If Wall Street hates Obama today for putting a cap on the salaries of executives taking a government bailout, he finds himself in the tradition of the president he is most compared to.

From the start of his presidency FDR stood up to Wall Street, who hated him in return....

Americans fought an eight-year war of liberation against not only the most powerful monarchy on earth in 1775 but against monarchy itself. Yet once the dust settled and it was time to write a Constitution compromises left America a legacy of monarchy now gone from most of Europe.

Among...

The trial of the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at President Bush was postponed on Tuesday. They are trying to decide whether to charge him with assaulting or just insulting Bush.

But Bush can pick up the phone today, call his Iraqi puppet Nuri al-Maliki, and tell him to...

The debate over whether to save the American auto industry with yet more billions of taxpayers' money is the wrong one. The discussion should be about how to wean America away from the car altogether.

Instead of sinking billions now and probably more billions later in propping up a...

Hubris on Wall Street and in Baghdad felled the imperious Republican Party. They had a vise-like grip on power and thankfully blew it. Obama happened to be a damned good candidate too.

He's pulling the country from the brink. This is a victory over massively misguided and failed policy. The...

Class is the real "C-word" in America. The pretense is that class is a European thing. The myth is since we cast off a monarchy at independence we are all somehow middle class.

Of course nothing is further from the truth. It is in the interest of the class...

10:00 President Lula of Brazil trashes speculators on Wall Street for undermining world markets and explains why governments are needed to regulate the irresponsible financiers.

10:14 Bush approaches podium for his last speech to the UN. Thankfully. Bush says the UN and other multilateral organizations are "needed now more than...

The moment I heard John McCain had chosen Sarah Palin I thought the decision had Karl Rove written all over it. Then Sidney Blumenthal wrote that Rove, who knows the American psyche like no other operative, wanted Mitt Romney and that Palin was McCain's call. Whoever chose her is...

"Listen people. When you sit at your one kitchen table and work out the family budget you are faced with choices. You only have so much money. So you have to decide between paying your kids' tuition or going on vacation. And you gotta go on vacation alone because you...

If I hear the word "dream" again during this Democratic Convention, I think I'll fling something at the screen. The time for dreaming is over. Harry Truman tried to bring us national health insurance and we're still dreaming about it. Europe has had public health care, free universities and a...

Ted Kennedy, who was honored Monday night, has been a force in the U.S. Senate for a very long time. The following is a little known story but typical of the kind of power Kennedy wielded in the Senate, as early as the late 1960s. This is a story related...

On June 4, the night Obama clinched the delegate count, many commentators were stunned that Hillary refused to go away. I wrote a blog saying Obama should freeze her out. Instead, he embraced her in a bid for her base. But he largely failed. Nearly three months later, she...

It's been non-stop Russia from rightist talk show hosts and columnists since the Georgia war began. They are promulgating the Republican talking points designed to keep alive the one issue that might give John McCain the White House.

The first major poll since the crisis erupted on Aug. 7...

Now that the dust is settling the big question about the dust-up in Georgia remains: Why was Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili so stupid to start this war?

There are a couple of theories. One is Saakashvili was under the mistaken impression the US military, even NATO, would...

If you didn't know who Randy Scheunemann was until the New York Times wrote about him Thursday morning I bet he and John McCain preferred it that way. He is a lot more than just a former lobbyist for Georgia.

After being a Capitol Hill staffer from the mid-1980s (working...

The shooting at the Unitarian Church in Knoxville, TN on Sunday that left two adults dead and seven wounded was an unequivocal act of terrorism.

Though the international community at the UN General Assembly has been unable to come up with a common definition of terrorism as it applies to...

The vetoed sanctions resolution against Zimbabwe at the UN Security Council on Friday has exposed the fault lines of international tensions than divide the West from Africa, Russia from the West and the United States from South Africa.

The surprise Chinese and Russian vetoes provoked sharp words in the...

From a human viewpoint, the invasion of Iraq has been an unmitigated disaster. It has caused regional instability for the foreseeable future. But seen from Bush's White House, the war has been "won" and victory is being consolidated. Bush meant it when he said "Mission Accomplished." He had four main...

The Second Amendment was written after a war in which a new nation without a standing army defeated the biggest standing army on the planet. To defend itself, the new country relied on citizens arming themselves in civilian militias.

Ever since Britain had permanently garrisoned troops in Massachusetts to...

Thabo Mbeki inherited the South African presidency from Nelson Mandela. Though not of the same stature, Mbeki was a leading activist with the African National Congress against European colonialism and white supremacy.

Working mostly from abroad, Mbeki was a comrade of Robert Mugabe, who was engaged in a similar struggle...