If the text of the citation for the honorary degree Notre Dame bill bestow on President Obama that has been leaked today by anti-abortion extremist Randall Terry is accurate, the university is making much the same case as I did...

{Historian Robert S. McElvaine is Elizabeth Chisholm Professor of Arts & Letters at Millsaps College & author of:
The Great Depression: America, 1929-1941 (Random House) and
Down and Out...

President Obama is meeting on Thursday with the CEOs of fourteen top credit card issuers. According to reports, the President will tell them that they have to "make those increases a lot easier to understand" and "make it so it doesn't look like you're taking advantage." Those, at least,...

President Obama seems to be hearing the growing outcry against the big bank pirates' declaration of war on the American people through their outrageous increases in credit card interest rates.

On Thursday in this blog I detailed the organized banksters' unleashing of...

Where is the fury now? The populists with pitchforks who screamed bloody murder at the A.I.G. bonuses are not saying nearly enough, or screaming loudly enough, about an even more outrageous action by the...

Enough! No--Too much!

Amid all the justified outrage we all feel at Bernie Madoff and the AIG bandits, let us save some intense outrage for Pope Benedict XVI.

After insulting Muslims by declaring in 2006 that Muhammad had brought "things only evil...

Today we mark the sixth anniversary of the beginning of the war in Iraq. Recent reports indicate that the situation there has improved considerably. The focus is shifting back to Afghanistan. President Obama has made good on his campaign promise to set a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. The question...

Ever since AIG entered the public consciousness in a very negative way...

A report by ABC's Jake Tapper on Monday that President Obama is reading a selection of letters from the public each day to get a feel for people's thoughts and problems is heartening. In establishing this means of connection with the feelings, hopes, and problems of "ordinary" Americans, Mr....

Washington, DC - 01.20.09 - Those numbers, at last! The date that appears on a T-shirt I've worn many times over the past few years has finally arrived! The unnatural disaster named "Dubya" has finally ended. As I watched him fly over me in a helicopter early this afternoon, I...

Last Christmas, one of my daughters gave me a coffee mug with an image of George W. Bush with devil's horns.

I used it occasionally over the ensuing months and the image faded slightly from a few trips...

Makes no difference what group I'm in . . .
Different strokes for different folks . . .

-- Sylvester Stewart (1968)

The legacy of the 1960s has been a matter of contention, with an uncertain outcome, for the...

Prior to the start of the war in Iraq in 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made a distinction between "Old Europe" that opposed the American war and "New Europe" that supported that war. Other members of the Bush Administration and neo-conservatives picked...

{My son, Brett, who is 20 and just voted in his first presidential election, wrote the following on Facebook on Election Night. I was so proud and moved by what he wrote, that I decided to post it for others to see.}

This is going to take some getting used to. For me, winning has been neither "everything" nor "the only thing." It has been a very rare thing.

This is the eleventh presidential election in which I have voted since I came of age in 1968. It's only...

If Colonel Robert McCormack, the longtime publisher of the arch-Republican Chicago Tribune is spinning in his grave as a result of that paper's endorsement two weeks ago of Democrat Barack Obama, imagine what sort of posthumous somersaults the brothers Thomas...

"Just a closer walk with thee."

It should be the theme song of the McCain campaign, and the "thee" is George W. Bush.

John McCain has given up Straight Talk for a Straight Walk. He is walking in lockstep...

The latest shift of wind direction in the campaign of John McCain finds him staking his waning hopes for winning the presidency on attacks on Barack Obama for saying, "I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody."

"When politicians talk about taking your money and...

". . . that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of
America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had
failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they...

Merry Xmas, everyone!

Oh, I know that Christmas is still almost two months away. But today, October 27th, is Xmas.
Christmas is the day on which Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus. Today is the day on which Xians should celebrate...