The California State Senate adjourned at midnight unable to pass three stopgap bills that would have saved the state $7 billion. In an attempt to appease Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger the Democratic leaders of the state legislature hastily drew up the three complicated bills to try to stave off fiscal collapse...

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is accomplishing right now what he failed to do in 2005 when he tried to put the state's major labor unions out of business and downsize the state government. At that time there was no economic catastrophe to point to as an excuse to shred the...

Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared that the test of our nation was "not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger might be married to a Kennedy but his governing philosophy...

When his term mercifully expires next year, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger will be leaving the Golden State in the worst condition than at any time its history. If Schwarzenegger and his right-wing Republican co-conspirators get their way (as they always seem to do) they'll gut every social program and educational...

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and his Republican colleagues are using the trauma of the economic collapse and the record state budget deficit to implement policies they've been advocating for years. "This budget ought to be solved in one chunk, at one time," the governor says, "and let's do it quickly."...

Yesterday afternoon Glenn Beck and two of his guests argued that Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Party were "leftwing"; that "political correctness" led the committed white supremacist, James Von Brunn, to shoot a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC; and that ultimately President Barack Obama is the...

President Barack Obama's speech today in Cairo hit all of the right notes and was exactly what he needed to say after eight years of saber rattling, racist diatribes about "Crusades," and Biblical quotes affixed to "Worldwide Intelligence Updates." For years we've heard mouthpieces from the American Right uttering every...

President Barack Obama has done a symbolically extraordinary thing by nominating for the first time in U.S. history a person of Latino descent to the Supreme Court. The president has stayed true to the theme of his long campaign when he adopted "Si Se Puede" from the legendary Latina leader,...

In his most recent piece in the New York Times Paul Krugman asks: "Who would have thought that America's largest state, a state whose economy is larger than that of all but a few nations, could so easily become a banana republic?" Here in Sacramento I've watched the disaster unfold...

Since the time of the February 1979 revolution in Iran that swept Ayatollah Khomeini into power Americans have grown accustomed to looking down their noses at "Islamic fundamentalists." Many of us see these religious fanatics who call America "the Great Satan" and promise to "avenge the Crusades" as backward people...

Israel's Likudnik Prime Minister, Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu, was one of the driving forces behind the neo-conservative foreign policy doctrine of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). PNAC called for a new "realm" in the Middle East forged through aggressive military action. Its successful prodding of the United States...

Rightwingers splayed across the corporate media, including Condi Rice and Dick Cheney, constantly remind us that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 members of the Bush administration were doing their darnedest to keep the nation safe. Bending the law a little to coerce information out of known terrorists must be...

Dick Cheney insists on inserting himself into our political discourse in a very creepy, strange, and unaccountable way. Every time he appears he reminds us how terrible the last eight years were. With his unyielding assertions and tone of infallibility he seems to be one of the only prominent rightwingers...

Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Laura Ingraham, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, and countless other talk-radio personalities fill our public airwaves with hours of political advice, political analysis, and political prescriptions for the nation's future. Their certitude on all subjects is awe-inspiring and like George W. Bush they "don't do...

Every Sunday I look forward to reading Frank Rich's column in the New York Times. He's one of the few commentators the Times has who can both write and think. Last Sunday he offered a lament of sorts about the current state of the Republican Party. "We need more than...

Right after the climactic finish of World War Two, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, while picking through the aftermath of the world's biggest bloodbath to date, famously called the waging of aggressive war "essentially an evil thing." "[T]o initiate war of aggression," the tribunal concluded, "is not only an...

Newly-minted "Democratic" Senator Arlen Specter's decision to abandon his party rather than face an ignominious defeat in the Republican primary is a welcome development that illustrates once again the rot that is currently eating away at the innards of the GOP. Senator Specter (D-PA) switched parties for the same reason...

From the celebratory atmosphere over the weekend at the California Democratic State Convention, titled: "California Democrats -- A New Era," held at the Sacramento Convention Center, one could get the impression that the Democratic Party's base is strong and the leadership of the State Legislature has made all the right...

Liz and Dick Cheney, Bill Bennett, Ari Fleischer, and countless other commentators have saturated the public airwaves of late ever since the Obama Administration decided to make public the Bush torture memos. These apologists for war crimes have been jawboning the issue from every conceivable angle. Why are these barbarians...

On August 1, 2002, then Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee, who now serves on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, sent an 18-page memo he wrote to the Acting Counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency. It surfaced as one of the four "torture memos" from the...