When talk was circulating that there would be a Medicare "buy-in" for people 55 to 64 years of age, the progressives who worked so hard to keep a public option "on the table" believed for a moment that there'd be a good compromise out of the Senate. Joe Lieberman's goal...

President Barack Obama's Nobel lecture last Thursday in Oslo shows he understands that "peace is not merely the absence of visible conflict." "Only a just peace based upon the inherent rights and dignity of every individual can truly be lasting," he said. Hearing a president say this is...

Fanciful prescriptions for "success." Voters who value peace demoralized. Siding with war hawks to triangulate against progressives. Another $30 billion the American people will have nothing to show for.

As Kurt Vonnegut used to say, "So it goes."

President Barack Obama has decided to prolong the debilitating American...

Like the GI Bill that gave access to a college degree for the first time to a generation of Americans, the creation of the California State University system fifty years ago did the same for Californians. In the decades that followed there was an explosion of innovation in all fields...

It's truly touching that Goldman Sachs' CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who recently said that his too-big-to-fail, Fed-backed holding company is doing "God's work," has offered a mea culpa (of sorts) for his firm's past sins. Our beneficent overlords at Goldman Sachs promise to bestow upon small business a boon of...

Brit Hume of FOX News once compared Iraq's murder rate to California's to downplay the level of American casualties because the two places are similar in geographical size. On August 26, 2003, Hume opined:

"Two hundred seventy-seven U.S. soldiers have now died in Iraq, which means that statistically...

A piece in yesterday's New York Times by Peter Baker and Helene Cooper reported that all of the U.S. military options for Afghanistan that President Barack Obama is currently contemplating include some kind of troop escalation. "Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates appears to be supportive of the middle option,"...

Suburbanites and independent voters in Virginia and New Jersey broke Republican in yesterday's election. Last night I saw CNN's John King tell his viewers that this phenomenon could only mean that people are sending a signal to President Barack Obama that they're fed up with "all that spending" in Washington....

Time magazine's cover story this week titled "What's Still Wrong with Wall Street," by Allan Sloan, is a remarkable indicator of where the public stands on the recent obliteration of the economy by a gang crooked financiers and speculators. It shows that even the corporate media is now making...

One Republican candidate who wants to be California's next governor is Steve Poizner, whose economic prescriptions for healing the state's fiscal maladies are like a quack doctor who "bleeds" his patient by attaching leeches. Poizner's PR people came up with a catchy "10-10-10" slogan. He throws up three arbitrary numbers...

"Deficits don't matter." When Vice President Dick Cheney uttered this famous line he was making a political judgment, not an economic one. In 2001, when the newly selected President George W. Bush and his posse rode into Washington they immediately began in earnest the chicanery, lying and recklessness that we...

During the initial 24-hour news cycle following the announcement that the President of the United States had won the Nobel Peace Prize we heard all manner of demeaning, diminishing, and ridiculing of the President and the prize. Beltway pundits David Brooks and Ruth Marcus appearing on Jim Lehrer's News Hour...

The Americans for Prosperity Foundation's "National Defending the American Dream Summit" held last weekend at the Marriott Crystal Gateway Hotel in Arlington, Virginia was an assemblage whose only distinguishing feature was its astonishing homogeneity both in thought and in demography. When they were not loudly applauding President Obama's (and America's)...

Sam Tanenhaus, a senior editor for the New York Times, has written a useful book about modern conservatism and its discontents. It is a short intellectual history tracing the pedigree of ideas that have informed conservative (and liberal) thought over the past couple of centuries focusing mainly on the last...

On October 23, 1983, when Shia militants in Lebanon killed 241 American military personnel outside the Beirut airport with a suicide truck bomb, President Ronald Reagan vowed to continue the troops' mission in Lebanon. Reagan had repeatedly claimed that Lyndon Johnson forced American soldiers to fight in Vietnam "with one...

The billionaire former CEO of eBay, Meg Whitman, has formally announced her candidacy to run for governor of California. Her "platform" (if one can call it that) is nothing short of a scorched earth campaign against the public sector she seeks to manage. She wants to fire 40,000 state workers,...

Time magazine's cover story on Glenn Beck by David Von Drehle is a clinic for journalism students who wish to learn about faux balance, false equivalencies, straw men, and omissions of important facts. Nowhere in this piece does Mr. Drehle mention the fact that 62 of Beck's sponsors...

When Fox News' Glenn Beck called President Barack Obama a "racist" and claimed that he had "a deep-seated hatred for white people" an African-American netroots group, ColorOfChange.org, organized a successful boycott of Beck's corporate sponsors. It wasn't long until fifty seven of Beck's sponsors jumped ship lest they be associated...

For about thirty years now the American middle class, (and by "middle class" I mean those of us who make about $45,000 to $75,000 per year), has been taking it on the chin. And for that reason half measures and lukewarm "reform" isn't going to cut it. So let's get...

Among the thousands of contributions to his country that Edward Kennedy made throughout the course of his 46-year career in the United States Senate, one episode that stands out to me is his role in exposing the human costs of the American war in Vietnam. In early January 1968, just...