"And [Lieberman] will at last be only a minor annoyance" -- Casablanca, 1942, paraphrase shown.

Time to get on with it. Just as the President has done all in his power to get countries like Iran to engage as a full partner with the rest of the world, but has...

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves"--Julius Caesar, Act I, ii.

But for his personal tax problems, Tim Geithner would have been a consensus choice of Wall Street for Treasury Secretary last fall. As President of the New York Federal Reserve, he knew all...

JP Morgan's Chief Executive Officer, Jamie Dimon, wrote an op-ed piece for Friday (the 13th, very apropos!)'s Washington Post, arguing that the big banks should not be broken up. Whereas Goldman's Lloyd Blankfein invoked the 'divine right' theory ("I am doing God's work") of big banks, Dimon was refreshingly...

"It [your opera] had too many notes, remove a few and it will be perfect"
--Emperor to Mozart in Amadeus.

The battle for the soul of the Republican Party is over. Conservatives and the moderate have come together behind a constitutional amendment that would prohibit Congress from passing any...

President Obama is about to make a momentous decision: whether and to what extent to commit the United States to continuous war in Afghanistan. It is the most difficult decision I think this, or any other president, has probably confronted.

History provides conflicting advice. Foreign occupiers of Afghanistan always fail...

Buddy, can you spare a credit default option?

Class, come to order. Yesterday, we discussed the dismal unemployment numbers, and what those numbers translated into when put in terms of real human lives. For politicians to wish these figures to get worse so as to bring down the party in...

Crazed teabagging and screaming townhall meetings notwithstanding, the Republicans and right wing have never been so thoroughly distrusted and even despised by the bulk of the electorate. A smaller percentage of people nationally trust Republicans to solve their problems than there are dentists who do not recommend Crest®.

In Washington...

Barring illness, Dick Cheney will be the Republican Presidential nominee in 2012. Of course, the mainstream media will yap away for the next two years about the polls and chances and strategies of Tim Pawlenty, Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney and anyone else in the Republican Party who does not cheat...

Rachel Maddow reported last night Democrats in the Senate are considering holding colleagues accountable for halting Republican filibusters by stripping seniority and chairmanships from those who do not vote for cloture.

Let us demand it.

The Democratic Senate Campaign in 2008 was largely focused on getting enough Senators to bring...

Last time, we were not only lied into war, but those who did the cheerleading and lying neither volunteered themselves nor did any of their children.

So, this time, before Michelle Malkin, or Eric Cantor, or Liz Cheney, or Rich Lowry, get a nanosecond on any other network but...

Great Depressions do not have single causes. As John Kenneth Galbraith pointed out in The Great Crash: 1929, a key cause of the 1930s Depression was the severe contraction of consumption, due to a negative wealth effect, lost wages, and a destruction of confidence. The stimulus package was designed to...

Late night owling it on CSPAN, I report some encouraging events in the Senate Finance Committee markup of the Baucus bill that has met with deservedly widespread criticism. If the trend continues, something very good may yet emerge. The following are recounted in alphabetical order:

Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) had...

Great pitching will always beat great hitting, and vice versa. --Casey Stengel

Two months ago President Obama was strongly urged to get concrete about the health care reform package he wanted, to campaign actively and on television for support, to remind Democratic members of Congress that they face far...

The most important meeting held thus far on health care reform was totally ignored by the media. I mean totally. Even Rachel, Olbermann and Ed.

The meeting was the most important because the witnesses are the health care providers, representing those who actually deliver health care to patients.

Imagine,...

"That he is mad, 'tis true; 'tis true, 'tis pity; and pity 'tis, 'tis true." Hamlet, II, ii.

Health care reform with universal coverage and a public plan to help control costs should be passed because it is right and necessary. It also happens to be great politics for the...

Sen. Ted Kennedy was known to lament his decision not to accept Richard Nixon's 'offer' on health care reform to impose an employer mandate to get the country close to universal coverage. He need not have wasted his remorse. Nixon's transcripts expressing shameful indifference bordering on a near-wish that Kennedy...

Pathetically but predictably, the health care reform debate is not focused on health care or reform, but rather on imagery meant to trigger our reptilian responses. In another article, I shall address what the "debate" should really be about (hint: improved health!), but in the public interest, in the hopes...

The public health care plan is the major lightening rod of the health care reform "debate" (which, thus far, has not been about health care or reform!). It provides the radical right "evidence" to engineer fear of "socialism" and "a government takeover" that make seemingly rational people scream for the...

Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy uttered the words that would come to define their presidencies ("New Deal" and "New Frontier") in their acceptance speeches at the Democratic National Conventions.

FDR said simply that he would offer a new deal to the American people. By that he meant that the...

-Men of small caliber in public office find scorn of expert knowledge a convenient screen for hiding their own mental barrenness. (--Wilderness Warrior, p. 411)

I was wary about choosing the word "epic" to describe Douglas Brinkley's recently-launched volume, Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (Harper Collins),...