The New York Times's Sunday Business section ran an extremely long investigation this week on the precarious financial state of the Barnes & Noble book chain. The irony of the story was both obvious and painful.

Not long ago, those of us concerned with the role of books...

Conservative media outlets are falling all over themselves looking for the "true" heir to Ronald Reagan. (For a telling example see here.) But one area in which pretty much all conservatives today are completely off base when it comes to Reaganism is capital-gains taxation.

Take David Frum, who...

In the New York Times this past Sunday, Sam Tanenhaus, senior editor of the New York Times Book Review and a student of conservatism, pronounced the impending death of the Tea Party. He noted that:

Even in South Carolina, a seat of conservative activism, the opposition to Mr....

A bizarre incident took place during the 60 Minutes interview with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) on New Year's Day: When Leslie Stahl asked Rep. Cantor whether he would be willing to compromise with President Barack Obama to improve the legislative performance of the current Congress, Rep. Cantor responded:...

Two weeks ago in this space, I employed the 70th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to examine the unhappy precedent set by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in failing to level with the American people about the level of conflict between the United States and the Axis Powers...

In an article entitled "Top Earners Not So Lofty in the Days of Recession," by the star New York Times journalist Jason DeParle, we are told to "hold the condolence cards the recession cost the rich. The share of income received by the top 1 percent -- that...

Support for the Tea Party is in a free fall. According to a Pew Research Center study conducted between November 9-14 and released earlier this week, 27 percent of the general public now disagrees with the Tea Party, nearly double the 14 percent who said so in March...

Jon Stewart went to town on fellow New Jersey-born-and-bred, ex-senator/governor/ex-Goldman Sachs CEO Jon Corzine on "The Daily Show" Tuesday night, describing him as "the living, breathing avatar of "the corporate-industrial-government complex." He had a point. Corzine famously argued on behalf of tough financial regulations in office, only to return to...

In a column about the recent sexual harassment claims against Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain, New York Times pundit Maureen Dowd writes:

Ann Coulter has a point when she says that feminists rewrote their own rules on sexual harassment to support Bill Clinton. It is never right for...

In Time magazine's recent profile of Herman Cain, author Michael Crowley writes of Cain's now famous "9-9-9" plan, "Conservative economists applaud the idea, but many others say it dramatically favors the rich and would actually raise taxes on the poor and require huge spending cuts."

Sentences like these...

Whether one agrees or disagrees with the tactics of the Occupy Wall Street movement, it's easy to understand the inspiration for its anger as well as its impatience.

"Historical movements," the historian Mari Jo Buhle rightly notes, "are rarely judged solely in the light they cast themselves." In that sense...

Writing in The New York Times Magazine this coming Sunday, Bill Keller, until Monday the paper's executive editor, addresses the same topic as my "Think Again" column of last week: the misguided and overly rosy assumptions that led the "liberal hawks" of 2003 to support George W. Bush's -- or,...

Warren Buffett pays taxes on a smaller percentage of his billions in income than his cleaning lady. He thinks this to be both morally wrong and practically misguided, and he said so in a New York Times op-ed recently, complaining that he and his fellow gazillionaires have been...

President Obama is under fire for any number of things, but the one that appears to excite reporters the most is his decision to take a few days' vacation. According to Politico:

"Images of Obama fundraising, golfing and on vacation -- especially in such a well-heeled location --...

National Public Radio's Morning Edition did a report last week on therapy to turn gay people straight, inspired by the work of Rep. Michele Bachmann's (R-MN) husband. The story rested on interviews with two gay men who had been through the therapy; one who felt it caused "emotional and psychological...

In last week's column I examined the transparent attempt by conservative Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin to try to exploit her own false assumptions about the alleged Islamic identity of the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik to push a bigger budget for the Pentagon and...

The scandal facing the Murdoch empire that has dominated media news has certainly been riveting. But has it taught us anything we didn't already know?

Well, yes and no. Most significant disagreements between reasonably well-informed people are merely differences of degree. And in this case, we've merely learned that whatever...

Back in April I wrote in The Nation that, journalistically speaking, Rupert Murdoch was "an enabler and purveyor of lies, hatred and criminal activity in the service of his ideological, financial and personal interests. A man like this deserves to be shunned, à la Bernie Madoff or Mel...

In a July 5 column called "The Mother of All No-Brainers," New York Times pundit David Brooks notes the recent changes in American politics due, he argues, to entry of a new class of extreme conservatives into the House of Representatives:

They have put spending restraint and debt...

Close readers of The New York Times will have noticed a disagreement among its reporters on whether Wall Street bankers are pleased or peeved with the treatment they've received from the Obama administration. The initial sparks flew when, on the occasion of a fancy fundraiser at the French restaurant Daniel,...