So you're at the doctor. A nurse takes a history and some vital measurements. Heart rate is checked. Perhaps an EKG checks the electrical activity of your heart. You give a vial of blood, so it's typed, checked for cholesterol and sugars (and if you're a man, prostate specific antigen,...

Any day now. Maybe next week. Soon. Eventually. It is reasonable to expect, let's say, that Congress will figure out how to borrow money to pay the bills it has already agreed to incur.

It is more than reasonable to want the federal government to spend something closer to...

Almost ten years ago, a small American-led force overthrew the Taliban government of Afghanistan. The invasion had been fast, that Afghan government had been weak, and you could have been tempted in 2002 -- before the ashes in lower Manhattan had cooled or the Pentagon had been rebuilt -- to...

Few political columnists in the United States are Puerto Rican. Few political columnists in the United States follow the twists and turns in the debates over the island's status closely, if at all.

Yet, as the President boarded Air Force One for a five-hour visit to La Isla...

I was working in New York when the first headlines began to appear in newspapers. The New York Times headline was like many that appeared in 1981: "RARE CANCER SEEN IN 41 HOMOSEXUALS."

The outstanding medical journalist, Dr. Lawrence Altman wrote, "The cause of the...

For decades, Latinos have been portrayed as "Republicans in training" by hopeful GOP operatives. After all, we were told, they are Roman Catholic, family-oriented, oppose gay rights and abortion. Not so fast, said Democrats. Because they tend to be poorer, younger, less educated, and highly reliant on public services, the...

It's easy to find educators, politicians, and parents bemoaning the state of American education. It's a reliable applause line at political rallies, and unchallenged in newspaper editorial pages: American schools stink.

Except they don't. Not really. Schools all over the country are turning out students who work hard, take challenging...

During the Bad Old Days of the Cold War, a Latin American country had a few options: you could go it alone, cozy up to Washington, or get friendly with Moscow. All three choices had their problems. The world has transformed over the last 25 years. The Cold War is...

Mexico's descent into something like open war over the drug business has created anxiety in the American states closest to the border. If you believe the FBI's annual crime statistics, the big cities on or near that 1400-mile frontier -- San Diego, Phoenix, El Paso -- are among...

You had to read past the jump from the front page to the inside of the paper to find some of the more obscure points in the budget-cutting deal that avoided a government shutdown a few weeks ago. For those of you who never handle newspapers, I guess you had...

You'll have to forgive me if you think I'm oversimplifying. Let me lay out the money situation for the United States:

1) The government spends a lot of money on a lot of things... every dollar backed by a spending priority articulated by the executive branch or the Congress.

2)...

As the Congress and the White House try to come to terms on bringing what the federal government spends and what it collects closer to each other, listen for loose talk. There's bound to be plenty of it on all sides of the debate.

This year, the government of the...

It's one of the most important jobs of the Congress and the president: come up with a plan for financing the operations of government. The administration and the Hill have to figure out how to raise the money -- who to tax and how much -- then spend it.

One...

If we consulted the health statistics kept by the rich countries club, the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, the OECD, we might not be too surprised to find that the United States has the highest rate of obesity, at 30.6 percent. What country, would you guess, is number two?...

Secretaries of Labor are often unstoppable cheerleaders for the job market, seeing blue skies ahead. Former US Representative, now cabinet secretary Hilda Solis has learned from two years on the job during tough economic times: No blue sky forecasts unless they are absolutely guaranteed. Here's what she sounds like now:...

Just as the US Constitution required and Congress paid for the Bureau of the Census headed out into the country to do the hard and seemingly impossible work of counting everyone living in the country during 2010. That elusive number is a constantly moving target: People move in. They move...

Here we go again... or do we?

You can bet interested parties on all sides of the immigration debate held their breath during the final weeks of the lame duck session of the 111th Congress. When the clock, the year, and the congress all ran out, so did what the...

There's something about the subject of Cuba that just riles people up. So it was with anticipation and no little anxiety that I strapped myself into the anchor chair at Destination Casa Blanca to moderate a conversation on Cuba. Looking back on it, the conversation was more civil...

In last November's election, Latinos gave two out of three votes to Democratic candidates. At the same time, other Americans gave the Democrats a stinging defeat. The House shifted from a secure Democratic majority to a big Republican one. Democrats held the US Senate -- barely. State governments shifted heavily...

In 2012 tens of millions of Americans will head to the polls, and their mailboxes, to cast votes for President, the US Congress, and thousands of state offices. Thousands of incumbents will be asking the voters to rehire them, hundreds more newcomers will be running against them, in districts shaped...