When we were classmates at Ingraham High School in Seattle, Jay Inslee was quarterback of the football team and a key player on the state champion basketball squad. I was a fledgling cartoonist and editorial writer on the student newspaper. On Wednesday afternoon, as I watched Inslee shoot hoops with his buddies under the new backboard he had just put up on his garage, it struck me that some things have not changed. It was still basketballs for him, cartoons for me.

But, in truth, the change is rather dramatic. My bio now starts with the phrase “two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner.” Inslee, as a congressman, threw elbows and blocked shots on the White House basketball court with President Obama. And now, that hoop and net he just installed is attached to the garage outside the governor's mansion in Olympia, Wash. As of Wednesday, his bio has a new top line: 23rd governor of the state of Washington.

I traveled to Olympia to see Inslee sworn in. After all, how often does a friend...

Even before President Obama announced his proposed gun control measures, right-wing paranoids and Republican members of Congress were raving about impeachment, incipient monarchy and civil war. 

Obama’s proposal is expected to include a call for banning military-style assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, as well as strengthening the background check system for gun buyers. While Congress would have to approve those major steps, he may also lay out 19 actions he can take by executive order, such as mandating that federal agencies gather data on gun safety.

In the wake of the schoolroom massacre in Newtown, Conn., and many other brutal gun-related tragedies in recent months, ideas for dealing with school safety and mental illness are also said to be on Obama’s list. But most of the attention will be directed at his gun control plan, and much of it will be hotheaded and shrill. 

The usual gun rights lunatics are preemptively saying it may be necessary to take up arms to...

Revolutionary changes are coming at us at supersonic speed, bringing new challenges that are existential and global. Yet our political system seems incapable of adapting to, or even fully acknowledging, those changes. Instead, the system is constricted by ideas and attitudes better suited to the 19th century.

In the current issue of Vanity Fair, Todd Purdum equates the current era with the decades before and after 1500 during which the New World was discovered and explored, trade became a global enterprise, the Reformation broke the religious monopoly of the Roman Catholic Church, the feudal system gave way to nation states and movable type and the printing press created the first form of mass communication.

The introduction to Purdum’s column sums up his thesis: "Not in 500 years has the world seen such revolutionary change as it is now witnessing: the Internet, genetic engineering, mass migration, climate change, worldwide economic dislocation, a new global elite, and more."...

It is hard to have a reasoned discourse about guns when one side of the discussion seems to be dominated by people ready to hole up in an Idaho survivalist camp to await the arrival of the black U.N. helicopters filled with Kenyan commandos coming to disarm America. 

President Obama has given Vice President Joe Biden the task of surveying a wide range of interested parties to formulate a remedy for the horrific gun violence that bedevils American society. The shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and innocent bystanders at a shopping mall in Tucson, the slaughter in a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., the heartbreaking murder of a class of first-graders in a schoolroom in Newtown, Conn., and a long string of similarly horrific incidents have become a recurring nightmare from which we all want to awake.

Supporters of gun rights make a fair point when they insist that guns are not the sole cause of the problem. They are very likely right that the ultra-violence in movies and video games...

In “The Fountainhead” and her other tomes of hyper-libertarian fantasy, Ayn Rand posits that society is composed of “Makers and Takers.” In her vision, it is the creative supermen of industry who are the Makers and it is the work-averse, collectivist leeches who feed off the wealth of capitalist empire builders who are the Takers.

This week’s news about AIG and the big banks suggests that Ayn Rand was wrong.

A pretty strong argument can be made that the Makers in American society are the millions of men and women who raise their children the best they can, take part in the life of their communities as coaches, classroom helpers and volunteers for a thousand good causes and put in long hours as employees keeping the nation’s businesses and industries going while receiving diminishing pay and benefits.

The Takers, on the other hand, include quite a few of Rand’s heroes. They are the big-time bankers, speculators, derivatives traders and others in...

In the trench warfare that characterizes politics in the nation's capital these days, Chuck Hagel is like a soldier stuck in no-man's land, getting shot at from both sides.

President Obama's choice of Hagel as his nominee to become secretary of Defense does not seem to have pleased very many people. The Republican ex-senator from Nebraska appears to have few vocal fans among his GOP Senate colleagues, and Senate Democrats look as if they will be holding their nose if forced to support the president on his choice.

What is their problem with Hagel?

First -- and this is earning him enmity from both sides of the aisle -- he is not very popular with the pro-Israel lobby. It is not that his views are anti-Israel -- his skepticism about the policies of the current Israeli government is shared by a rather large number of Israelis, after all -- it is that he has not been a bouncing, bubbling cheerleader for Israel the way so many American politicians feel they need to be.

Second, Hagel, in the...

With all the moaning coming from the Tea Party Express and its loyalists in the House Republican caucus, you would think conservatives had lost everything, including their virtue, in the "fiscal cliff" parlay with President Obama, because taxes are going up on the wealthy. However, if they could just get past their prudish sensibility about backroom compromises, they might recognize that their side actually did rather well in the dead-of-night deal-making.

Yes, Democrats can claim some good results in the last-minute bargain that was struck to avoid the immediate across-the-board tax hikes and budget cuts that were set to begin on Jan. 1. The George W. Bush-era tax cuts for people making more than $400,000 a year were eliminated and capital gains taxes and estate taxes were raised, providing new revenue sources that Democrats insist are necessary. Those are significant wins for the president and his party, and forcing Republicans to let these higher tax brackets go through is a...

The 112th Congress worked hard on just one thing: competing to be known as the most worthless, incompetent, do-nothing gathering of lawmakers in the nation’s history. These political underachievers may well have guaranteed themselves that dubious distinction by what they did and did not do Tuesday night.

In theory, our senators and representatives are elected to promote the best interests of the people who elect them. In practice, a great deal of the elected officials’ time is spent serving the interests of the people who paid for the campaigns that got them elected. But in the past, even the most bought-and-paid-for members of Congress found ways to come together and do the right thing in times of national crisis.

The 112th Congress, though, manufactured an artificial crisis while failing to provide timely aid to people suffering from the devastation of a crisis that is all too real.

The manufactured crisis was the "fiscal cliff." In 2012, after damaging the nation’s...

Seated inside a cavernous auditorium in Charleston, S.C., just days before that state's presidential primary in January, I was feeling downright gleeful. Spread out before me was a vast, gaudy, multi-screen, red-white-and-blue stage set worthy of “American Idol.” A CNN producer was warming up a big crowd of well-dressed Republicans, coaching them about when to cheer, when to laugh and when to shut up as if they were rubes in a “Tonight Show” studio audience. Within moments, the candidates for the Republican nomination would be trooped out, one by one – each introduced as if he were in the starting lineup of the Lakers.

This was a presidential debate, for Pete’s sake, but, festooned with all the distracting glitz of the sports and entertainment business, it looked and felt more trivial and overproduced than a Super Bowl halftime show.

“What a weird way to pick a president!” I thought to myself, “And how perfect for political...

The "fiscal cliff" looms ahead and it is a solid bet that no one will come up with a deal in time to stop the country from careening off the edge. Nearly everyone claims they want to avoid the automatic tax increases and massive budget cuts that will start kicking in on Jan. 1, but few are ready to make the compromises necessary to make that happen.

As expected, anti-tax purists in the House Republican Caucus have gotten in the way of Speaker John A. Boehner’s attempts to come up with a fix for the fiscal cliff. Last week, he withdrew his own Plan B rather than let it go to a vote he knew he would lose. Democrats were united in their opposition, but what really killed the scheme was the refusal of conservatives in Boehner’s own caucus to go along with a tax increase for millionaires.

Boehner now seems to have washed his hands of responsibility and says it is up to the president and Democrats in the Senate to save the country from the new year’s program cuts and tax...

I was at a holiday party on Friday when the subject of gun control reared its head somewhere between the appetizer table and the wine bar.

The host -- my friend Alan -- is a Canadian who thinks the American attitude toward guns borders on the insane. While Canada, with tight limits on gun ownership, is relatively free of gun violence, the United States, awash in enough guns to arm every man, woman and child in the country, suffers repeated incidents of gun-related killings -- most recently the horrific slaughter of 6- and 7-year-olds in Newtown, Conn.

Appalled by the situation, Alan said assault weapons, like the one used in the Newtown killings, should be banned. Overhearing this, our friend Miles turned from pouring a nice Syrah to protest. "Are you going to take away my two AR-15s?" Miles asked.

Miles has spent much of his life running a business in Alaska. He bought the two assault-style weapons for himself and his son. He is not a gun nut, a right wing wacko or a paranoid...