For the first time, American forces based in Afghanistan have acknowledged crossing the border into Pakistan to attack Queda militants there. The attack carries a bundle of grave risks, as nuclear-armed Pakistan is already in the midst of a political crisis that seems to worsen by the day. It...

I sometimes go to sleep at night wondering what it will take to muster the political will to begin to seriously address global warming. Historic droughts? Hundreds of wildfires? The disappearance of Arctic ice? Been there, done that.

How about this one: a national political party considers canceling its quadrennial...

History will come knocking this evening in Denver in just a few hours. In all likelihood I will be in tears. A stadium full of Americans are going to launch the presidential bid of 47 year-old bi-racial man and his black wife and mixed-race kids and his white Catholic running...

Barack Obama, the Facebook candidate, has been stumbling in trying to move his campaign into the real world. The problem is his lack of real positions.

I know this is a minority view. The press has recently been full of commentary about how Barack Obama needs to "re-introduce himself"...

Here's an idea for you Internet news hounds: take a break from the Obama VP watch tonight and honor the passing of Isaac Hayes by renting a DVD of the incredible documentary Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story. You will learn some amazing things about American culture and politics, and...

Today the journal Science published new research which shows that the number of marine "dead zones" around the world has doubled about every 10 years since the 1960s. That's big news for the future of this planet. To get the bird's eye view you need to know what these dead...

The opening extravaganza at the Beijing Olympics one of those rare moments when many different threads of history simultaneously pass through the eye of the same needle. Yet what fills the pages of Western newspapers is this "scandal:" when we saw the cute little 9 year old girl sing alone...

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, the lifeguard appears blowing her whistle and waving her arms.

The lifeguard in this case is Maureen Dowd, and she is furious about the way the agenda for the Democratic Party convention is being shaped by the...

There is wonderful news today for planet earth. No really. I'm not kidding. It's on the front page of the New York Times. Well, OK, it's not actually on the front page but it's in a story that starts on the front page. The story is about the price...

"We have to have a talk about Barack Obama," says Gail Collins in her NYT op-ed today. She is directing her comments squarely at people like me:

I know. You're upset. You think the guy you fell in love with last spring is spending the summer flip-flopping his way...

Last night I posted a blog suggesting that Obama supporters who are angry about his about-face on the upcoming FISA legislation should take the money they would have given Obama this month and give it instead to Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI), who is carrying on the fight that Obama...

Since I started writing about Senator Obama's reversal on the upcoming FISA vote, the number of comments to column shot up 1000%, and they are mostly supportive. It turns out that there are a lot of Obama supporters who feel as I do: we support Obama over McCain as much...

UPDATE: A Powerful, Easy Way to Tell Obama to Get FISA Right

Original post:

The current dust-up in the Obama camp over this week's FISA vote may have real consequences for the rest of this campaign. As you may know, the largest "group" on the Obama campaign's social...

In an unprecedented attempt to put out a fire in his own house, Senator Barack Obama yesterday issued a response to supporters who had been protesting his position on government surveillance. The release was followed by an 90 minute interchange on MyBarackObama.com between campaign officials and supporters (though as far...

Online protest has continued to grow against Senator Obama's decision to support legislation granting legal immunity to telecommunications companies that cooperated with the Bush administration's program of wiretapping without warrants.

As I wrote about yesterday, the protest is taking place on the Obama campaign's social networking site, MyBarackObama.com. The site...

It's reality time at MyBarackObama.com. The latent tension between a conventional top-down presidential campaign and the bottom-up social-networking Internet operation it launched has burst into the open in the form of a grassroots insurrection against Senator Obama's decision to support legislation granting legal immunity to telecommunications companies that cooperated with...

When Barack Obama pulled out of public campaign financing, I wrote a column about his money machine, noting that despite all the small Internet donors, his campaign is still mostly funded in the most traditional of ways. Numerous readers taking offense at my characterization of Obama's fundraising as dominated by...

Just as learning to live with the threat of nuclear holocaust became the signature of the Cold War generation, learning to live with the threat of climate calamity will be the signature of today's generation.

These fears are similar in scope but their dynamics are different. Fear of a...

Since early in the campaign, I have been writing about how Barack Obama has the potential to realign American politics in a way not seen since the Reagan revolution. Key to this are demographic changes in the western US, and generational changes in the population in general and in particular...

Just to calm your tempers a bit, let me state from the start that my intention here is neither to endorse nor criticize Barack Obama's decision to opt out of public campaign financing. So relax. What I want to do instead is raise a couple of points about the role...