Pop and his brothers and sisters came with their parents from Calabria in southern Italy.

In the first decades of the 1900s, they settled in Pittston, in between Wilkes-Barre and Scranton, in the hard coal fields in Pennsylvania. They went to work in the mines, dress factories, in construction and...

America's Catholic bishops have been allies of the Republican Party for almost four decades.

The Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 launched the cooperation as Republicans quickly proclaimed themselves forever opposed to abortion. President Nixon and others thought it was a very good political strategy. They were right. Evangelicals,

If you didn't vote in 1932, then the election of 2012 will be the most important of your life.

Pivotal American elections -- 1800, 1860, 1932 -- have been about decisions that would change the quality of life in America. 2012 will be about such a decision. It will deal...

The current attack campaign of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops on the
Obama Administration for its mandate that Catholic hospitals must provide contraceptive insurance for its employees is part of a pattern that has seen the Bishops oppose every pro-choice Democratic candidate for president for more than three decades.
...

The fight for the Catholic vote is underway and Republicans are latching unto the issue of "religious freedom" as a centerpiece of that fight. They are being aided by the U.S. Catholic bishops who in a bid for relevance said at their Baltimore fall meeting that religious liberty was under attack....

Warren Buffett said a few years ago that America is in a class war and his side, the rich, started it and is winning.
   
Republican presidential hopefuls, however, say the Democrats, notably President Obama, are the ones waging class war. For good measure, Mitt Romney...

House Speaker John Boehner said again this week, tax increases are off the table. He and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have used the same language hundreds, perhaps thousands of times. You can't tax the job creators in a recession, they say. They pound it home time and again. It's...

At the risk of sounding like a leftist conspiracy nut, I think the Wisconsin crisis is about much more than the state budget or unions. At its core the central theme is really about the attempted perversion of democracy.

Look at how the founding fathers put together...

It's been thirty-eight years since the Supreme Court made abortion legal throughout America.

The Republican Party has bellowed continuously since then that it is opposed to abortion and it would work to destroy it. 

Republican presidents have been in power 24 of those 38 years. Their allies have included powerful...

His accent was still thick despite having come to America from Haiti more than 20 years ago.

He had been back once since the quake. He wasn't impressed, though hardly surprised, at the lack of progress made by the relief agencies.

"The NGOs mean well but they all want...

Is Republican senator Jon Kyl a moron or just a complete liar?

Appearing on Face The Nation this Sunday, Kyl defended tax cuts for the ultra rich saying they did not cause the recession.

Instead, he said, the recession was the result of the housing bubble which was triggered...

George Pataki is causing me to to have intense stomach agita.

The former Republican New York Governor is pimping on TV news shows for the continuation of the "temporary" nine year tax cuts for the ultra rich. He argues they should not be "punished for their hard work and success"...

The candidate with the best story usually wins elections. Stories speak to voters the way logic can't, on a gut level.

My father, an immigrant coal miner, always voted Democratic feeling that there was a sharp philosophical between the two parties and that Republicans favored big business against the working...

Let me see if I've got this right.

Wall Street goes on a drunken binge from 2001 to the crash in 2008. The Street is spurred by the removal of most regulations and by the creation of new financial devices like derivatives and credit default swaps. One...

"I want my country back" is the rallying cry for conservatives.

Not being very conservative, I don't feel qualified to define their America. I know, though, what my America is.

My father came to America with his parents nearly 100 years ago. Like other immigrant kids, he went right to...

America lives through its classic stories.

The most powerful story of the new century is of course 9/11 with its 2700 dead, the shattering of the myth of American invincibility and the realization that there were foreigners who hated us enough to trade their lives for ours.

One of our...

This post was co-written by Cara McDonough.

Catholic critics of the Church can expect to find themselves attacked by both the left and right wings of the Church and the community at large -- and they are rarely disappointed.

Church defenders from the right tend to view critiques of Church...

Is the Republican Party bad for America?

This isn't a trick question but is asked seriously and is prompted by former Congressman Tom Tancredo's charges that President Obama is America's greatest enemy.

Tancredo's is the latest in a series of Republican attacks and simplifications being offered as answers to America's...

The Roman Catholic Church is having a mental breakdown. Much of this is due, of course, to the child abuse cases and the hierarchy's arrogant and immoral handling of these cases. But there's more.

Just this year, two children have been dropped from Catholic schools because their parents are...

Too big to fail?

The banks, yes. But the church and the fed?

What do the Catholic Church and the Federal Reserve have in common? Both are big, both do important things, and both have far too much arrogance at the top. Both cry out for a cleansing.

Take the...