Carnage and suffering in Oklahoma, for thousands of Americans who have suffered through nature's terrors -- tornadoes, hurricanes, fires, floods, and earthquakes -- is all too common. This is a continent repeatedly attacked, and more so with global warming, by enormous calamities. To this, we have added the calamity of...

A murdered ambassador, Chris Stevens, and three other Americans dead in Benghazi. These men died courageously.

Lacking courage, Romney and Ryan clumsily try to turn this into a critique of Obama foreign policy, when they have vapid bases for doing so. Their bastardized version of what transpired, designed to...

How many Americans can Willard Romney alienate in the shortest possible time?

Apparently, most of us. With astounding dexterity, "Mitt" is entirely capable of pissing off our British allies, Palestinians, and Poles, and then find himself in deep kimchi about remarks he has made and continues to make about...

Many of my acquaintances and friends are religious. Jewish, Protestant, Catholic, self-proclaimed California Buddhists, Hindu, Muslim, and yes Sikh.

One kind gentleman, probably about 70, whom I met one morning while walking back from taking my young daughter to school and who not surprisingly had the surname of Singh,...

Paul Ryan is from Janesville, a long, long way from Whitehall and Hixton, in Wisconsin's southwest. The southeastern side of Wisconsin is a different state from rural Wisconsin, north or west. Well, those of you who haven't been there will have to believe me on this. Think upstate New York...

I understand violence. I've seen it, been there, done that. The military has a violent purpose, and warfare kills directly and collaterally. Southeast Asia, Central America, Bosnia, Caucasus. I have seen too much of it.

But what we do in the so-called "developed" world is kill children in schools...

Who is Mitt Romney?

His children and wife know him and certainly love him. But Americans do not. His "likeability" polling is half that of President Obama.

Why?

I think it is because his narrative is vacant, absent, non-existent. He is an abyss. Mormon, one-term Massachusetts governor, very...

Tea partyists have brought the U.S. Congress to a halt and endanger the federal government. That, of course, is precisely what they want to do. With the Senate primary victory of Ted Cruz in Texas, tea partyists have another notch in their belt. Righter than Rick Perry right... way off...

Willard M. Romney has said almost nothing during most of this presidential campaign about foreign policy or the world. Then he made his coming out speech at the VFW convention filled with Cold War relics. And then he jetted across the Atlantic to stick his foot

In the winter of 1944, Belgium became a vicious final counter-offensive of a retreating Nazi army, and my father was there. He fought and killed, and those around him were killed and maimed.

He would never speak about his experiences in combat. Never. Even when I asked, after junior high...

We have pissed on Taliban corpses, burned the Quran, and assassinated women and children. Enough for a month?

How about enough, full stop? We are not winning. We are losing. Although Iraq cannot be compared with Afghanistan (in terms of wealth, sophistication, culture), the single comparison that can be made...

These are painful times for American progressives. President Obama is struggling to regain control of his own administration after two and a half years when it often seemed that he was not in control. His oratory faltered, communication became stilted, decision-making was lackluster; once he was no longer a candidate...