Barack Obama showed considerable vote-getting ability in last fall's presidential election, with a clear-cut win in both popular and electoral votes. But when it came to presidential coattails, his were of the same modest length of many of his immediate predecessors.
This has been a month of forward leaps in the campaign for gay-marriage -- or so it is said. The Iowa Supreme Court struck down a ban on same-sex marriage, providing a toehold in the heartland.
Beware of geeks bearing formulas. That's the lesson most of us have learned from the financial crisis. The "quants" who devised the risk models that induced so many financial institutions to buy mortgage-backed securities thought they had reduced risk down to zero.
Is bailout nation about to strike again? Sure looks like it. According to a bunch of front-page news stories, life-insurance companies are about to get TARPed. This is nuts.
On April 7, the Department of Homeland Security distributed a counterterrorism assessment to local law-enforcement types entitled "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment." The nine-page paper has many on the right questioning what is going on in Washington.
If conservative leaders no longer even try to offer serious solutions to national problems, nobody should underestimate their capacity or their will to mobilize angry Americans.
Our view of Pakistan's role in the war in Afghanistan has undergone an ominous but necessary series of shifts. At the outset of the war, in October 2001, Pakistan correctly was seen as a necessary ally -- both politically and geographically -- as it was the primary conduit for our entry and lines of communication into Afghanistan.
Sometimes it’s important to try and fathom the unfathomable. For example, why is “thirteen” considered an unlucky number? Why do pigs continue to fly in Washington D.C.
"I can't say that I know her," the forewoman of Phil Spector's jury told the press after it was over, referring to Spector's victim, Lana Clarkson. Both Clarkson and Spector were on trial for the second time, after the first jury to consider murder charges against the music producer deadlocked 10-2 in favor of conviction.
One day last week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average shot up 246 points. On CNBC, Jim Cramer punched the Sousa March button. NPR's "Marketplace" boomed, "We're in the Money."
In December 1773, Bostonians held a Tea Party in Boston Harbor to protest excessive British taxes. "No taxation without representation" was their message.
Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal seeking a new trial for death-row inmate and former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was convicted in the 1981 shooting of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner.
I was in elementary school in Swampscott, Mass., when I learned that the Jews had killed Christ. Or so we were told, right around this time of year. Most of the kids in the class just nodded when they heard. It seems they already knew. I was shocked.
If you have a long enough lever, you can move the world. That's an old saying attributed to Archimedes. But what Archimedes didn't add is that a long enough lever may splinter in your hands if the material is not strong enough. You may end up not moving the world where you wanted it to go and finding yourself in a position you didn't want to be in.
The election of America's first black president has been widely hailed as an historic event. However, much less attention has been paid to the demographic trends which made that event possible and which will continue to affect elections and politics in the United States far into the future. In this article I examine those trends and their consequences for the American party system.
In the 1990s, the Math Wars pitted two philosophies against each other. One side argued for content-based standards -- that elementary school students must memorize multiplication tables by third grade. The other side argued for students to discover math, unfettered by "drill and kill" exercises.
Seems a lifetime ago that the price of crude approached $150 a barrel, but it was only last summer. Remember how people went nuts? Santa Barbara County voted for oil drilling off California's spectacular coast. Santa Barbara of all places, epicenter of the 1969 oil spill that ravaged beaches from Pismo to Oxnard -- and launched the modern environmental movement.
Corruption is a bad thing wherever you find it, and no profession or institution, from churches on Main Street to banks on Wall Street, is immune. You've got people who abuse the trust of shareholders and people who abuse the trust of voters; you've got cops who abuse their badges and professors who abuse their tenure. But in my book there is a special place by the devil's side for corrupt prosecutors.
Of all President Barack Obama's transformative domestic policy proposals, none is more far-reaching and less transparent than health care. What most Washington policy people mean when they talk about his health care proposal was described in the first two paragraphs of Robert Pear's meticulous article in The New York Times on April 1:
Two very rich Republicans -- former eBay CEO Meg Whitman and state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner -- are lining up to run for governor in 2010. The most money that a third Republican gubernatorial candidate, Tom Campbell, ever earned was as the dean of the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley -- about $300,000 per year. That would make him the pauper in the primary.
