What Obama Is Up Against
We Americans harbor a quaint belief that a new president takes charge of a government that eagerly awaits his next command. But that's not how things work at the top, especially where "national security" is concerned.
We Americans harbor a quaint belief that a new president takes charge of a government that eagerly awaits his next command. But that's not how things work at the top, especially where "national security" is concerned.
Jacob M. Appel | Posted 11.02.2009 | Politics
I have little doubt that the day will soon arrive when the CEOs of health "insurers" are dragged before Congress to face the same sort of interrogation to which the Waxman Hearings subjected Big Tobacco in the 1990s.
Gary Hart | Posted 10.22.2009 | World
More can be done in linking national research laboratories, networking financial regulatory regimes, linking universities, networking environmental protection efforts, and the list goes on.
Bill Maher | Posted 10.10.2009 | Comedy
This weekend is the perfect time for Obama to announce he's repealing "don't ask, don't tell" and committing to a full-throated endorsement of gay marriage. But of course that's not going to happen.
Michael Carmichael | Posted 10.06.2009 | Politics
When Truman realized that General MacArthur was insubordinate, he dismissed him. When General McChrystal spoke out in London, he usurped the power of the president to design and execute foreign policy.
Aubrey Sarvis | Posted 09.30.2009 | Politics
it is one thing to give the Pentagon considerable weight and another thing altogether to let it dictate the timing and terms of the debate, and the final decision.
Bruce Feiler | Posted 09.15.2009 | Politics
The Ten Commandments do not mention homosexuality. But the Five Books of Moses do, in ways that have plagued homosexuals for centuries.
Lincoln Mitchell | Posted 09.15.2009 | Politics
A clear line can be drawn from the red-baiting and Muslim-baiting of Obama during the campaign to the birther movement and the accusation that the president was a Nazi to Joe Wilson's behavior.
Bill Cunningham | Posted 11.09.2009 | Politics
Tonight, we saw a leader, unafraid to stand and deliver...not a political document, but a platform that all who care about real reform, can support and amend and work for.
Marshall Auerback | Posted 10.19.2009 | Politics
A broad number of polls indicate that progressive opinion, particularly in the area of health care, is much more profoundly aligned with popular opinion than the damp squib of a proposal currently being championed by the president.
Jeffrey Feldman | Posted 10.17.2009 | Politics
The shifting definition of "public option" is not accidental, but is emerging from the perception by Democrats in the House that the August recess caused them great damage.
Danny Miller | Posted 09.26.2009 | Politics
Ironically, it was President Kennedy's assassination less than a year into Ted's first term that really allowed the younger Kennedy to find his place on the national stage.
Greg Mitchell | Posted 09.10.2009 | Media
Creative artists of every variety have made incisive, satiric or powerful statements about nuclear threat. What they share, with rare exceptions, is an avoidance of the specific subject of Hiroshima.
Daniel Ellsberg | Posted 09.06.2009 | Politics
I was one of many in the late '50s misled and recruited into the nuclear arms race by exaggerated and deliberately manipulated, fears of Soviet intentions and crash efforts.
Daniel Bruno Sanz | Posted 09.05.2009 | Living
Shadowy non-state actors contemplate flattening an American city with a device smuggled into the United States at one hundred possible ports of entry.
Rep. Rush Holt | Posted 08.31.2009 | Politics
Although Medicare now is widely seen as a successful program for helping Americans access health care, it was very controversial when it was passed. The same arguments against health care reform today were made then.
Christian Avard | Posted 06.18.2009 | Entertainment
Dennis Perrin: I would like to see more direct action but I knew early on in the Obama administration that it was just not going to happen.
Raymond J. Learsy | Posted 06.11.2009 | Politics
President Obama, acting without equivocation, has put his administration on notice. Nothing less than competence and dedicated service to the nation is expected. The Bush buddy years are at end.
Sam Sedaei | Posted 06.07.2009 | Politics
It is hard to believe that this country continues to debate simple issues of discrimination in 2009.
Dennis Perrin | Posted 06.03.2009 | Media
Nothing sets domestic reactionaries off like a "media elite liberal" like Stewart besmirching our nation's fine name and God-fearing reputation.
Sahil Kapur | Posted 05.28.2009 | Politics
The most transformative health care overhauls that succeeded in the last century employed the same strategy: build on what we've got and let the changes happen organically.
Sahil Kapur | Posted 05.21.2009 | Politics
The current system encourages exclusion of those who need medical care the most, and only government has the power to restructure these incentives.
Leslie Harris | Posted 05.04.2009 | Politics
Earlier this week, two Senators introduced a bill that gives the President the power to seize and shut down the Internet or any other "critical infrastructure " in the "interest of national security."
Karl Frisch | Posted 05.03.2009 | Media
For more than 75 years, conservatives have smeared progressive attempts to reform our faltering health-care system as "socialized medicine."
Norman Horowitz | Posted 04.01.2009 | Politics
It is, in a manner of speaking, silly to compare what happens at a Motion Picture and Television Studio to what happens when there is an election and ...
Russ Baker | Posted 11.04.2009 | Politics