With William F. Buckley's passing yesterday, perhaps the time has come for progressives to stop fearing him and learn from him. Not from his ideas, of course, but from his tactics.

Buckley came of age in an America guided by a liberal consensus. Rather than trim his sails...

This week, I watched the same piece of information reported on commercial TV and PBS. At 6:30, NBC's Brian Williams went into shocked-and-breathless mode to announce that American life expectancy had hit a whopping 77.9 years. Then at 7:00, I heard Jim Lehrer calmly announce the same fact and...

Class, summer's over, it's time to do your homework. I hate to designate one of those mammoth Sunday New York Times articles as required reading, let alone one from the snore-inducing business section, but progressives should all take the time to read the Gretchen Morgenson's exposé of mortgage...

There's a funny little story, perhaps apocryphal, about the 1968 election:

An editor at The New Yorker goes in to work the day after Election Day and is shocked by the Nixon victory. "I can't believe he won," the editor says. "I don't know a single person who...

Last night at the Yearly Kos Democratic presidential candidates' debate in Chicago, Hillary Clinton, bated by Barack Obama and John Edwards who have pledged not to take campaign money from Washington lobbyists, defended her open pocket policy:

"A lot of those lobbyists, whether you like it or not, represent...

I wrote my book, The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America in the hope of starting a serious debate with conservatives. But since it came out, I've learned some hard lessons in how the right-wing noise machine operates.

My book lays out how Reaganomics transformed America into...

Up on Capitol Hill, the Democrats are in a bind. They're in the majority but they can't get much done. They don't have the votes to overcome Republican Senate filibusters or override White House vetoes. What can the Dems do? It seems they'll just mope around for a few...

In a recent post on the healthcare crisis and the movie SiCKO, I pointed out that an overwhelming majority of Americans have told pollsters they want a universal healthcare system even if it means raising taxes. With this kind of popular support, I concluded, if we don't pass...

Jonathan Swift couldn't have thought up a better satire. John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market and avowed libertarian, just got caught exploiting imperfect market information and scheming to rip off consumers by building an organic food monopoly. Libertarians claim the market should be left alone to regulate itself, while...

Traditional conservatism is a philosophy that defends social hierarchy. It states simply: those on top deserve to be there. But this brand of conservatism, so popular in Europe, never caught on in the egalitarian environment of America. In the US, conservatives had to argue that what they really wanted...

Many Americans, particularly progressives, often complain that we live in an anti-intellectual country. And in a nation where many citizens couldn't tell you what the Fourth of July signifies beyond a day off from work and an excuse for a barbeque, it's hard to argue with them. Then again, what...

For my new book, The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America, I interviewed scores of frustrated professionals, toiling away in jobs that paid the bills but that they didn't care for or believe in. A few weeks ago, I came across another. Too late for the...

Seeing Michael Moore's new movie Sicko last night, I left the theater surprised and impressed. I'd always had mixed feelings about Moore: he was on the right side of the issues, but he wasn't much of a thinker. Moore's first film, Roger and Me, forced Americans to look at the...

I went out to see Will Durst, the liberal comedian and former Air America radio host, do his shtick in a Philadelphia comedy club last night. "The reason the Democrats were so hot to pass that stem cell research bill," Durst quipped, "is that they thought it was their...

In my post on Sunday, I took on one section of the lead article in this week's New York Times Magazine, "The Inequality Conundrum." But before it becomes last week's news, I need to get something off my chest. The piece repeats what is probably the most dangerous...

If you've been reading the papers and watching the news, you've surely heard about the recent student loan scandals. Unscrupulous private loan companies caught charging credit-card-level interest rates; a financial aid official at Columbia University and another at the federal Department of Education resigning in disgrace after the disclosure that...

This week's New York Times Magazine leads off with "The Inequality Conundrum," a handy summation of the conventional wisdom on rising inequality in the United States. It endorses the usual New Democrat approach that it's all about pulling up the bottom not holding down the top. I would counter...

In a New York Times column last month, Nicholas Kristof was flabbergasted to find that Leana Wen, the recent med school graduate who won the contest to join him on a reporting trip to Africa, didn't have healthcare coverage. I just had to laugh -- at Kristof. Only a...

We all know the stats. We live in a nation with millions of millionaires and millions of working poor people. In recent years, the benefits of economic growth have been entirely siphoned off by those at the top --especially those at the tippy top (the top .01 percent of...