Drive eastbound from Los Angeles on Interstate 10. Just beyond downtown, travel through a long stretch of the San Gabriel Valley suburbs. After passing Pomona, then crossing over the L.A. County line, the scenery takes a turn toward the exurban. Layered over the hardscrabble desert landscape like a carpet is...

When voters cast their ballots for Barack Obama last year, they could have been forgiven for harboring the expectation that they were voting for, among other things, a more humane American immigration policy. On the campaign trail, Obama had made such enlightened statements as:

Ultimately, the danger to the...

One of the most timeworn and tiresome tactics of the right is to accuse anyone who talks publicly about the widening gap between rich and poor, the tax privileges of the affluent, or any other morally significant economic issue of engaging in "class warfare." The device usually achieves its desired...

What a pickle for the human rights hawks spraining their wrists to applaud President Obama's renewed focus on "The Right War" in Afghanistan. As it turns out, despite Laura Bush's much publicized entreaties on behalf of Afghan women, the government her husband put in place as the...

Check out Van Jones on Meet the Bloggers.

I just heard what I think might be one of the most creative policy ideas of the year, and it came from - of all people - Click and Clack on Car Talk.

I believe it was Clack's idea, to be...

It's impolite to talk about cancer.

That's about the best reason I can think of to explain why John McCain's stage IIA (or is it IIIB?) melanoma isn't the subject of every political chatterbox show on cable news. It certainly isn't because McCain has ever come clean and settled the...

**UPDATE: Guess I was wrong...it's ABC. Maybe it'll be a real interview after all. (Or not, judging by Charles Gibson's performance during the primary debate.)**

**UPDATE 2: Read this and smile.**

With Sarah Palin breathing new life into an otherwise listless presidential campaign, John McCain has been, pathetically,...

Here's an interesting tidbit about Sarah Palin's home state of Alaska: it's socialist.

When pundits refer to Alaska as the 'reddest of red states,' they could as easily be referring to its oligopolistic resource extraction-based economy and its redistributionist state taxation regime as to its electoral tendencies. Eighty percent of...

On Friday, following McCain's announcement that Sarah Palin was his choice for running mate, like way too many others I allowed myself to indulge in the fantasy that this was the stupidest decision of a GOP presidential candidate since Dan Quayle was tapped for the role. Now that my post-DNC...