Rustbelt Intellectual

Alec MacGillis of the Washington Post has penned a very interesting analysis of the state of contemporary liberalism ( "The rise of zo...

Progressives: You can learn from Utah. Really. Re-posting from my recent piece at _The Hill_. Critics on both the left and the right are d...

In this PBS "Need to Know" podcast, my fellow rustbelt intellectual, Rick Karr, explores the reasoning behind Washington Monthly ...

Today's Times has a front-page story about attack ads now, finally being launched by Democratic Congressional candidates. It seems that...

For six or more months now the political story line playing in the media has been the crumbling of the Democratic party and the newly resurg...

Whatever else the tea drinkers who assembled in Washington on August 28 might have accomplished, they did manage to turn the National Mall i...

Today the last American combat troops left Iraq, nearly 7.5 years after Bush/Cheney launched this military fiasco. There is no measure of t...

Not too long ago I attempt a little piece of research. I wanted to know how many military bases the United States maintained overseas. Ans...

Almost exactly two years ago (??!!) I wrote a piece here complaining about Barack Obama's decision to make Senator Joe Biden his running...

Another player has entered the immigration battle as the Justice Department sues Arizona over its new immigration law. And the reason the ...

It's one of the thorniest aspects of the capital punishment issue. And yet we rarely talk about it, hiding our heads in shame, hoping it...

What do you see when you look at Mitch McConnell? I know. You see a shriveled old white guy, the sort of guy whose sagging face screams ...

Let me start by saying that I wrote the last essay before I learned that the Republican Governor of Virginia had declared a "Confederat...

Poor Ulysses S. Grant. Saving the Union by defeating the Confederate army and being elected twice to the Presidency is no longer good enough...

Joe Biden was right the other day. The Health Bill is a big f!@#$ deal. It is far from perfect and the process of getting it passed confir...

The Obama Presidency has failed. 14 months into it, that's the only conclusion you would draw based on the way the press has reported it...

When I was growing up, one of the feeble responses made by those who still clung to the hope that communism might still triumph as a system ...

It took almost a year, but we now are hearing the conservative critique of Obama that he "dithers," that he waffles, that he wave...

While the rest of the nation expressed shock at Republican Congressman Joe Wilson and his “You lie!” outburst at President Obama, South Car...

Labor Day and summer is over. This means the real fights over health care reform begin in earnest. The Glenn Beck-sponsored nonsense of th...

Summer 1993. Team Clinton was trying to reform the nation's health care system and things were already starting to look grim. The forces...

Hear that sound? something between a buzz and a whine? That's the sound of the finance industry lobby revving its engines (and mobilizi...

Buried in the "Science" section of today's Times is a squib reporting a new study in the current American Journal of Public ...

Rather than the usual coherent essay-style posting, I'm presenting today just a few notes in easily digestible form about life in the fi...

The Federal Government - that is to say, you and I - now own an astonishingly large piece of General Motors. In the long run, this may or ma...

It has been hysterical to watch the Republican Bund react, hysterically, to the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. Newt, P...

Over the last decade or so, the courts have chipped away at affirmative action programs in a whole host of areas. The cases which have gott...

President Obama deserves a great deal of credit for delivering the commencement address at Notre Dame, and Notre Dame deserves credit for in...

Perhaps it is too early to declare the much-vaunted troop escalation in Iraq (dubbed by George Bush the peppier-sounding "surge" w...

"Ed Meese is a pig." More than twenty years ago that pithy little phrase made its way onto buttons and t-shirts. A bicycle messen...