How fitting that Professor Skip's last name is Gates. Thanks to Gates-gate and Birthers, we've taken our eyes off the prize of health care reform, just as lobbyists, their "centrist" shills and desperate GOP pols get into position to administer the fatal poison. Just as it was in 1993-1994, when...

Health care reform is wildly popular. Three separate polls show over 70% of Americans favor a public insurance plan. Remarkably, the majority of us are even willing to pay higher taxes to provide health insurance for our uninsured compatriots. (see here, here, and here).

But elder...

Last week, the nonpartisan Pew Center released its 2009 survey on American political values. Its headline could have read "Left Wins Culture War." As the Right ramps up for a Supreme Court showdown over abortion and gay marriage, this report couldn't be more timely. It's a clarion call...

Who will win the battle for the soul of the GOP? There's little need to follow the unfolding drama, because the verdict is already in. Look to the daughters. Meghan McCain has been excommunicated from the party by Father Rush, and Mother Bristol Palin is back on...

A young Barack Obama spent a few years as a community organizer. The community organizers I know and love have been at it for decades, and they don't have time to cook a meal, much less run a country. President Obama needs to delegate. Mr. President, set the Obamaniacs free....

Sound investment advisors and the wisdom of the ages give the same counsel. Diversify, or in other words, don't put all your eggs in one basket. Why didn't Bernard Madoff's investors heed this truism? Enough of their crocodile tears; they wanted their crocodile shoes and bags.

Any mentally competent adult...

If we shift the angle of vision from the habits we formed during the campaign, Hillary Clinton emerges into view as an inspired choice for secretary of state and a potential agent of transformational change -- exactly what President-elect Barack Obama is seeking.

Obama has a distinctly 21st century view...

In 1763, during the siege of Fort Dix by the Delaware, Mingo, and Shawnee nations, American colonists bestowed a parting gift of two winter blankets and one handkerchief on the Delaware's diplomatic delegation. Small-pox infected blankets and handkerchief. The Bush men, elder and Shrub, seem to have a similar sense...

With early voting ended, election monitors deployed in all the dodgy states, and polls giving Barack Obama a significant lead, a stolen election seems highly unlikely. But it's not quite time to relax our anxious vigilance. Markers have already been laid down to steal Obama's mandate.

What narrative might...

John McCain, the reborn populist, wants to divert your attention from the architects of our economic crisis: the Republican Party and its free market ideologues. It is an unconvincing posture, based on a distorted reading of American history.

Today's financial crisis is the predictable historical outcome of the policies...

What if John McCain had chosen a white man with Sarah Palin's extremist views as his running mate? Instead of a week of media glee that the maverick was back, would the punditocracy have been forced to dwell on a more hard-headed analysis of the power of the radical Right...

Hillary Clinton, we trust, will graciously assume her new role campaigning for the Democratic nominee, Barack Obama. We can look forward to her return to the Senate, where her intelligence, experience, tenacity, and newfound economic populism can be put to work leading the Democrats in the task of undoing the...

In a slow campaign week, the New York Times and the Washington Post have trawled their vaults to resurrect the eighties' campaign caricature of out-of-touch liberal Democrats. It seems instead that they are the ones out of touch with the American public.

Public opinion surveys published over...

Since John McCain emerged as the Repuliblican front-runner, conservative Republicans have been staggering through the stages of grief. James Dobson remains in denial. Rush Limbaugh, in character, is apoplectically enraged. CPAC organizers are instructing the faithful not to boo McCain's speech today. The inimitable Grover Norquist has smoothly sailed from...

Mike Huckabee's creationism and call for a time-out to honor Baby Jesus will play well in Iowa. But when Republicans get out of the Bible Belt, such declarations of faith are going to be read either as loopy or scary.

The Republican party has a problem. The conservatives'...

Monday's awkward, silent photo session of Al Gore and George W. Bush on the occasion of the presidential reception for American Nobel Prize winners is a testament to the ironic reversals of history. Gore is admired throughout the world. Only a third of Americans approve of Bush. With the presidential...

I don't know how tonight's CNN debate in Las Vegas will turn out. I'm not sanguine -- seven candidates, 90 second answers, race tightening or sewed up, depending on your poll. Expect a lot of mixed metaphors about gambling, boxing, and horse-racing in post-debate coverage. Expect to be depressed.

Former president Clinton is being charitable when he observes that some opponents of health care reform had an attitude of, "just say no to Bill Clinton." Hillary's later call out of the 'vast rightwing conspiracy' would be more apt.

Little-mentioned in the interminable debate about who killed health care...

Goodbye abortion, hello Islamofascism? Christian Right powerbroker Pat Robertson handed his much-coveted endorsement to Giuliani yesterday, claiming "The overriding issue before the American people is the defense of our population from the blood lust of Islamic terrorists."

Does Robertson's endorsement represent a fundamental shift among social conservatives away from...