When I had the privilege of serving 14 months at the White House between 1996 and 1998, I got to know most of the Secret Service agents who worked there. I used to enjoy some time with them early each morning, when I regularly entered the White House complex through...

The Obama White House must consider last week to have been a pretty good one. When the president is attacked personally in the same week both from the right, by former Reagan speechwriter and Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, and from the left, by New York Times columnist Maureen...

Last week I argued in my column that, even though I strongly oppose the Stupak amendment because I am pro-choice, if things come down to a bad choice -- a national health care bill with the Stupak language -- or a worse choice -- no health care bill at all...

Cross-posted with The Hill.

I am a pro-choice liberal Democrat. I believe the Hyde Amendment, passed in 1977, which forbids the expenditure of federal tax dollars to fund abortions, directly or indirectly, is unfair and wrong. It discriminates against poor women. But it is passed every year,...

So it happened. A miracle. In the 2009 World Series, I became a Yankee Fan. May Dad forgive me.

Some background:

My first memory of why I should hate the Yankees goes back to when I was a kid in the 1950s. My dad had a simple political analysis...

With Tuesday night's results in, and Democratic candidate Bill Owens defeating Conservative-Republican candidate Doug Hoffman in New York's 23rd congressional district, I thought about the civil war within the Republican Party that preceded the election and will be further accelerated by the experience in this upstate New York conservative Republican...

It's time for liberals like me, who favor the public option or its functional equivalent, to give up on the idea and move forward to enact an historic, landmark national health insurance legislation. And to do so now -- not next week or next month.

Without the public option, the...

Cross-posted with The Washington Times.

One of my favorite dialogues from one of my favorite plays, Fiddler on the Roof, has Tevye, the elderly font of wisdom in the village of Anatevka, Russia, trying to mediate a bitter dispute between neighbors.

He always tried to see things both...

"Have you no shame? Have you no decency?" That was the question that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked during his important speech to the U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 24.

He was referring to the decision of those members of the General Assembly who remained in their seats when...

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Only in America. Correct that: Only in the polarized America of 2009. President Obama had just been named the 2009 recipient of one of world's highest honors, the Nobel Peace Prize. He is only the third sitting U.S. president to receive that honor, after Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson....

Re-read that headline.

I am not making this up.

A health care bill exists that would accomplish what the headline says.

Moreover, it has been verified by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), in a letter signed in May 2008 by the office's then-Director Peter R. Orszag, who...

Last week I described the political riddle of a national health care proposal, called the Healthy Americans Act (HAA), which mandates universal health care insurance for all Americans, pleasing liberals; which empowers individual choices and private market competition, which pleases conservatives; and which fundamentally restructures our health care system substantially...

I don't get it.

Two weeks ago, I wrote a column offering advice to Democrats and the White House that they could achieve a broad bipartisan consensus on health care by supporting S. 334, the "Healthy Americans Act" ("HAA"), introduced last year by liberal Democratic Sen....

Let's face it, whether you are conservative, moderate, or liberal, Democrat or Republican, if you are rational and fair, you should agree: Congressman Joe Wilson was rude, obnoxious, and offensive when he shouted out at President Barack Obama during Wednesday night's speech before a joint session of Congress, "You lie."...

I happen to be a liberal Democrat. And I think I'd probably prefer a single-payer system similar to Canada's -- in which the government guarantees all adequate health care but private medicine is still available.

But I also understand there are grave and legitimate concerns in this country about a...

The other night, shortly after Ted Kennedy's tragic passing, I heard Rachel Maddow on MSNBC express skepticism about those who described Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's long history of political compromise with conservative Republicans. Ms. Maddow, whose liberal views on the issues I mostly share and respect, may have mistakenly perceived...

Has there ever been a better example, at least in recent years, proving that the extreme left and extreme right share more in common than those on their own side of the ideological divide when it comes to the issue of health care?

On the far right: the shouters shouting...

When I agreed to debate Professor Grandin on Democracy Now, I was hoping for a fact-based dialogue that would shed light on the origins of the current crisis in Honduras and suggest possible resolutions to that crisis. Instead, I was shocked to hear Professor Grandin repeatedly misstate facts in...

One of the nine Republicans who voted last Thursday to confirm Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court was Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. (The final vote was 68-31, with only Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, unable to make the vote).

Mr. Graham had announced his vote...

I am guessing that in the early days of the Obama administration, probably shortly after the arrival of Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, the "strategic decision" on health care was made, one that we are now watching unfold in recent days in Washington.

I am guessing it was essentially...