A year ago Sunday, a group of teens left Marcelo Lucero bleeding and dying on a street in Patchogue, New York - with a knife wound to the chest. Lucero, 37, was an immigrant from Ecuador whose death has become a national symbol of civil rights and humanity in a...

There is nothing like a preemie Nobel Peace Prize to set the polity ablaze. I'm sure Barack Obama smelled the political smoke when awakened with the news this morning that the Nobel committee had essentially named him "Worldwide Statesman Most Likely to Succeed" - and White House sources tell me...

The last time Americans celebrated this long holiday weekend - first convened in 1882 to publicly applaud "the strength and esprit de corps of the trade and labor organizations" - Barack Obama was the Democratic nominee and trailing after a long, drifting summer that knocked his impressive, disciplined campaign off...

If there's one thing Democrats should have learned from the contentious and unsuccessful attempt to pass public health care reform in the Clinton Administration, it's this: never lose control of the narrative.

Though much attention is paid to how President Clinton brought his own complex bill to Congress in '93-94...

Like so many kvelling George Costanzas, frantically waving a bill of sale to a used LeBaron convertible as proof of their brush with fame and an Academy Award, right-wing bloggers are falling over themselves to wrap themselves in the glow of "the great Jon Voight."

Reason: Voight's incrediby irresponsible, un-American, and...

Even as the system of capitalism that supported the growth of social entrepreneurship in its more enlightened margins changes drastically, 800 delegates from 60-odd countries flocked to the 900-year-old University of Oxford last week for the annual Skoll World Forum - the sixth formal gathering of the leadership of the...

For journalists of a certain vintage, these are the days on the digital horizon that were long-feared and yet somehow unanticipated. The newspaper world is slowly asphyxiating, starved for the oxygen of classified advertising and simultaneously kicked in the chest by a massive recession that is hastening the tombstones in...

Looking for all the world like the sweating floor manager on the late afternoon shift at Larry Flynt's Hustler Club in an unbuttoned shiny black shirt and undersized sport coat, Rush Limbaugh leaned his meaty hands on the lectern at the CPAC conference and slipped a greasy dollar bill into...

Last winter, I asked a national political correspondent I know about the media and Barack Obama - was it really as far in the tank for lanky Illinois Senator as it appeared to be? Yeah, he said. And the reason was simple: "Obama is a growth industry."

With margins for media...

We do not have an advance copy of President-Elect Barack Obama's inauguration address just at hand, but it's no particular leap of faith to predict that a national call to public service will be issued from the west front of the Capitol on Tuesday afternoon.

Yet that call - a...

With the sensational success of Milk, an Oscar contender if ever one rolled on a projector, we have new project for Mssrs. Penn and Van Sant - another ode to a governmental folk hero in the making. For nothing captures these early Depression Era II days of strange municipal doings...

For Senator Chuck Schumer, it's apparently better politics -- and karma -- to name the Brooklyn courthouse for a Republican son of Manhattan who died in 1919 than the dominant Brooklyn Democrat who saved New York City during the last fiscal crisis and who was born the same year...and remains...

When times were tough and people were tougher, media came in two flavors: black and white, all shadows and light with a clear line between good and evil (or so we thought). In another two weeks, we may all receive a massive inoculation of optimism in full, living color as...

There's a particularly terrifying moment very late in the totemic and chronically misunderstood It's A Wonderful Life when Jimmy Stewart's George Bailey rings the bell of Ma Bailey's boarding house in Pottersville, the alternative upstate New York town riddled by vice because the good eldest Bailey son had never been...

A year from today, Americans will go to their local polling places in schools, community halls, and firehouses around the country to choose the 44th President of the United States. As a lifelong Democrat and a committed liberal on social issues - and as a blogger - I believe Senator...

A few weeks ago, my daughter and I started a bank and now we make loans to businesses all over the world. Now, before you speculate on my family wealth or means -- and my place among the banking titans -- consider that we started this little lending institution of...

There is some irony in the location for the annual Milken Institute Global Conference, which this week celebrated a decade of meetings. The Beverly Hilton, a plush walled garden on busy Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills, used to be the site of Michael Milken's high-80s meetings of buy-out funds...

Matthew Arnold called Oxford the city of dreaming spires, a reference to the timeless beauty of the harmonious colleges here but also the centrality of thought that Oxford plays for all of Britain. Last week at the fourth annual Skoll World Forum, "dreaming spires" took on another meaning - as...

One of the signature cultural moments in the globalization of the economy unfolded last Sunday, amidst the roar of high-octane engines at the Daytona International Speedway. Sure, there are some grumblings in racing-obsessed quarters about the entry of Toyota-branded stock cars for the first time in the history of a...

Time magazine ignored Warren Buffett when it came to naming its ballyhooed 'Person of the Year' last month. His biggest-in-history divestiture of personal wealth - and related comments about inheritance and the growing gap between rich and poor- didn't make the cut. In a year of big philanthropy headlines, the...