Listening to President Obama's angry diatribe against the gun lobby Wednesday night, you'd think the Senate majority failed to pass his modest legislation.The president railed against those who trumped the 90 percent of Americans who favored gun control, and he assailed individual senators for not meeting "the test." But the...

On Friday, December 14th, President Obama addressed the nation in the wake of the tragedy at Sandy Hook School in Newtown, Conn. as a parent. Here is the speech I believe he needs to give to Americans now as president:

"My Fellow Citizens: I speak to you today...

It was the 21st versus the 20th century in last night's foreign policy debate. Never was the contrast between a party wedded to the past and a party anticipating the future more evident. Governor Romney's obsession with Cold War hostility to Russia and with the declining number of naval ships...

The verdict was in before the debate was over: the president lost -- he was distracted, weak, disinterested, irritated and looking like he wished he was somewhere else. Maybe the facts were on his side, maybe his opponent was shamelessly dissembling, but so what? That's politics, folks!
Governor Romney...

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who at the time of Gadaffi's violent death said "now comes the hard part" acknowledged after the heinous assassination of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three brave colleagues in Benghazi that she was "confounded." "How could this happen?" she asked, and in a country whose revolution...

President Obama certainly stuck his foot in it back in Roanoke, Virginia on July 13. Trying to explain that public infrastructure plays a role in successful businesses, he told the crowd: "If you've got a business, you didn't build that." No surprise, then, when six weeks later the...

In choosing Paul Ryan as his running mate, Governor Romney has fully embraced the conservative conceit that tax breaks for the rich really will produce jobs for the poor and middle class. Government, these new libertarian conservatives aver, doesn't and can't produce jobs, only the private sector can. To do...

In our surprise at learning "conservative" Chief Justice Roberts had joined the "liberal" wing of the court to uphold the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, we allow today's ideological schism in politics to eclipse what is really at stake in the historic 5-4 decision: the separation of powers through...

The untimely death of Adam Yauch, "MCA" of the Beastie Boys, reminds us again of how naturally it comes to artists and musicians to think and act interdependently, even as our political and media leaders think and act with stunning parochialism.

Not long after 9/11, with President Bush...

Media hypocrisy about the Occupy Wall Street movement is old news. But the New York Times hit the "refresh" button once again with its coverage of the May Day demonstrations in New York and around the country on May 2. And it is supposedly the last serious newspaper with a...

Believing in the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary, I have generally resisted the partisan claims from Left and Right that you, our life-term justices on the Supreme Court, dispense justice with a heavy ideological hand, in accord with partisan political biases.
I recognize that...

300 years ago, a watchmaker in Geneva, Switzerland, fathered a son who became the first powerful voice against inequality in an urbanizing Europe in which the costs of capitalism and private property were already clear. Jean-Jacques Rousseau proclaimed in his Social Contract that men, though born free, were everywhere in...

Last week, Steven Pearlstein offered a Swiftian proposal in The Washington Post to legalize buying votes and thus make the bribing of voters -- already the norm in practice -- a legal norm as well. Clear away all the hypocritical rhetoric about democracy and get on with selling...

The front-runners in the Iowa caucuses and now in the New Hampshire primary, seem to detest one another, but they agree on one thing: that the Democrats want unlimited government pushing unearned "entitlements" and Obama style "socialism," while Republicans seek an "opportunity society" which means, well, no government at all....

Given how extraordinarily successful it has been both in its own terms and in its capacity to grab the attention of the media, Occupy Wall Street has been conveniently misunderstood by its supporters and detractors alike. Recently, Mayor Bloomberg patronized it haughtily, saying "It's fun and it's cathartic...

His death was violent and ugly, but what the people he ruled over for 42 years with a violent hand wished for. And what he wanted. Muammar Gaddafi died in his home town holding a silver pistol, killed by some combination of a NATO strike that intercepted his caravan and...

Observing our small bore politicians bickering while America risks fiscal and moral collapse from the vantage point of a ceremony in Gdansk, Poland -- in which two political heroes are being honored -- is a bracing if dispiriting experience. Bracing because to watch Founder of Solidarity (Solidarność) and former Polish...

Today is Interdependence Day: the day after September 11, when, ten years ago, brutal terrorists attacked the United States of America as they have attacked so many other people around the world before and since.

This year, fittingly, we are celebrating Interdependence Day in New York City at...

There is no better proof for the gullibility (or worse) of Western media than how easily they have been manipulated by rebel spokesmen for the Libyan insurgency. From Sunday through Monday evening for more than 24 hours, broadcast and cable media outlets reported the rebels had captured Saif Gaddafi and...

American exceptionalism glides complacently into the 21st century on a lie and a prayer. The lie comprises all the flag-waving hyperbole, the exceptionalist claim that "We're Number One," when as measured by far too many key indicators we are actually closer to being #10 (social mobility) or maybe #34 (infant...