ehm1212

Paul Starr explains why the Democratic Party’s fate is tied to the passage of health-care reform: The moment of decision on health-care reform is arriving for progressives in Congress. Some of them have insisted they will refuse to vote for any bill without a public option, and that is now the only bill that has […]

Adam Serwer on criminal justice reform: Eric Haines lives in his father’s basement in Paterson, New Jersey, just across the street from a freshly anointed memorial to a childhood friend who was shot to death two weeks ago — Haines’ second friend to die violently in as many weeks. A white sheet hangs over a […]

Mark Schmitt on the rare pieces of legislation that get better as they grind through Congress: The very word “progressive” implies a linear view of social progress. We try to move forward, the bad guys try to take us backward. So it’s not surprising that progressives have an equally straight-line assumption about what happens in […]

Terence Samuel explains how environmental and economic interests are clashing in Papua New Guinea: It’s a strategic gamble Barack Obama is making by going to Copenhagen at the end of the U.N. climate change conference instead of at its start. The president’s idea is to close the deal, rather than open discussions with a long […]

Michelle Goldberg explains how a case before the European Court of Human Rights rests on the question of whether reproductive rights should be universal: On Wednesday, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, began hearing a case that has the potential to be a kind of Roe v. Wade for Europe. Three Irish […]

Matthew Yglesias on how the United States needs to help fix the global problem of climate change: This week offered a typical example of the disconnect that’s emerged between the United States and the rest of the globe. The eyes of the world are on the climate talks in Copenhagen, while the American political establishment […]

Phoebe Connelly explains how federal agencies learned to stop worrying and love Web 2.0: Barack Obama, widely heralded as the first “Internet president,” is inseparable from his BlackBerry and delivers a weekly address on YouTube. The White House has its own Flickr stream. Senators now duke it out via Twitter. (The Supreme Court, or at […]

Mark Schmitt explains how a bipartisan commission to bring down the deficit could be a good thing: For those of us who had a reasonably close view of the early months of the Clinton administration, certain parallels to the current political situation are eerie. One is this: The price of a landmark domestic accomplishment seems […]

Adam Serwer on why we should put to rest the notion that black folks are uniformly opposed to marriage equality: Supporters of marriage equality were crushed last week when a marriage-equality bill in the New York Senate was defeated 24 to 38, despite high hopes that a few Republicans would cross the aisle and the […]

Paul Starr on the individual insurance mandate: No provision of the health-care reforms being debated in Congress is as likely to generate a popular backlash as is the individual mandate — the requirement that individuals purchase health insurance if they are not otherwise covered. But there is an alternative to the mandate as it is […]