Out of the courthouse, back to the streets. That seems to be the view of thousands of members of the California gay and lesbian community seeking to secure the right to marriage. They are mistaken. Actually, civil rights history may simply be repeating itself.

As in several...

End climate change. End the war. End Wall Street corruption. Achieve universal health care. Rebuild trust in government. Given the election results, this is just some of what is now expected by Obama supporters, especially progressive Democrats and the young. Time for a Newer Deal. A New Frontier. A New...

In our nation's history, crisis has frequently brought fundamental change. Examples abound: the Civil War and the end of slavery; the Great Depression and the New Deal; the Civil Rights Movement and the Voting Rights Act; Bhopal and the Superfund Toxics Release Inventory.

Not this time. The economy is...

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The sound you hear is the almost daily shifting of position on key environmental issues by the McCain-Palin campaign. Employing contortions worthy of an Olympic gymnast, they are seeking to escape past positions, appeal to a conservative base...

Sarah Palin is on a mission. Her fellow Republicans have signed on. At their convention, Senator Fred Thompson urged that "we need a president who doesn't think the protection of the unborn is above his pay grade." This makes mystifying the (possibly temporary) Palin-inspired 20% shift of white American women...

Whether Obama or McCain, the next president will inherit an environmental crisis like none before him. This is due in no small measure to the Bush administration's outright assault on environmental law but also, more fundamentally, to a large flock of chickens now coming home to roost.

In past elections,...

You say tomato. I say salmonella (with apologies to Fred Astaire). Some two months into the most recent food scare, the most FDA can tell us is that "Florida fits the time frame" for the source.

The cause of both was likely overflowing animal waste "lagoons" from adjacent fields. American...

The other night on one of those cable news channels I watched a GOP operative urge that, while Hillary Clinton might secure the votes of the great white male working class, "there is no way on God's green earth (an admittedly nice acknowledgment) that they would vote for Obama." Then...

As a lawyer might say (OK, I am one), I have no personal knowledge of whether John or Cindy McCain voted for George W. Bush in the 2000 election. However, now that that has been called into question by Arianna Huffington (who says no) and Huffington's truthfulness has in...

Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign is approaching the "try anything" stage.

Obama supporters are a cult. He copied someone else's homework. And now Hillary has returned with a vengeance to counting the Florida and Michigan results, even though state officials holding their primaries violated party rules. She urges doing so because...

Led by its chairman, former Republican California Congressman Chris Cox, the SEC earlier this month, in a 3-1 vote along party lines, quashed the right of American shareholders to influence the makeup of corporate boards. The sole Democrat on the Commission, Anne Nazareth, opposed the decision. Nazareth has announced her...

We Southern Californians are said to live on the edge, as if there were no tomorrow. But there is. And we are on the verge of destroying it not just for our children and grandchildren, but for ourselves.

Our politicians continue to give each other high fives and deservedly praise...

It's been a year now since federal agents went into the Salinas Valley in search of killer spinach -- contaminated with E. coli from agricultural waste. Now E. coli has been found contaminating ground beef used in elementary school cafeterias and, before that, intended for Burger King Whoppers. Three times...

"Merchants Have No Countries"

- Thomas Jefferson

What was she thinking? CNBC commentator Erin Burnett got a huge laugh when her comments on China were broadcast on Jon Stewart's Daily Show. "I think people need to be careful what they wish for in China. If China were to say start...

Earlier this month, former Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Arthur Levitt, a Clinton appointee, joined with former Chairman William Donaldson and Commissioner Harvey Goldschmid, both Bush II appointees, in filing an amici brief in the U.S. Supreme Court. They did so to support the notion that third parties operating...

"One deceit needs many others and so the whole house is built."
-Baltasar (1601)

We live in a funny country. In the same government, we have an agency to protect workers, an agency to protect investors, an agency to protect taxpayers, an agency to protect businesses....

A report just published in an American Cancer Society Journal concluded that there are more than 200 - that's 200 - commonly used chemicals that cause breast cancer in a variety of laboratory animals. "Overall, exposure to mammary gland carcinogens is widespread," the researchers wrote in a special supplement to...

BP - "Beyond Petroleum" - is the oil company that knows how to be a good corporate citizen.

Never mind that pesky oil spill in Alaska last year shutting down the pipeline. Forget about those human rights violations in Columbia and around the world. Ignore that $183 million lawsuit for...

You have to give the Bush Administration this much. No matter how bad an idea is, they never give up on it.

Five years ago, reversing the approach of the Clinton Administration, the Bush White House issued an Executive Order opening the Mexican border to cross-border trucking. The claimed rationale:...