Special Report

America needs more good jobs at good wages. The combination of deregulation, global low-wage competition, and the attack on unions has reduced the supply of reliable jobs with decent wages, benefits, and career prospects. This shift comes at a time when other social supports have been cut. Any serious student of this subject knows two […]

How to generate more good jobs for Americans? Conventionally, policy-makers and economists give great weight to two strategies — education and economic development. Presumably, a better educated workforce will command higher pay. And economic development will generate more jobs, one hopes good jobs. But there are limits to what these two approaches can accomplish, given […]

When Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson became vice president in 1961, he persuaded his protégé and successor, Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana, to let Johnson continue running the Senate Democratic caucus. The vice president, constitutionally and ceremonially, is Senate president, voting only to break ties. However, no vice president had ever proposed to function as […]

My fellow Americans: The decision to invade Iraq in the spring of 2003 divided the country and divided my party. People I respect found themselves on both sides of that controversy. But three and a half years later, it’s clear that the invasion was a serious error. The president told us the invasion was necessary […]

On the recent fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, President Bush visited all three sites of the mayhem — the field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where the courageous passengers took down United Flight 93; the Pentagon, long since rebuilt; and Manhattan’s ground zero, earth onto which New York’s bickering and feeble Republican politicians have managed […]

On a sweltering Saturday morning in August, on the grounds of the old Rutherford County Courthouse just outside Nashville, where a Bible in a glass case is permanently turned to John 3:16, a young politician of considerable urbanity is convincing a crowd of his fellow Tennesseans that he’s just a New Age version of a […]

The world headquarters of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. is still in Akron, Ohio, but all they make there now are decisions. Except for a few specialty racing tires, Goodyear hasn’t made tires in Akron in years. Industry here is dead, dead, dead, and there is nothing we can do to revive it. Apparently, […]

Next month, South Dakotans will vote on whether to uphold the most radical abortion ban in the nation. Allowing for abortion only “to prevent the death of a pregnant mother,” the ban was enacted last March in the belief that the changing membership of the Supreme Court made timely a direct challenge to Roe v. […]

Here’s what Election Day will look like in Oregon this fall. Most of the voting will not take place on Election Day at all but probably sometime in October. It’s after dinner and the family gathers around the kitchen table to vote. Mom and dad, maybe with children old enough to be interested, get out […]

The first time you hear about Oregon’s approach to voting, the idea sounds almost un-American. In 1998, the state that gave us assisted suicide decided to run all of its elections by mail: no voting booths, no frantic Election Day get-out-the-vote efforts, no dueling poll-watchers — and no trooping off to the local firehouse to […]