Harold Meyerson

Sacramento — It was just two years ago that California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, angered by his inability to get right-wing bills through his state’s Democratic-controlled legislature, termed that body’s leaders — Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez and Senator Don Perata — “girlie men.” This political neologism went over particularly big with a subgroup […]

Labor Day is almost upon us, and like some of my fellow graybeards, I can, if I concentrate, actually remember what it was that this holiday once celebrated. Something about America being the land of broadly shared prosperity. Something about America being the first nation in human history that had a middle-class […]

Murfreesboro, Tennessee — On the grounds of the old Rutherford County Courthouse, in the middle of the Murfreesboro Town Square, about a half-hour’s drive from downtown Nashville, there’s a plaque commemorating what Civil War buffs know as Forrest’s First Raid. Here, in July 1862, Nathan Bedford Forrest, a slave trader turned Confederate […]

If you’re looking for a land that time forgot, you couldn’t do much better than the mountain country of central Pennsylvania. On a sparkling summer day it’s a tableau of lazy rivers and deeply green forested hills, of cornfields and farmhouses (some abandoned) and steel mills (many shuttered), and one little town […]

Of all the signs that the American people are fed up with the war in Iraq, the one that the administration should fear most was put forth last week by a longtime supporter of both the president and the war, Virginia Republican John Warner. Of all the signs that the American […]

With the release yesterday of the latest Quinnipiac Poll, which shows Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman trailing challenger Ned Lamont in next Tuesday’s Democratic primary by a prohibitive 54 percent to 41 percent margin, we now have some hard numbers to add to what’s been the growing impression of many political observers for […]

Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid has taken to invoking Harry Truman’s line about a “do-nothing Congress,” and with ample reason. In dealing with the major issues of our time (global warming, immigration, the diminishing benefits and stagnant wages that characterize today’s economy) or in discharging its oversight duties over administration policies that […]

I wonder if this is how the summer of 1914 felt. Then, you will recall, the assassination of the Austrian archduke by a Serbian nationalist terrorist provided the senescent Austro-Hungarian Empire the excuse it had been looking for to wipe out the Serbian nationalists, which provoked the pan-Slavic nationalists at work for the czar to […]