Before the music swells, the long dissolve, and the credits roll, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and his merry band of right-wing Republicans who control a third of the state legislature are intent on making one final power play to squeeze the last drops of blood from California's public institutions. Schwarzenegger's hackneyed...

In April 1962, when U.S. Steel and five other steel corporations unilaterally decided to jack up their prices and squelch an intricate set of compromises that the Kennedy Administration had expended a great deal of effort in negotiating, President John F. Kennedy responded with an aggressive counter attack that shocked...

Paul Krugman recently penned an insightful article where he argues that the 1999-2009 decade should be called the "Big Zero" decade because over the course of ten years there was no real job growth or notable "progress" in tackling any of the nation's problems. But Krugman's view, I'm...

On the 30th anniversary of the ill-fated Soviet invasion of Afghanistan another lesson in armchair military sophistry graces the op-ed pages of the New York Times. This time around it's not Benny Morris who is calling for military aggression against Iran to stop its nuclear program but another...

A forty-vote Republican minority in the United States Senate controls the destiny of all legislation aimed at addressing the nation's most pressing needs after eight miserable years of Republican misrule and malfeasance. Welcome to California, America! Here in Sacramento, only thirteen Republican state senators control legislation relating to the state's...

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...