"Who knows what causes a judge to decide as he does?" mused Justice Roberts, reflecting on his bombshell decision to break ranks with his conservative brethren and save the Supreme Court. "Maybe the breakfast he had has something to do with it." That Roberts -- who up until this case...

God bless the Internet. Not only for its contributions to the culture, but because it has ripened so enthusiastically into its inevitable role as our last true public square -- the favorite refuge of the pamphlet-waving lunatic, sure, but also the only place left where being...

There has long been a pall over the coming year, a sense among the pessimists that 2012 has been divinely, socially, or scientifically ordained to hasten the end of our days on Earth. The threats are many, and range from an ancient civilization's prophesies of doomsday to an...

When the state of Georgia executed Troy Davis on Wednesday night, I was thinking of the old fable about the scorpion who asks a frog to carry him across a river. The frog resists for fear of being stung, but the scorpion, who can't swim, insists that he would never...

134 years ago, a Republican politician coined a simple, breathtaking maxim: "He serves his party best who serves the country best." We have no way of knowing, through so much time, whether that was ever more than a callow aspiration or a clever line, or indeed if anybody took seriously...

The president of the United States was burnt-out and beleaguered two-and-a-half years into his first term, a weathered edition of the once sunny reformer who had -- seemingly a lifetime ago -- swept easily into office promising progressive remedies to hard times.

The economy bequeathed to him had been...

It's never pretty when the magic fades, when the buoyant rapture of courtship gives way to the bobbing realism of the marriage. I count myself among the bright-eyed millions who found in the 2008 presidential campaign something legitimately stirring; as a young person, the race carried...

Less government, more freedom -- four words that encapsulate the central tenet of libertarianism, the nutshell within which the seed of anti-federal sentiment gestates into a full-grown nut. As political philosophies go, it seems rational enough; even though I strongly disagree with the priorities of the modern libertarian movement, I...

Ronald Reagan was a man -- just a man -- and he was everything that was wonderful, terrible, and strange about American politics in our time. With the hundredth anniversary of his birth this week, more than the usual number of pundits and politicos are thrusting themselves onto that foggy...

There can be little doubt that, here in America, 2010 will be remembered as a tough year coming on the heels of a tough decade. Be it unprecedented rancor, record-setting obstructionism, the waxing crescent moon of our economy, or the continuously embarrassing fecklessness of much of the media,...

With Christmas fast approaching, the time has come once more for Americans to turn our thoughts to family, friends, presents, lunar herding, and the ongoing war on everything we believe in or hold dear. Being Jewish -- it's like Christianity, but our thoughts turn additionally to...

"Republicans and Democrats just can't seem to work together, and I for one am tired of all the finger-pointing!" you may have heard one friend or two hundred thousand recently remark. It's a convenient line, to be sure, and the general sentiment -- that it's better, on the...

Close your eyes, and imagine that you're a committed member of a major political party. Your beloved president, just twenty-two months into his first term, has watched his approval ratings plummet from a high of nearly seventy all the way down to forty-two -- they will dip as low as...

"I don't think this election is about details," crowed Ron Johnson, the Tea Party-backed challenger to three-term Democratic Senator Russ Feingold, shortly after his opponent meticulously explained how the 2009 stimulus bill saved more than a million and a half jobs at their recent debate in Wausau, Wisconsin....

There are times when I wonder what it might have been like to have lived through some of the most egregious moral failures of our history. What would I say to my grandchildren when they asked me about America under Jim Crow, or the days before women's suffrage, or indeed...

It's a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad time to be the world's oldest living democratic republic. Americans are down on their government, and -- like a Sitka spruce on Sarah Palin's property -- no branch is safe. The administration is slumping in the polls, the...

As Kermit the Frog would have put it so aptly had he been a Dendrobates azureus rather than a muppet, it's not easy being blue. The Democratic Party, seemingly on the path these last four years to recapturing its brain, heart, and courage, has been repeatedly frustrated by...

Politics has always lent itself well to sports metaphors, so perhaps it is appropriate that one of the rarest and most significant events in the sphere of democratic governance has coincided this summer with its athletic equivalent in the form of the World Cup. Forget every other delusive...

This week, President Obama learned a crucial lesson about oil spills that so far has gone sadly unrealized by nearly a thousand dead birds: at a certain point, when the water becomes too thick to wade through, you have to take to the air. The president did just...

It was on Sunday nights at Temple Bet Ha'am in South Portland, Maine -- a reform congregation my mother started in 1985 -- that I first learned to think and talk about Israel. For members of my religion, Israel is the physical manifestation of our endurance as a people; though...