In the showdown over regulation of potentially toxic securities like credit-default swaps, the savviest and toughest battler for effective legislation turns out to be not Barney Frank or Chris Dodd, who chair the key House and Senate financial committees. Surprisingly, the best informed and most relentless crusader is not a committee chair at all but a back-bench Senator from Washington state, Maria Cantwell. If you want to see how one determined junior legislator can make a difference, Cantwell is your woman.
Was the Vietnam War an act of prescience, or simply a prelude to today? You decide. The first 1000 people who respond to this blog will receive a free DVD copy of last Friday's PBS show, Bill Moyers Journal.
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 as a nation have not been upholding ample support for the arts, despite the deep spiritual healing that it can bring -- its joys, its shared experience, its sense of what and who we are.
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.
You may feel daunted by the number of pages in these health reform bills, not to mention the legislative language that is often impossible to decipher. But here are some important provisions you should know about.
This weekend, thousands of Arkansans convened at the Statehouse Convention Center for a mass free health clinic, the first of its kind in Little Rock.
By ignoring recommendations on mammography, Sebelius demonstrated why the government has been unable to rein in health care costs: Even when testing is found to be harmful, our leaders still demand more tests.
No, American friends, France is not a country of "cheaters." The affair of Thierry Henry's hand, the scandal of the France-Ireland game that we won, but should have lost, has outraged many in Paris.
With so much information readily available at the tips of our fingers, the slow pace of information dispersal from the government only engenders distrust. The contrast between government and our real-time real life is simply too stark not to be frustrated by.
To put it bluntly, Twilight sucks. (Sorry, that pun is too irresistible). One moody high school girl lusts after an even moodier vampire and the result is a potential $100 million opening weekend at the box office?
The endless tangle of bullets, trajectories, wounds, time sequences and inconsistent testimony that has surrounded the JFK assassination will probably never be satisfactorily resolved.
I've been thinking about the arc of the series, from 1960 to 1963. Where has the series been, where is it now, and where might it be going with creator Matthew Weiner?
The images of what happened yesterday, in G Street, with my husband, Reinaldo Escobar, and other friends are, to me, too reminiscent of repudiation rallies of 1980. Look for yourself and tell me if it doesn't seem the same.
The company had planned to perform a pagan dance around the inferno of blazing thousands while roasting a suckling pig as part of their year-end bonus celebration, but howls of protest forced them to reconsider.
The Republican Party did a disservice to itself, to women, to the country, and to Palin when they nominated her. It was an insult to proceed as though women would vote for gender rather than qualification and policy position.
Atul Gawande is a doctor who writes for the New Yorker. Or perhaps, at this point in his career, he's a journalist who also happens to be a doctor.
The Constitution provides, in very clear language, that Texas "may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage."
Last Wednesday, a media firestorm erupted after a seventeen-year-old girl named Jackie was interviewed by MSNBC's Norah O'Donnell while standing in line during Sarah Palin's Michigan book signing.
The audience for this huge weekend for Twilight was 80% female. So, if you looked anything like Robert Pattinson and were willing to tag along at the movies, there's a healthy chance you got laid over the last 72 hours.
A real declaration of independence, coupled with organized displays of mass non-violent popular resistance to the occupation and all its manifestations, would have created a new dynamic for Palestinians.
It is amazing how a presidential junket and the meanderings of a silly little woman with pretensions to the White House can bump a war off the front pages or as the lead stories of broadcast news.
