Washington and the media are up in arms about any number of so-called scandals, but in my own opinion, while the American republic may be in some danger, the danger lies less with the trench warfare in Washington and its attendant noise than with the trends now facing us that...

Want to straighten out the nation's finances, eliminate poverty, and end the income tax?

Easy.

Tax financial trades.

As it happens, a bill to do that was introduced last week in Congress by Tom Harkin, Sheldon Whitehouse and Bernie Sanders in the Senate, and Representative Peter DeFazio...

On Friday a Federal Appeals Court in Washington, D.C. showed just how far, and recklessly, conservatives are willing to go to get what they want, and hang the impact on the nation.

The court ruled that four recess appointments made last January by President Obama were unconstitutional and...

At bottom, the National Rifle Association is a marketing shop. They sell guns to America by claiming they stand between us and a government plotting to take away our rights and establish tyranny. In the old days they did their job by emphasizing hunting and gun safety, but I guess...

This week, Wayne LaPierre and the GOP proved I've been wrong about the right wing. All these years I've thought the guys on the right were smart. But faced with 27 coffins in Newtown, Ct.-- 20 of them tiny--the NRA executive vice president and his Republican friends displayed the worst...

Mitt Romney apparently violated the Ethics in Government Act in 2009 by burying an investment in his wife's name, according to a coalition of non-profits and unions. The investment didn't surface through much of the campaign because Romney refuses to release his 2009 tax returns.

The investment in Singer Associates...

"We have met the enemy, and he is us" was Pogo's famous saying from Walt Kelly's cartoon strip.

Whether Mitt Romney would listen to that is another matter, and he has plenty of enablers, on his staff and elsewhere, to tell him it's all somebody else's fault.

But...

Here's how to answer that right-wing correspondent of yours who insists the deaths of the U.S. ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, and three other Americans -- not to mention the riots in Libya and Egypt, and whatever's coming next -- are all Obama's fault.

Obama didn't do this. Gaddafi, Mubarak,...

This election is all about getting out the vote. Pretty much everybody has already made their choice; most so-called "Independents" really aren't, and the number of really undecided voters is miniscule. So the future of America is all about arithmetic.

And that arithmetic doesn't look great for the Democrats....

Plenty of Progressives, Greens and other Democrats don't much like President Obama, partly because when they pulled the lever in 2008, they'd thought he was more their kind of guy. It's not hard to find some who say there's really no difference between him and Mitt Romney -- that they're...

The United State Postal Service (USPS) was created in 1775 -- a year before the signing of the Declaration of Independence. In 2006, Congress forced the USPS to pre-fund 75 years of health care benefits in three years, and gave itself oversight powers.

This week, the USPS said it

On Oct. 27, 1812, three American warships weighed anchor and sailed into history.

They bore fabled names: The 44-gun frigate USS Constitution, Commodore William Bainbridge commanding; the 32-gun frigate USS Essex, Captain David Porter in charge; and the USS Hornet, an 18-gun sloop, Master Commandant James Lawrence on the quarterdeck....

On June 11, 85 Republican Congressmen sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder demanding he investigate alleged attempts to intimidate bloggers called SWAT-ing. This followed a similar letter sent to Holder on June 6 by Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.).

Those letters arose after a "blogblast" on...

For most Americans, notions of sustainability and passing a livable world to our children are mainstream.

But for the John Birch Society (JBS) and a growing segment of the Right Wing, such notions are the green mask for a sinister blueprint for a UN-led New World Order that will erase...

I've been cured of my persistent fantasy that Americans can find common political ground if we try. Based on the evidence, I now believe the Right Wing's only happy to cooperate if we do everything their way and like it. So we're just going to have to slug it out....

New York's war over fracking is lurching toward the state Court of Appeals, where it will languish for the best part of two years to little purpose because everyone involved expects the ball to be lobbed to the state Assembly for clarification after the decision is handed down.

Along...

The world is a bad place and people do bad things in it. It's made worse when good people do bad things by just doing their jobs, trying to make it better.

And that's the sum of this story. Looking after the people in their care, the country's pension funds,...

Whether Newt Gingrich's romp in the South Carolina primary blew the GOP nomination race wide open or whether it is just a blip that Mitt Romney and his allies will hammer down remains to be seen. But there's little doubt that whoever gets the GOP nomination will be badly weakened...

Millions of retired Americans are frozen out of the health care system even though they've paid into it all their lives, because most of them rely on Social Security for the bulk of their income and can't afford the 20 percent of every medical bill that Medicare requires them to...

On 8PM on November 4th, 2009, Amir Celoski was sitting in his Acura at a traffic light in Paterson New Jersey. The 28-year-old masonry contractor was on his way to pick up new company shirts for his employees; on the passenger seat was sushi for his fiancé, Sibel. Then a...