"Winability," affability, experience,( i.e. a Clintonian Cabinet ready to hit the ground running) were the key catch-phrases the 250 guests left with along with their 'Hillary for President' badges from the Chicago Dinner with Hillary co-hosted by the husband and wife duo of JB and MK Pritzker last week in...

(Syrian Ambassador to the US Imad Moustapha and President George W. Bush)

New York University professor Alon Ben-Meir has written an eloquent and compelling essay on why Syria's role in any Israel-Palestine negotiation is...

I was at a dinner party the other evening where the conversation moved swiftly through movies, the New York real estate market and plastic surgery before landing firmly on presidential politics. We started with possible candidate Michael Bloomberg (doesn't look presidential), and ended with Mitt Romney (If Mattel made...

We cannot express how relieved and elated we were when University of St. Thomas President, Father Dennis Dease, suddenly appeared in front of our banner today to tell us he had changed his mind and would be inviting Archbishop Desmond Tutu to speak at...

A few weeks ago I was working on a story about Ramadan and Muslims in the Bay area, where I live. I was surprised by some of my findings during the research and interviews, in particular the increasing concern about practicing religion in public and being identified as a...

The impressive petition drives and enthusiasm of the Draft Al Gore for president movement considered, I still don't think Al Gore wants to enter a knockdown drag-out campaign for the Democratic nomination. He's built too much credibility - maybe even an upcoming Nobel Prize - with his crusade to save...

Thanks to the recent obvious failures of conservative policies when played out on the national scale, progressives now have an opportunity to win over many to their cause and redefine the political spectrum for generations to come. However, their potential will not be realized unless they move quickly. David...

Most of us accept Tip O'Neill's adage that all politics is local. Yet, most of us want to play on the big stage, push for change from the top down. Sometimes it works, but real movements for social change are very local. Think about the 1960s civil rights movement...

Well then, I knew eventually that the parasites using my religion for cover in order to pursue their politics of hate would either finally expose themselves as the anti-Semites that they are or be run-out of town. I had hoped the latter would come first, frankly, because I thought us...

Let's suppose it is October, 2008 and let's suppose the election race had a front runner. What would all the political reporters be doing? We'd all be dusting off Yogi Berra's cliche that "it ain't over till it's over" and writing that it wasn't over yet and pondering the various...

This past week felt like a bad sci-fi movie released by the moguls of Washington. Many of the Republican notables have finally broken out of their pods and emerged as full fledged space aliens with a mission from planet Xandur to destroy the constitution and bring terror down upon the...

Last night, a Republican was the victor in one of the most important political contests of 2007. With apologies to the debaters in Michigan, the contest last night with the most promise for a more accountable democracy was won by Jason Perillo. Perillo, a publicly financed Republican defeated a publicly...

This week marks the fifth anniversary of Congress's vote to authorize the Bush Administration to overthrow the government of Iraq by military force. The Nation opposed the war authorization. In "An Open Letter to Congress," which we published on the magazine's cover on the eve of the vote, we...

Nearing the end of a catastrophic presidency George Bush seeks redemption in odd ways. Having wrecked Iraq he takes aim at Iran. Having denied global warming, he asks others to fix it. Having waged war on a credit card, he mimics fiscal prudence in symbolic budget battles with Congress.

It's...

In the '60s, the media pushed the country against the Vietnam War. The Tet Offensive bled onto living room TV sets, Walter Cronkite came out against the war, citizens were outraged and convinced.

The same with Watergate: Central and somewhat trusted media outlets pushed and probed and...

Read Part I of this conversation here.

For the past couple of weeks, I've been posting pieces of my ongoing conversation with Naomi Klein, about her new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. You can watch our first encounter here, and read our earlier conversations...

Washington, DC -- This morning, the Justice Department announced that American Electric Power (AEP) -- one of the most recalcitrant operators of outmoded, dirty coal power plants in the country -- has agreed to spend $4.6 billion cleaning up its 46 dirty units in the Ohio Valley, including three of...

The 2006 Congressional elections were a turning point for U.S. trade policy. One issue that helped Democrats retake the Congress was a renewed sense of distrust among the electorate of our government's trade policy, which is commonly mislabeled as "free trade." President Bush has lost his "fast track" authority to...

Following his announcement yesterday that he will be supporting Wall Street's push to expand NAFTA into Peru, Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) has embarked on a campaign of misdirection - ironically (or perhaps, predictably) similar to the original campaign of deception that marked the original debate over NAFTA.

Here is...

A recent book has been criticized for vastly exaggerating the influence of the Israel lobby in Washington. As a former senior advisor to the White House, and a longtime active resident of Washington, let me tell you that the opposite is the truth. As all the other lobbies are shutting...

What do San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, Newark Mayor Cory Booker and Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson share in common? They are three mayors who are speaking out forcefully against the failed, racist drug war.

Last week Mayor Newsom gave a passionate interview about the need to end...

On December 31, 2006, the health insurance I purchase through a group of freelance artists and writers cost me $4715/year. On January 1, it jumped to $12,268. That's $1.40 per hour. I watch a Dodgers game, and I'm down $3.50 by the 7th inning. I go to sleep, and I've...

Lost in a haze of hyperreal distractions and the weakening of our body politic, we forget in fact how our planet came into being: Violent eruptions, long periods of stability, sometimes equilibrium. But its eruptions were serious, and nothing to shrug off....

The amount of disinformation about Muslims is disconcerting. One popular smear is that Muslims are in an alliance with the left to take over the West; it is an allegation that far right loves to use.

The other, equally popular and equally absurd, idea is that Muslims do...

In the spring, as the scandal at Walter Reed Army Medical Center dominated the headlines, the President promised to fix the problems facing returning veterans. Congress proposed the best veterans' budget we've ever seen, including the biggest increase in funding for vets' health care in 77 years.

But more...

Unless you happen to live in Virginia or New York, right now Hillary Clinton is doing more than both of your U.S. Senators to prevent the Bush Administration from attacking Iran.

How does that make you feel?

On October 1, Senator Clinton took a step that no other Senator...

Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the amazing Technicolor dream coat.

What's this I hear about Los Angeles cops having contests to see who can make the most arrests or impound the most vehicles in twenty-four hours? Has all that sushi made the LA police go soft? What happened...

The 40th anniversary of the death of Che Guevara elicited considerable media attention, mostly about his iconic image captured on T-shirts throughout the world. There were the standard snarky asides that many young people wearing those T-shirts have scant notion of who Che was, but the journalists reporting the story...

The sixth Republican presidential debate was pass-fail for former Senator Fred Thompson. To succeed, all he needed to do was stay alert and not nod off in the middle of an answer.

That doesn't mean the audience didn't doze off every so often. There was a build-up to this one,...

Richard Nixon's observation about Fred Thompson being "dumb as hell" is just one of thousands of aspersions cast in the Oval Office and captured on tape. Test your knowledge of Tricky Dick's bountiful Oval Office bile:

1) What did Richard Nixon call his Secretary of the Treasury, George Shultz?

When it comes to making policy in the Middle-East, the United States has consistently and unilaterally pursued a double-standard in favor of Israel. There is no better example of that than the U.S.'s position on the Iranian nuclear issue.

Under the Non-Proliferation Treaty - which Iran is a member...

Some of us think to ourselves, "It can't happen to me," or, "It can't happen here." We think, "I'm a good person and I don't hurt anybody. I live in a safe neighborhood. I couldn't possibly be a gunshot victim, and neither could my family. It can't happen to me."

Few would argue with the fact that we have an educational crisis in South Los Angeles. Consider this: of the close to 4,000 kids that enter a ninth grade public school each year in the 45 square-mile area between USC and the Los Angeles Airport, fewer than 1,600 of them...

Another day, another story about an out of control private security contractor shooting. This time it is an Australian run company, Unity Resources Group, was returning from escorting a USAID subcontractor convoy. They shot two women in a car. The Washington Post reports, "'A vehicle got close to them...

Marisa Treviño has done a great job of covering the opposition to the Texas border wall among the border communities for us at FDL. These border towns now have Tancredo's pale ass pretty...

(Senator Gary Hart and Steve Clemons at Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley's official residence in Annapolis)

During October and November, Washington College's C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience will host five former and current U.S....

"The best way to kill a bad product is with good advertising." That's one of the oldest maxims in the ad business, an industry I have spent my career in, usually online but with a fair amount of traditional branding experience as well.

Simply what it means is that good...

The secret is out that No Child Left Behind's brand of measuring success and failure for students and schools does not work. For five years, principals and teachers across the country have been subjected to immense pressure to bump up students' test scores, by any means necessary. While NCLB certainly...

Sovereignty (n) -- government free from external control

Is Iraq a truly sovereign state, or is the Maliki government a puppet of America? We may know the answer to this crucial question in a very short time. Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki could show independence from American interests in many ways,...

Faster than you can say the word "Sicko" and turn around 3 times, the Democrats' promise of health care for all has gone from "Universal Medicare For All" to "Individual Insurance Mandate". In Monday's New York Times, Paul Krugman defends that reversal in an article entitled "Why Not Single Payer?"

Yankee Stadium erupted in thunderous booing when Rudy Giuliani's mug flashed on the jumbotron during the seventh inning stretch. Could New Yorkers' chilly reception of their former mayor, (even in the middle of "God Bless America"), be the result of the fact that he continues to milk shamelessly for his...

It was hard to miss the clarion call for class based affirmative action seen in the pages of The New York Times the past few weeks. Starting with a September 24 op-ed from Jerome Karabel, the UC-Berkeley sociologist, and in two articles from "The College Issue"...