The idea does not find voice in the cacophony of the 24-hour news cycle. It has no place in the media's daily digest of gossip, false controversy and ideological cant. It is barely mentioned in the halls of power, where the very officials who capitalize on the economic angst of working people to win election forget that this raw anguish -- not the sophisticated arguments of lobbyists and campaign donors -- is supposed to motivate them every day.

It is easy to blame the financial crisis, Wall Street's breathtaking bonuses or the culture of excess that glittered until we found ourselves...]]> Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- I don't have a sex scandal for you. The foibles of politicians and celebrities titillate. But ultimately, they have little to do with the most enduring and corrosive scandal of our civic life. It unfolds out in the open, day after day.

Millions of dollars slosh from the pockets of powerful corporate interests into the campaign accounts of lawmakers who then write the laws that determine the rules for how these businesses make money -- or more money. Then millions more flood in through direct lobbying activity that ensures these same lawmakers are reminded, again and again, that the interests financing their campaigns have a favor to ask.

The nexus between...]]> Thu, 08 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- It would be nice to believe that things will be different next time.

"What's the point in bailing them out if there aren't any jobs?'' asks one of the organizers of the Christmastime protest at Republic Windows and Doors, the Chicago company whose laid-off workers staged a peaceful, six-day sit-in at the factory last December to win back pay to which they were entitled. Scenes from the occupation are featured in Michael Moore's new film "Capitalism: A Love Story."

The Republic layoffs occurred long before unemployment rose to a 26-year high of 9.8 percent, a figure that masks the depth of the jobs crisis because it doesn't count those who've stopped looking...]]> Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- Whatever significance is attached to Chicago's failed bid to host the 2016 Olympics, it is of small importance to the rest of the country. More far-reaching and frightening is the Supreme Court's decision to take up a case challenging the city's ban on handgun ownership in the new term that begins this week.

The case is best considered a preview of coming attractions. The gun lobby, if it wins in the Supreme Court, is prepared to challenge every gun control law enacted at any level of government. It will usher in a scary season of assault on the common sense of citizens, law enforcement officials and others who believe that carrying today's high-powered weapons in an...]]> Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- The Full Employment for Filmmaker Michael Moore Act is coming soon to a theater near you.

Well, not exactly.

But by exquisite coincidence, Michael Moore was in Washington this week promoting his latest comedic expose of greed, corporate malfeasance and our government's complicity in the unbridled assault on working America that led us into the Great Recession. "Capitalism: A Love Story" fortuitously previewed to select audiences just as the Senate Finance Committee was amending the "America's Healthy Future Act of 2009." The panel obligingly provided hours of potential footage for Moore's next cinematic assault on the system.

The denouement was the...]]> Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- The latest turn in the nation's confrontation with the terrorism comes to us as opera buffa. The scenario would be comic if it were not so unnerving.

In New York, law-enforcement authorities have begun laying out a chilling case against a legal immigrant from Afghanistan who lived in Queens. Najbullah Zazi allegedly received terrorist training in Pakistan, returned to the United States through John F. Kennedy Airport, traveled to the Denver area and, in the days leading up to the eighth anniversary of 9/11, amassed a stockpile of readily available chemicals -- basic beauty supplies -- and returned to New York in an apparent plot to commit murder and...]]> Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- It is "a stunning assault on liberty" (Sen. Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona). It is "trying to force or foist a one-size-fits-all solution on the states" (Sen. Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah). It is a plan that "taxes too much and grows government too much" (Sen. John Cornyn, Republican of Texas).

It is also a massive shift of tax money from constituents of traditionally liberal and Democratic states to constituents of traditionally conservative and Republican states.

This went unremarked in the hours of bipartisan gas-bagging that opened the Senate Finance Committee's markup of its version of health care-overhaul legislation. As it happens, just as the panel...]]> Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- Finally, a health care proposal George W. Bush could love.

Well, maybe not love, but certainly like -- especially since the draft plan by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus takes its cue about how to pay for expanded health insurance from a tax policy that Bush and other Republicans pushed for years.

Baucus' idea is to tax so-called "Cadillac" insurance plans -- policies that supposedly are so costly and generous they are luxuries -- in an effort to raise about $215 billion over the next decade, or roughly a quarter of the $800 billion the Baucus proposal would cost. The words "Goldman Sachs" are often tossed around by those who support this tax,...]]> Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- It's not the right time. But then, it never is.

It was never the right time for federal regulators pry into Wall Street's mysterious derivatives and other opaque markets -- that is, until the whole gluttonous enterprise fell. There was never a proper moment to rein in the rapacious subprime mortgage industry before it was too late.

In recent political memory, there has never been a good time to raise the minimum wage, not even in the late 1990s -- when the economy was a gusher of new jobs -- or in 2007, when the inflation-adjusted purchasing power of the minimum wage had fallen to its lowest level since 1955. Though two increases were enacted amid contentious...]]> Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- Now that everyone in politics has concluded that the "public option" is about to be very publicly dropped from health overhaul legislation, perhaps it is time that everyone understands that the public options we already have are working very well.

The upside-down logic of this retreat makes about as much sense as irate Medicare beneficiaries who turn out to protest "government-run health care" while insisting that their own government insurance remain untouched. In our current public discourse, no absurdity is too ridiculous to be called farce.

Yet there are still facts that can get in the way of fictions, as the Census Bureau's recently released annual report...]]> Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- The first "shift" that John Feal worked at the smoldering labyrinth of fallen buildings at Ground Zero lasted 43 hours. Over the next few days -- until Sept. 17, 2001 -- the young, athletic construction worker from Long Island labored amid the molten metal and shattered glass and concrete remains of skyscrapers that had collapsed when terrorists rammed two airliners into the World Trade Center.

A supervisor for a demolition contractor, Feal's work would end when an 8,000-pound steel beam landed on his left foot, cutting it in half. The injury, which required 30 surgeries over five years, made Feal one of the thousands of heroes of 9/11 who have been treated in a...]]> Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- It isn't all in our heads. Americans did not balk at buying back-to-school clothes, or forgo a Labor Day weekend trip, or refuse to invest in a new television for football season just because they are, to use the overworked shorthand, "feeling cautious."

They are feeling the real effect of shrinking paychecks.

Wage growth -- perhaps the most important number in the torrent of economic numbers that seems to assault us daily -- all but ceased in the past six months. Pay for private-sector workers grew at the rate of only 1.3 percent, according to government data analyzed by the Economic Policy Institute. That's slower than the rate of growth late last year, when...]]> Thu, 03 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- In politics as in physics, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Thus, former Vice President Dick Cheney's most recent and thoroughly extraordinary public support of torture has produced, with almost mathematical precision, the following chain of events:

People who think Cheney is scary in his defense of violating international treaties and U.S. laws, smashing the heads of suspected terrorists against walls, threatening them with rape and electric drills and subjecting them to waterboarding -- an ordeal perfected in the torture chambers of the Spanish Inquisition -- howled. They believe Cheney is completely gonzo.

As soon as this reaction...]]> Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- We will never forget, say the bumper stickers, which often bear the image of the smoking Twin Towers superimposed across the red and white stripes of the flag.

But we have forgotten. Or at least we have forgotten that the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, demanded that we go to war in Afghanistan.

This war flares anew, and every day seems to reach some new marker -- the most deaths in any year for American and international forces, a tally of U.S. casualties for August that makes it the deadliest month. Public weariness deepens. CNN recently found a precipitous drop in support for the war effort. The Washington Post uncovered a more troubling sentiment: A...]]> Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- Ten summers ago, for reasons I do not now recall, I asked Ted Kennedy's office to provide an account of key legislation he had sponsored in what already was a long and distinguished career.

The 32-page fax I received in response is as notable for what it lacks as it is for the fullness of history it recounts.

There was no tone of pompous self-promotion that we are accustomed to expect from politicians -- from U.S. senators, in particular. Each of the "highlights" was typed out, without graphic embellishment, in a single, short phrase. They represented the best hopes America could offer in those turbulent years that began in 1963, when Ted's brother Jack was...]]> Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- The summer of disinformation seems to have accomplished its goal: to preserve for the private insurance industry an effective monopoly over how much most Americans pay for health care, and on what terms they can buy it.

No one will come out and say this. But that will be the result if the so-called "public option" is dropped from the proposed menu of choices in a new health "exchange" envisioned in reform proposals being considered on Capitol Hill.

It was predictable that the right wing would declare a voluntary public option a scary "government takeover" of health care. That's what they always say. Only a few years ago, the same crowd was in a full-throated...]]> Thu, 20 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- We won't have to cope with delusional believers in nonexistent "death panels" stalking those health care town hall meetings much longer, not with politicians left and right racing to remove from health care legislation any hint that perhaps people might want medical counseling on end-of-life care.

So what will placate the armed and dangerous gun guys? Nothing.

They've been showing up for President Barack Obama's public appearances, boldly displaying their perfectly state-permitted firearms. They did it first in New Hampshire and then this week in Arizona, where one man became a media celebrity by turning up outside an Obama speech in Phoenix carrying not only...]]> Tue, 18 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- I missed the hot fun this summer. While much of America seemed to be screeching over the incredible -- in the truest sense of the word -- notion that angry citizens could tote a gun even to a town hall meeting with the president of the United States, I was pondering the relative merits of bike ride versus beach walk.

The brouhaha that has stripped away the thin veneer of good will that greeted the start of Barack Obama's presidency is over health care revision, and specifically over something the media keep calling the "Obama health care plan."

That one stumps me, too, because there is no "Obama health care plan." Nor has there ever been one. That's part of...]]> Thu, 30 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- Happy Birthday, Medicare.

It's a fine time -- perfect, in fact -- to celebrate the government-run, taxpayer-supported colossus in the American health care system that turns 44 this week. Medicare has done all it was supposed to do, and more.

It thrives despite apocalyptic warnings from its original opponents that "socialized medicine" would hamper doctors, hospitals, patients -- perhaps even doom the entire American health care system. Medicare is exceedingly popular and remarkably well-functioning despite its current critics' claims that it is singularly wasteful, out of control in some never-specified way, or at the very least, holds the potential to...]]> Tue, 28 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- So is there good news, or bad? Are we poised for an economic rebound or are we perched on the edge of another unnerving cycle in which Wall Street analysts -- along with politicians with a huge stake in talking things up -- try to chat us out of our funk?

Goldman Sachs, fresh from returning the $10 billion infusion of taxpayer money that helped keep it afloat during last fall's credit crisis, posted a record-breaking $3 billion profit in the second quarter. That's enough to dedicate nearly half the firm's revenues to compensation -- that is, to the eye-popping salaries and obscene bonuses that we've been led to understand were one cause of the financial and economic...]]> Thu, 23 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- It's not yet time to say that the political debate over this year's effort at health insurance reform has reached its low, since we're sure to hear more hyperbolic charges about socialized medicine, meddlesome government bureaucrats that might replace meddlesome corporate bureaucrats -- and how we shouldn't tax the rich because after all, they create jobs!

Any sentient person might wonder where all these jobs are, and why this upper-crust, job-creation engine should be spared a tax surcharge to finance insurance coverage for those who do not now have it. But that would be a digression.

What we apparently are supposed to be talking about is when health...]]> Tue, 21 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- That's not the way it is -- not now, and not for a long time. Remembering Walter Cronkite means recalling when there really was a media figure who was "the most trusted man in America." In moments of profound national tragedy and unparalleled triumph, the country turned its eyes toward Cronkite, who unfailingly delivered professionalism and integrity.

The greatest sorrow in marking Cronkite's death is the necessity of acknowledging that we have replaced his work ethic and wisdom with puffery and ideological pontification.

To watch the tapes of Cronkite's extraordinary coverage of John F. Kennedy's assassination -- not that final, teary moment when he...]]> Thu, 16 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- It is the damned spot that simply will not go out.

The legacy of the Bush administration's antiterrorism tactics cannot be washed away in a tide of feel-good rhetoric about moving on, nor will it fade eventually if we apply President Barack Obama's spiritual wisdom that this should be a time for "reflection, not retribution."

The revelation that CIA Director Leon Panetta killed a secret program reportedly aimed at assassinating top al-Qaeda leaders, and quickly informed Congress of its existence, does not shock. It has long been a presidential aim to decapitate the terrorist network. Despite Republican claims that President Bill Clinton limply addressed...]]> Tue, 14 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- The sound and the fury at Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings signify almost nothing. Yet they still tell us almost everything we need to know about race and politics in the age of Obama.

No matter how much drama Senate Republicans wish to concoct, it is practically a foregone conclusion that Sotomayor will win confirmation and thus become the first Supreme Court justice of Hispanic heritage, and only the third woman to serve on the nation's highest court.

So as a matter of Supreme Court politics, the incendiary arguments of Sotomayor's Republican opponents amount to gruel spooned out to the party's base, shrunken and demoralized after repeated electoral...]]> Thu, 09 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- When a virulent disease is ravaging you like a cancer, you don't want a cacophony of voices promoting different or contradictory cures. Yet that is what we're starting to hear about the economic crisis, not only from a politically divided -- and pretty scared -- capital, but from within the Obama administration itself.

In just the past few days, Vice President Joe Biden has said the young administration misread the depth of the recession -- an honest account, since most private economists did as well. Laura Tyson, an outside economic adviser to the White House, said it's wise to start preparing another stimulus package.

Then President Barack Obama made...]]> Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- As Donald Rumsfeld might put it, there is only one known known in the tsunami of speculation touched off by Sarah Palin's announcement that she's stepping down as governor of Alaska: The media will almost certainly have Palin to kick around some more.

Her forthcoming book is going to be fodder for who-knows-how-much dissection, and her obvious earnings potential on the conservative talking-head circuit means that even should she eschew a future run for public office, she's very likely to remain in the public eye.

And it is equally likely that the media will continue to subject Palin to the unapologetic sexism that has been directed at her since the very first...]]> Thu, 02 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- It hardly seems worth mentioning that the search for role models of sexual rectitude has gone pretty badly lately. That famous poster of Farrah Fawcett -- her golden locks tumbling around her shoulders and her gleaming smile offering a girl-next-door counterpoint to the suggestiveness of her red swimsuit -- sure makes it look as though, by comparison, the 1970s were an era of wholesomeness.

They weren't.

It was about then that social conservatives -- fed up with sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll, divorce, Roe v. Wade, women surging into the work force and who knows what else -- began organizing politically to stamp out all this threatening change. They failed. But...]]> Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- As the media trumpets sound for the pullback of American troops from urban areas in Iraq, the essential lesson of our involvement must be recalled: Nothing about our entanglement in Iraq has ever been as it seemed.

We did not invade because Saddam Hussein was behind the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as Bush administration officials repeatedly suggested, or even because Iraq threatened the United States with stores of chemical and biological weapons. The 2005 Iraqi election symbolized with images of purple ink stains on voters' fingertips -- an anti-fraud measure later promoted by House Republicans, who stained their own fingers purple in support of President...]]> Thu, 25 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- It's all right to be just a bit defensive when you're the addict in chief.

"You just think it's neat to ask me about my smoking as opposed to it being relevant to my new law," President Obama snapped when a reporter justifiably asked him at a news conference how he's doing on kicking his cigarette habit -- and whether the landmark legislation he signed requiring the Food and Drug Administration to regulate the tobacco industry would help.

Recovering his equanimity, the president explained that he's "95 percent cured" from smoking, doesn't smoke in front of his family and doesn't light up every day. In short, he is a closet smoker -- just like millions of...]]> Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- The price at the gas pump has been ticking up and unemployment is tightening its grip. Pay cuts, salary freezes and furloughs strangle the wallet. The easy cuts to the family budget -- no summer camp, no family vacation -- already have been made.

But the school year has ended and the kids are at loose ends. What's a worried parent to do?

At the risk of attracting the ire of those who justifiably want to pull their children away from computer screens, send them to YouTube. Amid the trashy home videos and other uneven chronicles of pop culture is a memorable new look at America's past that whets the appetite for more free fun. The National Archives, in...]]> Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- You can't get there from here.

Not if there is defined as health insurance coverage for everyone in the United States, lower costs for the millions of insured who are being crushed by its price, and relief for employers who are burdened by an expense many wish they could wipe off their books.

And not if here is where the health insurance political debate is stuck.

At the moment, Republicans are gleeful and Democrats glum because of a Congressional Budget Office analysis -- based on an incomplete and early draft of what is likely to be the most liberal-leaning health care proposal to emerge from the Senate -- that shows the measure just...]]> Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- There are without a doubt links among the extremists who have murdered three Pittsburgh police officers, gunned down a doctor who performed abortions in Wichita, killed a new Army recruit and wounded another in Arkansas and brought a demented hatred of Jews and blacks to bear in last week's shooting at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

These are all connected to the bloodshed in April at a community center in Binghamton, N.Y., where a distraught Vietnamese immigrant killed 13 people and then shot himself. And this horror is, in turn, linked to mass murders in such distant places as a North Carolina nursing home and a comfortable residential enclave in California's...]]> Thu, 11 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- The appearance of extreme political impropriety, the Supreme Court has decided, is sometimes just too extreme.

The circumstances of West Virginia's chief justice, who refused to remove himself from deciding a case involving the company of a political contributor, is an "exceptional" example of why appearances count, according to the high court's 5-4 ruling in a case that shines a brutal light on the spiral of campaign contributions that threaten to compromise too many state courts.

The case began with an aggrieved coal company owner who was angered by a lower court decision that had ordered him to pay $50 million in damages to competitors for fraudulent...]]> Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- A culprit is required. This is an iron rule of Washington policy malfunctions and political malfeasance.

It may be that Angelo Mozilo, the former chief of Countrywide Financial, will become the iconic corporate villain of the mortgage meltdown in the way that Kenneth Lay was during the Enron scandal. The Securities and Exchange Commission, with its belated civil charges of fraud and insider trading against Mozilo, lays out a case that does not reveal a web of deceit as extensive as the one Enron wove in the energy trading industry nearly a decade ago. Yet the similarities are striking: Those at the center of the duplicity were aware of the hazard they were creating...]]> Thu, 04 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- The murder of Dr. George Tiller cannot be smoothed over with a speech. This is the lesson the Obama administration must learn from it.

Since Tiller was gunned down -- at Sunday morning church services -- the administration has correctly offered increased law enforcement protection to the hundreds of abortion clinics and doctors who have, for years, been targets of violence and vandalism, and whose patients are routinely harassed and intimidated. This necessary measure is only temporary.

As most of the public surely knows, the abortion wars have become a permanent and ugly part of American political discourse.

That Tiller performed late-term abortions --...]]> Tue, 02 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- So it's health care overhaul this year -- or bust. If this is the bet, right now I'd put my money on bust.

President Obama's urgency on bringing rationality to the broken health insurance system is understandable. Few Americans are blind to the necessity for quick action.

But the trouble with the way health care 2.0 is starting to play out is that it is beginning to look an awful lot like the original. Obama has determinedly avoided a commitment to anything resembling his own proposal. This is because the White House has concluded that Hillary Clinton's 1994 health care revision effort failed because it was sent to Capitol Hill as diktat.

That's a...]]> Thu, 28 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- Sonia Sotomayor, a woman and a proud Puerto Rican, is going to be a Supreme Court justice for the majority of us.

The talking points repeated with numbing banality -- that Sotomayor was chosen to help diversify a Supreme Court still shamefully dominated by white men, that she would be the first Latina to be elevated to such a perch -- do not quite capture the moment. Sotomayor did so herself at her introductory White House ceremony. The nominee said she hopes Americans "will see that I am an ordinary person who has been blessed with extraordinary opportunities and experiences."

Ordinary people have had a difficult time of it before the current Supreme...]]> Sat, 23 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- Hiking boots, check. Sunscreen, check. Water bottles, check.

Guns, clips, ammo. Check, check, check.

It's enough to make you sick before you've grilled a single hot dog.

Just as the National Park Service was kicking off the summer season by reminding us that these public jewels "offer tradition, heritage, recreation and fun for all members of the family," the National Rifle Association was having one heck of a good time. The gun lobby has much to celebrate this Memorial Day weekend.

With their usual steely conviction, contempt for the rights and safety of others, and string of nonsensical arguments, gun supporters in Congress managed to...]]> Thu, 21 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- So now we know that pilots responsible for the safety of about a quarter of the flying public rest up for duty by catching a few winks in an airport lounge, or sleeping in idle aircraft or aboard a cross-country flight from their hometowns to their airport home base.

The co-pilots who provide the only backup to these weary sky warriors have similar sleep and commuting schedules -- and earn a bit more than someone who works full time in a fast-food restaurant.

The initial inquiry into the causes of February's crash of a Continental Connection commuter flight outside Buffalo has exposed a seamy -- and exceedingly unsafe -- underside of the burgeoning commuter...]]> Tue, 19 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- The partisan firefight over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's incendiary allegation that the CIA lied to Congress about its use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" -- torture -- is a blessing. It turns the compelling case for a public inquiry into the Bush administration's policies toward terrorism detainees into an urgent necessity.

Americans must finally own up to what was done, at whose order, with whose acquiescence, and why. The United States government must at last hold accountable the architects of this calamity -- not only the underlings like Lynndie England and Charles Graner and Janet Karpinski, those frontline military personnel who paid the price for bit...]]> Sat, 09 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- Not to ruin brunch, but Mom's probably not doing very well. Not if she's already retired, not if she's a baby boomer approaching retirement, not if she's a younger woman who hasn't yet given retirement a thought.

This Mother's Day could stand fewer sweet greeting cards and more frank conversations about how mothers -- and all American women -- are going to be supported in old age.

They used to depend on traditional pensions that under the law protected surviving spouses, usually a widow, with lifetime monthly benefits. These pensions are becoming extinct. Then they were expected, like most American workers, to self-finance their retirement through 401(k)...]]> Thu, 07 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- I never understood John Edwards' appeal. I therefore do not expect that Elizabeth Edwards' new book, or the tiresome media blitz accompanying its publication, will bring a sudden change in my thinking.

I first saw Edwards at one of his early presidential campaign events in New Hampshire during the summer of 2003, and was mystified. He'd pulled up to a small brick plaza in his campaign bus, adorable children in tow, and, as I recall, with John Mellencamp's "Small Town" playing as theme music. The song was meant to resonate with rural voters and it was odd to hear an ode to country life at lunchtime in downtown Manchester, which is not particularly small, nor rural nor...]]> Tue, 05 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- In my nearly two decades of covering New York's irrepressible Alfonse M. D'Amato, agreement between us was, to put it politely, rare.

Yet there was one extraordinary moment when good governance and good politics collided to bring me into alliance with the former senator. It was the elevation of Sonia Sotomayor to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York -- a position that now puts her on the short list to fill the Supreme Court vacancy upon Justice David Souter's retirement.

Sotomayor grew up in the housing projects of the Bronx, the daughter of a widowed mother who raised her two children on a nurse's modest salary. With scholarships and at least an...]]> Thu, 30 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- This is how it ends. Or at least, this is how the latest, sad chapter in a story that has been ending for three decades is written.

If Chrysler survives, it will be in partnership with the Italian automaker Fiat, an odd pairing for any number of reasons. If General Motors survives, it will be only because the government effectively took it over, ousted its management -- and cleared the way for thousands upon thousands of workers to lose their jobs and the hard-won benefits that once made them symbols of a robust American middle class.

They are now icons of its decline.

What is ending is not only a time when the American auto industry was a colossus in...]]> Tue, 28 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- His interest, President Barack Obama says, is "the achievement of a full, frank and just acknowledgement of the facts."

His topic was the delicate question of what to call the slaughter of 1.5 million ethnic Armenians at the hands of Turkey during World War I and the fall of the Ottoman Empire, a festering historical sore no American president can genuinely hope to heal.

But Obama's professed desire for a complete and just accounting raises the question: If it's good for the Armenians, why isn't it good for Americans? Why can't we also have a "full, frank and just acknowledgement" of the facts surrounding torture and other moral horrors that were carried out...]]>