Columns

The crowning disgrace of this country’s five-year experiment with one-party Republican rule was surely the passage of a bill on September 29 that sanctioned abusive treatment of prisoners in the “war on terror,” banned habeas corpus claims for those identified as “enemy combatants,” and allowed the president to place that designation on anyone, including U.S. […]

Imagine stepping into a polling booth and voting for candidates who, instead of being bought and paid for by corporations, unions, or wealthy donors, are financed by public funds, and accountable to you and other citizens. Sounds utopian, doesn’t it? Well, clean-money elections already exist in Maine and Arizona, states too small to challenge the […]

It is conventional wisdom that the new democratic activists of the “netroots” are strong on political tactics but don’t have much to contribute to the war of ideas. Matt Bai, writing in The New York Times Magazine, charged disparagingly that “leaders of the netroots … will tell you that Big Ideas are overrated.” This isn’t […]

Democrats: Odds are, come November 7, you will gain the 15 seats you need to take back the House (the odds are much lower in the Senate). So it’s not too early to start thinking about what you should do during the two years leading up to the 2008 presidential election. You’ll be sorely tempted […]

Many liberals in recent years have been smitten with political envy. The conservative movement and Republican Party have seemed so much shrewder in their use of language, tougher in their tactics, and better organized than their progressive and Democratic counterparts. Perhaps so. But let us put to rest one supposed source of advantage for conservatives: […]

What would the legendary labor leader Walter Reuther have said if 40 years ago he was told that American business was going to spend millions to register workers and encourage them to vote? He would probably have been ecstatic: “They’re spending their money to turn out my people?!” And indeed, since World War II, business […]

A week after the supreme court delivered a stinging rebuke to the Bush administration in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, holding that the military tribunals it had fashioned to try Guantanamo detainees were illegal, I went to the base to visit my detainee-clients and to inform them joyfully of the Court’s ruling. To say the least, they […]

To spend Christmas in Baghdad is not a dream of many travelers, but it was what The New York Times assigned me to do in 1998. American bombs were raining down on the Iraqi capital that season, as they did periodically during the 1990s. Each morning I visited the places that had been bombed the […]

On June 6, California voters decisively rejected a ballot initiative to provide tax-supported public pre-kindergarten. A special surtax would have touched only residents making at least $400,000 or $800,000 for a couple. It’s hard to think of a better use of social outlay for the middle class and the poor, or a better-targeted tax. Yet […]

Even in an administration famous for its contempt for science, the President’s tortured case for abstinence stands out. He committed $1 billion to abstinence-only programs abroad without a shred of scientific evidence that they prevent disease. Casting about for justification, he and the virginity advocates who surround him latched on to one of the developing […]