During the Vietnam War, it became clear that America could not afford to simultaneously wage war on poverty and wage war in Vietnam. We could not have guns and butter at the same time, as Martin Luther King so eloquently noted in his 1967 speech at Riverside Church:

I don't like to try to read the minds of politicians - mostly because with the automatons we have in office today, if you actually could read their minds, my guess is you'd find almost nothing actually going on in there. However, there are ways to ferret out the actual...

I know what you are thinking - you are thinking that the headline of this post is a joke. But it's not. It's not at all. Watch my CNN debate over Afghanistan and health care yesterday morning with former Bush speechwriter David Frum - specifically check out around 4...

Just a few quick questions to ponder after President Obama's speech announcing a massive escalation in Afghanistan:

- What percentage of those kids in the audience will die because of this decision?

- Why do so many pundits and pro-Obama activists continue to focus on how "hard" and "difficult" and...

"Of the billions poured out in bailouts and stimulus, a substantial share has gone to privileged insiders and liberal interest groups -- Wall Street bankers, auto unions, public-sector employees." -- New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, 11/29/09

Last week, I wrote about the various zombie lies surrounding budgetary...

A few weeks back, I wrote a column looking at how the media and political establishment spends an inordinate amount of time pretending to be outraged at the cost of priorities like health care while simultaneously ignoring the ballooning cost of permanent war-making. I was met with a wave...

Well-known fringe freak show Rammesh Ponnuru published a childish screed in 2006 attacking Democrats as "The Party of Death." It was a (deliberately) provocative title -- and we should thank him, because it's a perfect moniker for these troubling times. Only not for Democrats, but for Republicans.

Indeed, in...

I usually refer to The Washington Times as The Paper of Record for People Who Commit Hate Crimes. It is a fringe right-wing rag owned by the Moonie cult, and thus tends to tread in the most disgusting conspiracy theory and bigotry. So when this same Washington Times got...

In my column two weeks ago, I made this very simple point about the reporting surrounding the cost of the health care bill:

Political headlines of late have all been some version of Dow Jones newswire's recent screamer: "CBO Puts Health Bill Cost At $1 Trillion." That's as true...

The term "idiocracy" means a nation run by idiots - and the term idiot is defined as "an utterly foolish or senseless person" and/or a "person of the lowest order in a former classification of mental retardation, having a mental age of less than three years old." There are...

In its typical -- and typically desperate -- attempt to sensationalize everything via fearmongering, most of the Serious Media continues to assess the Ft. Hood tragedy through the prism of international terrorism rather than through the lens of a stretched-to-the-bone military. And so we arrive at a truly telling...

In pitting the 10-year cost of Democrats' health care bill against the 10-year projected cost of the bloated Pentagon budget, my newspaper column last week made a simple comparison rarely ever made in politics today -- a comparison that might provide citizens with much needed context, but a comparison...

Both politically and economically, it's absolutely idiotic for White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel to float the idea of massive social spending cuts right now. If the Great Depression taught us anything, it is that slashing spending in the name of deficit reduction is a great way to...

One of the few - and I sincerely stress the word few - concrete legislative successes progressives notched in the Republican Congress under President George W. Bush came on the evening of July 26th, 2002, when they humiliated the House into passing a bill sponsored by Rep. Rosa DeLauro...

NOTE: I'll be on PBS Now tonight discussing this and other issues related to the 2009 elections. Check local listings here and tune in! - D

I write a lot about the importance of fair trade -- specifically, about the significance of making sure our international economic laws do...

To feed the Punditburo's appetite for fact-free speculation and polemic, the Beltway press and the political activist class often manufactures elaborate rationales for fairly simple events. These professional prognosticators refuse to accept obvious explanations, either because they feel the need to produce overdramatized entertainment or because the 24-7 news cycle...

I appeared on CNN American Morning yesterday to discuss today's highest profile elections. You can watch the segment here -- I tried to make the point that while these elections are important, and while the Democratic Party certainly has its problems right...

Over the last many years, I've gradually moved toward full vegetarianism to the point where there's only one meat-based foot I still semi-regularly consume -- every few weeks, I have a bagel with whitefish salad on it (and I'm working on ending this last vestige of my meat eating). I...

Many readers here likely remember September 29, 2008. For a brief moment, the U.S. House extended a big middle finger at Wall Street - and then, quite predictably, the entire political, media and corporate Establishment went apeshit. Though it only lasted a few days, the standoff helped further controversialize...

This confounding moment in American history is raising a lot of important "why" questions for us all. Here's a few that are particularly on my mind right now:

Why is the "sanctity of contracts" only an inviolable axiom when...