Suburbanites and independent voters in Virginia and New Jersey broke Republican in yesterday's election. Last night I saw CNN's John King tell his viewers that this phenomenon could only mean that people are sending a signal to President Barack Obama that they're fed up with "all that spending" in Washington....

Time magazine's cover story this week titled "What's Still Wrong with Wall Street," by Allan Sloan, is a remarkable indicator of where the public stands on the recent obliteration of the economy by a gang crooked financiers and speculators. It shows that even the corporate media is now making...

One Republican candidate who wants to be California's next governor is Steve Poizner, whose economic prescriptions for healing the state's fiscal maladies are like a quack doctor who "bleeds" his patient by attaching leeches. Poizner's PR people came up with a catchy "10-10-10" slogan. He throws up three arbitrary numbers...

"Deficits don't matter." When Vice President Dick Cheney uttered this famous line he was making a political judgment, not an economic one. In 2001, when the newly selected President George W. Bush and his posse rode into Washington they immediately began in earnest the chicanery, lying and recklessness that we...

During the initial 24-hour news cycle following the announcement that the President of the United States had won the Nobel Peace Prize we heard all manner of demeaning, diminishing, and ridiculing of the President and the prize. Beltway pundits David Brooks and Ruth Marcus appearing on Jim Lehrer's News Hour...

The Americans for Prosperity Foundation's "National Defending the American Dream Summit" held last weekend at the Marriott Crystal Gateway Hotel in Arlington, Virginia was an assemblage whose only distinguishing feature was its astonishing homogeneity both in thought and in demography. When they were not loudly applauding President Obama's (and America's)...

Sam Tanenhaus, a senior editor for the New York Times, has written a useful book about modern conservatism and its discontents. It is a short intellectual history tracing the pedigree of ideas that have informed conservative (and liberal) thought over the past couple of centuries focusing mainly on the last...

On October 23, 1983, when Shia militants in Lebanon killed 241 American military personnel outside the Beirut airport with a suicide truck bomb, President Ronald Reagan vowed to continue the troops' mission in Lebanon. Reagan had repeatedly claimed that Lyndon Johnson forced American soldiers to fight in Vietnam "with one...

The billionaire former CEO of eBay, Meg Whitman, has formally announced her candidacy to run for governor of California. Her "platform" (if one can call it that) is nothing short of a scorched earth campaign against the public sector she seeks to manage. She wants to fire 40,000 state workers,...

Time magazine's cover story on Glenn Beck by David Von Drehle is a clinic for journalism students who wish to learn about faux balance, false equivalencies, straw men, and omissions of important facts. Nowhere in this piece does Mr. Drehle mention the fact that 62 of Beck's sponsors...

When Fox News' Glenn Beck called President Barack Obama a "racist" and claimed that he had "a deep-seated hatred for white people" an African-American netroots group, ColorOfChange.org, organized a successful boycott of Beck's corporate sponsors. It wasn't long until fifty seven of Beck's sponsors jumped ship lest they be associated...

For about thirty years now the American middle class, (and by "middle class" I mean those of us who make about $45,000 to $75,000 per year), has been taking it on the chin. And for that reason half measures and lukewarm "reform" isn't going to cut it. So let's get...

Among the thousands of contributions to his country that Edward Kennedy made throughout the course of his 46-year career in the United States Senate, one episode that stands out to me is his role in exposing the human costs of the American war in Vietnam. In early January 1968, just...

First let me state the obvious: the May 7, 2004 "Special Review" on interrogations from the Central Intelligence Agency's Inspector General is a heavily redacted document. Pages and pages of the report, titled "Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation Activities (September 2001-October 2003)," are either completely blackened out or mostly so. As...

There's an ancient saying that we do not inherit our society from our ancestors, but borrow it from our children. On July 21, the California State University Board of Trustees approved a fee increase requiring undergraduate students this fall to pay $4,026 a year, an increase of about $1,000 over...

In Sacramento yesterday, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, with grace and clarity, laid out his vision for California and the reasons why he is running for governor. To a packed town hall meeting at the city's main library filled with people of all ages and backgrounds, Newsom gave a masterful...

In the sluggish news month of August we've been bombarded with endless tape loops of indistinguishable white men and women yelling at the top of their lungs, red faced and panting, at Democratic town halls across the country. The corporate media gobble up the spectacle because they love atmospherics and...

Health-care reform was the single biggest issue in the 2008 campaign. Everywhere any of the candidates went, especially town hall meetings, they were peppered with the question: "What are you going to do about the dismal state of our nation's health care system?" There weren't any 'Tea Baggers' descending on...

According to Brian Stelter, writing in the New York Times business section, it was FOX News director Roger Ailes who cooked up the original scheme to blunt Keith Olbermann's withering criticism of Bill O'Reilly. The plan entailed O'Reilly and Glenn Beck aiming their barbs, not at Olbermann or his show...

In 1994, Senator Edward Kennedy was in a tough fight for reelection against a well-financed Republican opponent named Mitt Romney. There was a debate between Kennedy and Romney at Faneuil Hall and before the candidates arrived a large crowd of boisterous Romney supporters dominated the gathering. The place was a...