Columns

For many years, conservatives have warned us that someday the commissars of political correctness would run amok and impose their opinions on us with our own tax dollars. What they didn’t tell us is that they would become those commissars, and that their politically correct orthodoxy would be the Republican Party line. But that’s exactly […]

Here in Washington, “progressives” — the preferred term of art these days — have been feeling pretty good lately. George W. Bush’s Social Security privatization plan is still stuck in neutral, if not reverse. Tom DeLay, perhaps this town’s most important Repub-lican on an emotional level, is under fire. Poll after poll shows that the […]

In the religious war now being waged by the Republican Party, battles are designed not to be won but to mobilize troops for larger battles to come. The ultimate goal is not to dismantle the wall between church and state, although this would be a byproduct. It is to bring the majority of Americans who […]

Just when you’re on the edge of despair about the resilience of American democracy, an ancient pattern reasserts itself. People drunk with their own self-importance overreach and begin to destroy themselves. Names like Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon, and Newt Gingrich come to mind. And now, perhaps, Tom DeLay. The House majority leader is in trouble […]

Late in the evening of St. Patrick’s Day, while much of America was out carousing, our hardworking U.S. senators stayed in session. It was time for the Senate to take its first stab at addressing Social Security’s long-term financial health since President Bush began his push to restructure the program. The result wasn’t pretty. Did […]

Within minutes of secretary of state Condoleezza Rice’s March 7 announcement that John Bolton was the administration’s pick as ambassador to the United Nations, liberal Washington sprang into action. Bolton, suddenly, was Topic A, even more so than Social Security. His dismissive quotes about the United Nations were given wide circulation in the stream of […]

Last fall, after my group put out a study detailing widespread tax avoidance by America’s largest and most profitable corporations, the right-wing Heritage Foundation published a screed attacking us. It was one blatant misstatement after another. I e-mailed the author, Norbert Michel, to point out his many factual errors, but he declined to correct them. […]