A couple days ago, I wrote a piece for the Guardian newspaper, in which I posited the notion that President Obama's singular achievement in his first year in office has been to wrestle the great ship of state onto a new rhetorical course - one in which government again...

Next Wednesday marks the one year anniversary of Barack Obama's election. So much has happened in that year that it's easy to forget just how improbable the election victory was, just how world-shaking was the election of a young, charismatic, liberal black man to the presidency. It's easy to forget...

President Obama's speech to the United Nations this morning borrowed thematically from Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy. It was an example of American idealism, and internationalism, at its soaring rhetorical best - a blending of principles and aspirations, hope and optimism.

Obama talked of the four...

This is, according to the punditocracy, the summer of our discontent, the moment when utopianism slides into profound disillusionment and "change" in D.C. morphs into "business as usual." There's an inevitability to the narrative: newbie hits town, promises change, gets corrupted by power, and the town changes him. And we...

Over the past several days, my family and I have been driving across country. A couple days ago, we were in Moab, a remote part of Utah situated in the heart of red-rock country. One evening, my daughter and I took a boat ride up the Colorado, the trip narrated...

A new movie hit theaters this past weekend: Food, Inc. Want to know why so much of the food we eat is so bad for us, who benefits from industrial agriculture and who suffers, this is the movie to watch. For people concerned about what goes into their daily...

Last year, an elderly lady named Billy MacPherson recounted to me a story. When she and her husband George were young, she said, they'd often run out of money before their next pay checks came through. They and their children would eat pancakes with syrup for breakfast, lunch, and dinner,...

When I went to bed last night, I was weeping; when I woke up in the middle of the night, I was still weeping. And when I opened my eyes this morning, with my one year old son sleeping peacefully in between my wife and me, I was still weeping....

I posted the following article on the Guardian's Comments is Free site yesterday. It says things that I think need to be said, about the moral crassness of the commentators who have taken to blaming poor people for the financial collapse we're undergoing. With the permission of the Guardian,...

Some brief thoughts on the failure of today's bail-out vote.

1) This represents a failure of leadership of a truly historical scale. Yes, the plan proposed was flawed, but the reasons for voting against it were even more flawed. With an election only five weeks away, what should have been...

It's been said so many times this week, it hardly needs restating, but I'll restate it anyway: the financial collapse we're in the middle of, and the trillion dollar federal bailout now planned, is a once in a century event. We're living through the collapse of an entire economic -...

The Republicans have intruded on my sleep patterns, and I bitterly resent it.

A week ago, I was driving back home from a long work trip in the Southwest. I went to sleep in a small hotel deep in the Mojave desert at two in the morning, after driving close...

In June 2000, then-presidential candidate George W. Bush told reporters, according to CNN, that Al Gore was responsible for spiking oil prices. Gore, said the GOP man, "writes in a book that he thinks we ought to have higher fuel prices, and now that he's running for president and...

The received wisdom in the upcoming primary season is that the move toward early primaries and caucuses will mean the campaign's over after one or two days of voting. I'm not sure I buy it.

Yes, if Iowa, New Hampshire, the new early voting states of Nevada and South Carolina,...

Listening to NPR this morning, I heard a section on the ongoing fight between President Bush and the Congress about expanding SCHIP and providing health care coverage to more low-income kids.

There's something insane about the fact that a president who vetoed almost no spending bills in...

I've spent the past several days stunned by the size of the wildfires consuming much of California. I lived in San Diego during the last bout with disaster, in October 2003, and remember vividly the fear and claustrophobia one senses as the sky turns purple, ash rains down and the...

In January Army Specialist Charles Graner Jr. was sentenced by a military court in Fort Hood, Texas, to ten years behind bars. His crimes: assault, conspiracy, dereliction of duty and committing indecent acts.

Nearly a year after the infamous photographs of US military personnel abusing and...