Now that a Guatemalan court has convicted General Erfrain Rios Montt of genocide maybe we can better come to terms with the history of the early 1980s when the Reagan Administration was determined to vanquish communism in Central America. We should recall that General Montt was...

Washington Republicans, with their obstructionism and worship of austerity as the answer to all of our economic ills, are creating an opportunity for the Democrats to offer a more appealing alternative (if they're not too lame or bought off to seize the initiative). By giving the country nothing to think...

So we've reached the 10th anniversary of President George W. Bush's "Mission Accomplished" spectacle, the nadir of any U.S. presidency since the time Richard Nixon made his getaway in a helicopter from the White House lawn. The aircraft carrier stunt was a Karl Rove P.R. production designed to...

Whenever David Brooks and Thomas Friedman begin singing from the same hymnal you can bet the next public policy catastrophe is knocking at the door. This time around they've become boosters for online college courses as a panacea to cure the ills afflicting public colleges and...

Apologists for the war of aggression against Iraq that President George W. Bush launched ten years ago claim the United Nations and various European nations' intelligence services "believed" Iraq had "weapons of mass destruction." We constantly hear from former Bush officials that "everybody got it wrong" on Iraq when it...

As sure as the sun rises in the east we can count on seeing a host of North America's most prominent "conservatives" and right-wingers hyperventilate in the days ahead about what a horrible "friend of Castro" Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was. There will be obituaries that refer to Chavez as...

In late-2011, when House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell threatened not to raise the debt ceiling (a political tactic never before used by Congress that affected the nation's credit rating) the novelty of it had some pull. But when they followed up...

It's a welcome step to see President Obama appoint two Vietnam veterans to serve as Secretaries of State and Defense. John Kerry and Chuck Hagel are two people who have experienced war directly and have voiced publicly their deep ambivalence about war.

Too bad in...

In his State of the Union address when President Barack Obama paid tribute to Desiline Victor, the 102-year-old African-American woman from North Miami who was forced to wait for hours to cast her ballot last November, he was highlighting not only the Florida Republican...

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid talked a big game about taking apart the filibuster leading up to his Grand Bargain with Republican leader Mitch McConnell. The Kentucky senator now promises to play nice. But like Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown, he has once again snookered the...

When President Barack Obama signed executive orders yesterday outlining 23 actions aimed at blunting the effects of gun violence in America he urged citizens to contact their congressional representatives: "Get them on record," he said.

Ask your member of Congress if they support universal background checks to...

During the Republican primaries Newt Gingrich tried to distance himself from the deeply unpopular "Ryan budget" that would voucherize Medicare and shred the social safety net by labeling it "right-wing social engineering." Truer words have never left the former Speaker's lips. Yet despite President Obama's re-election...

With the stroke of a pen Michigan Governor Rick Snyder reduced the earning potential of millions of people, lowered the quality of the state's schools and government services, and set up the next fiscal crisis when, lo and behold, they discover that low-wage workers have little...

The rubbish that House Speaker John Boehner and other congressional Republicans keep dishing out about the federal budget shows the multimedia "bubble" that envelops the GOP and its mouthpieces is pretty durable. Even after Mitt Romney's loss at the hands of President Obama that "shocked" both...

With drones from the beginning there has been a kind of technological determinism associated with the idea that since the United States possesses this relatively new technology it should use it. Facing the uncertainty of reelection, President Obama became so concerned about the lawlessness of his drone killings he

California Governor Jerry Brown deserves our heartfelt appreciation for his hard work for the Yes on Proposition 30 campaign these past few months. The percentage of Proposition 30's victory mirrored the percentage of the vote Brown won in 2010 when he defeated in the governor's race the former...

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's graceless statement regarding President Barack Obama's reelection, where he stands by the Republicans' "our way or the highway" philosophy of governance, proves that he and his fellow travelers remain as ideologically rigid as ever and have no intention of working with the president...

Rex Tillerson, the CEO of ExxonMobil, sees global climate change as an "engineering" problem to be managed. The guy in charge of a giant fossil fuel conglomerate thinks that human civilization can cope with rising sea levels, extreme weather events, unprecedented droughts, mass extinctions of fish and the...

The unrepentant neo-cons and backbenchers on Mitt Romney's foreign policy team, such as Dan Senor and Cofer Black, always advise their candidate to attack signs of "weakness" coming from President Obama. The Administration's announcement of direct talks between the U.S....

The CNN reporter, Candy Crowley, who moderated Tuesday night's presidential debate at Hofstra University has joined the ranks of journalists inside the "liberal media" that the right-wing echo chamber will forever smear, slime, and loathe. The Republicans, along with their formidable propaganda outlets, Fox News and AM Talk...