I was 26 years old in 1989, and I remember very vividly the excitement, the joy, the sense of a once-in-a-lifetime world transformation that came in that year when tyrannies were toppled all over Europe.

Those who didn't grow up with the Cold War will have a hard time...

Public education may be crumbling in many of our cities, but if American schoolchildren are still taught history at all, they probably do know that on this day, five hundred and seventeen years ago, Christopher Columbus (they will not know that this Hispanicized Genoese sailor, born Christoffa Corombo, knew himself...

First media check of the morning - my web browser opens to the NYT - and I thought it was a joke. "Has someone hacked the Times site?"

Nope. Obama really did win the Nobel Peace Prize, eight months after his inauguration.

Now I know a lot of people are...

A quick local note:

It's a banal enough observation that money often drags arrogance in its wake, and power even more so. Here in New York City, our Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, is a very very rich man who bought himself a powerful office. Perhaps he's been saved from a reputation...

Health care reform is the issue of the day, and President Obama is blowing it. He's trying to reform the health insurance system, not the healthcare system itself; and doing so on the backs of the rich and of small business owners. Mandates on employers will be disastrous for the...

A long time ago in a different life, when the Iranian Islamic Revolution was less than a decade old, I was a student at the small New England college where Mansour Farhang taught (and still teaches) political science. Farhang had been the Iranian ambassador to the UN in the early...

A few more words about the use of torture in pursuit of national security goals in the wake of former Vice President Dick Cheney's deeply sick speech at the American Enterprise Institute on May 21.

About that speech itself I will say very little, since so many others,...

May Third, 2009, was Pete Seeger's 90th birthday. WNYC in New York hosted a retrospective of his work, and an hour long program, "The Protest Singer: An Intimate Conversation with Pete Seeger." NPR aired an "appreciation." There was a big concert in his honor at Madison Square...

Other professional obligations have kept me from writing in this space for the last few months. During that time, my piece on the influence of Friedrich Hayek on modern political thinking made it from print to Dissent Magazine's online edition, so I can finally offer the...

A few brief items, and then to work.

The question before us is, Does The New York Times have any dignity at all? Since early January, The Times has employed William Kristol as a weekly columnist. Kristol is a right-winger so extreme that he teeters on the divide at...

I'd like to start by mentioning a piece that I wrote for Dissent magazine, on the influential economist Friedrich Hayek, a hero of the right. It's in the current edition, Winter 2008. I'd been wanting to write about Hayek for a while, and I was pleased with how it...

Like any thinking person, I had mixed feelings about Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speech at Columbia on Monday. Not as regards the freedom of speech issue; I'd defend the right of Nazis and Stalinists to speak publicly. But there is a difference between allowing someone to speak and providing a...

Do you have a favorite right-wing spouter of nonsense? Someone who particularly appalls you? I have to admit that there's one right-wing pundit who gets to me more than most, even though he's nowhere near the worst of them. So I'd like to occasionally and recurringly take issue on these...

Last week I wrote about Michael Moore's ridiculous new film, Sicko, and some of the equally ridiculous right-wing reactions to it. Shortly thereafter, I received a challenge from Michael Cannon, a health care policy expert at the Cato Institute. Cannon highlighted some points for debate, and we agreed to...

I'd been holding off on seeing Michael Moore's new film, Sicko, because I am really more interested in the right-wing reaction to it than I am in the film itself. As the author of a book that harshly criticized Moore -- from a left-liberal point of view -- for...

So Bush will spare I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby jail time for his perjury. Could this surprise anyone? Libby, as Dick Cheney's former deputy, truly knows where the bodies are buried - and given what we know of Cheney's role in formulating the torture policies at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and...

Three items of interest today, two from the radical far-right journal The National Review, one from real life.

Over at National Review, John Derbyshire -- an occasional voice of reason at that depressing haven for social fantasy of all kinds -- observes, "The exchanges about the Senate's...

The New York Times recently ran an op-ed piece by Sam Brownback. Brownback is the Kansas senator and influential "cultural conservative" who is running for president. The background to the piece is that, at the first Republican presidential debate on May 3, the candidates were asked if any among...

Perhaps starting a blog with a comment about the Iraq war is a bit much. But this is the week after Memorial Day; we are in a war; and we're losing. Surely our soldiers deserve a public discussion of the war and the politics that fuel it that is as...