My friend Robert Ellis Gordon is dying of lupus, with months left to live. He's spent more than a decade teaching writing to prison inmates, written a terrific book called The Fun House Mirror from those experiences and crafted a rave-reviewed novel, When Bobby Kennedy was a Moving Man, on...

Will serious health reform meet the fate of the scorpion and the turtle? In that fable, the scorpion pleads with the turtle to carry him across a river. The turtle resists, fearing the scorpion's sting, but the scorpion reassures him that he'd do nothing so foolish, since both would drown...

Are U.S. taxpayers getting stiffed? Pfizer, Viagra's daddy, is using money from taxpayer-bailed-out banks to help buy major pharmaceutical competitor Wyeth in a $68 billion deal. That won't help taxpayers or consumers. Nor is it designed to. It will harm the companies' workers, 20,000 of whom will likely be...

Like most Americans, I'm guarding my dollars, but when my furnace died during Seattle's coldest winter in decades, I needed to replace it. And when I did, with a high-efficiency Trane model made in Trenton New Jersey, the costs and gains underscored key lessons about what we need to do...

Here's the dilemma: Detroit needs to sell cars to survive, and they need to sell them now. But every fuel-inefficient car they produce and put on the road creates an additional lien on our common future, by increasing our oil dependence and producing tons of greenhouse gases over its ten-to-twenty...

Remember when the McCain campaign accused Barack Obama of "already measuring the White House drapes." It was more false populism, suggesting that it was the bi-racial son of a single mother who embodied a sense of entitlement, instead of the admiral's son who couldn't remember how many houses he had....

I just came back from eight hours canvassing swing exurban neighborhoods 20 miles south of Seattle. Walking two precincts, I left materials on about a hundred doors, spoke to a dozen or so people who'd already voted, and told a handful how to turn in their absentee ballots. It was...

I'd thought little about Ralph Nader's potential electoral impact until I read recent polls suggesting he was drawing 3% among likely Ohio voters, 4% in Nevada (plus 1% for Cynthia McKinney), 3% in Pennsylvania, and 5% in Missouri. This means he might once again help tip an election.

Most...

It's tempting to begin taking the likelihood of Obama's victory just a bit for granted. The polls look good. McCain and Palin are flailing, and Ted Stevens is headed for jail. The Republicans have started their blame game.

But it's dangerous to assume that the election is over, or...

On election day four years ago, I was canvassing in home state of Washington, alternately knocking on doors for gubernatorial candidate Christine Gregoire and breaking to call Ohio and Florida. After three recounts, Gregoire won by 129 votes. I had no idea my state election was so close, but I...

When Sarah Palin joked about herself and her fellow hockey moms as pit bulls with lipstick, she may have revealed more than she intended. She made it sound a compliment--portraying herself and her peers as ordinary mothers who look good but are tough, tenacious, and defend their family at any...

What does it say about John McCain that he not only picked the least experienced Vice Presidential nominee in America's history, but picked someone he really didn't know? Departing so far from any normal concept of appropriate background, he should at least have had a sense of why this individual...

It makes sense for the Florida and Michigan delegations to be sanctioned by the DNC, as has now happened. If the Democratic Party is going to win elections, you can't have states capriciously violating agreed-on rules. But an equally critical reason to dock the states delegations is that for a...

Obama did the right thing by praising Clinton following the Oregon and Kentucky vote, and working to reweave the fabric of Democratic unity. And I'm delighted that Clinton said, "No matter what happens, I will work as hard as I can to elect a Democratic president this fall." But then...

With Hillary Clinton rejecting the compromise that Michigan Democratic leaders just crafted, the Democratic Rules Committee has a dilemma. Clinton keeps demanding that Michigan's delegates be apportioned according to the January 15 vote, where she was the sole major candidate on the Democratic ballot. But there's another twist that...

I'm back on the phones again, calling for Obama, and I'm glad that I am. It's tempting to do nothing but endlessly following the news, clicking on blog after blog as I root for Obama like I root for my local baseball team. But that doesn't actually change anything. My...

Continuing to parrot every potential Republican sound bite they can think of, Hillary Clinton's PR people have just sent out a mailer accusing Barack Obama of being insufficiently supportive of gun rights

But as Ben Smith describes in Politico, when Clinton's PR people created the display, they used a...

North Carolina activist David LaMotte just got a push poll call from the firm of Geoff Garin, the new head of Hillary Clinton's campaign team. It wasn't as bad as asking "would it change your mind if you knew John Kerry actually bought his Vietnam medals off eBay." Or "How...

Dear Hillary,

Reasons abound why you should do all you can to defeat John McCain--but for you, it should be personal. Maybe you've forgotten in the heat of the Democratic contest. But remember McCain's cruel joke about your daughter, when Chelsea was 18 and vulnerable. This alone should give you...

Obama's supposed evasion around "NAFTAgate" played a key role in Hillary Clinton taking Ohio. If there's any justice, her Bosnia fabrications should now bring her down in the remaining states. Repeatedly this spring, Clinton described sniper fire, evasive maneuvers, a cancelled greeting ceremony, and having to run "with our...