative values of fiscal discipline and limited government into his foreign policy decision-making.
When you're making an animated film, one of the big differences is that you can add scenes, change dialogue, and re-write as you're going along.
We consider ourselves a democracy, yet we salute the flag of a Republic. No idea is more central to the concept of a republic than what used to be called civic virtue, but what today would be called "giving something back."
The new task force recommendations on mammograms are not a blanket, one-size-fits-all prescription for every woman. Guidelines should never replace a dialogue with your own doctor that considers individual risk.
I'm not saying I don't support this weak health care bill (it's better than nothing), but if it gets any weaker and cuts into the Constitutional right of women to choose, really, does the good still outweigh the bad?
We come from a history of disregarding feeling as frivolity, and prior to Oprah we hadn't paid attention to its heft. She understood that our emotional lives inform every single thing we do.
One of the many problems with Michiko Kakutani's lame and flamboyantly irrational New York Times review of Eating Animals is that it suggests her own irrelevancy.
Palin's tactic of appealing to the worst impulses of the electorate has a long history in the Republican Party. Palin inherited the mean-spirited values of another politician with a gleaming smile: Reagan.
At the beginning of this year, there were predictions that as many as 10,000 American not-for-profit arts organizations would go bankrupt as a result of this recession.
