Columns

If the current revival of progressive politics were the civil-rights movement, the role of Rosa Parks would be played by Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer. Every child in America learns each February the story of how Parks one day decided that she just wasn’t going to take it any more and refused to move to the […]

The temporary lull in judicial confirmation battles has come to an end. Hoping to ramp up its base in time for the midterm elections, the White House recently promised supporters that it will flood the Senate with more right-wing appeals court nominees. Simultaneously, Senate Republicans have pushed for votes on existing ones, some of whom […]

Iraq in continuing meltdown. Oil prices at record highs. Forty-five million uninsured. A still-large budget deficit and an ever-increasing debt. How to respond? Hey, let’s cut taxes! That was the congressional rejoinder to our nation’s several crises in early May, when lawmakers passed a five-year, $70 billion tax cut, which news accounts affirmed that the […]

Suppose that you wanted to find a list of the 30 or 40 Republican members of Congress most vulnerable to defeat this fall (and assume that you couldn’t afford the Cook Political Report). Here’s an easy trick: Take a particularly egregious piece of legislation passed by the House, then look at the Republicans who voted […]

Shortly after the Senate confirmed John Snow’s nomination as Treasury secretary at the end of January 2003, Snow phoned me. He wanted to thank me for the guidance I had indirectly given him for how to survive a nomination hearing in my erstwhile memoir, Locked in the Cabinet. “Don’t defend yourself. Don’t lecture. Don’t take […]

Right-wing bloggers love authority. They live to repeat slavishly the talking points of the Bush administration, bowing down like a pack of authoritarian cargo cultists before the words and images of the Jeep-in-Chief. Left-wing bloggers, on the other hand, are a notoriously unruly bunch, and they spend much of their energy in a steel-cage death […]

During the early Cold War, while right-wingers called for the rollback of Soviet communism, the strategists of containment argued that the United States ought to be patient, confident that internal forces would weaken communism from within and that the “gravitational” force of a revived Western Europe would eventually draw Moscow’s satellites out of its orbit. […]

London is a place where Thomas Frank’s famous book bears the title What’s the Matter with America?, thus extending the indictment to the whole nation, and where a small American child is required to affirm that she hates George W. Bush before she can join English tykes on the jungle gym. Even so, the principal […]

It was January 1989, during my senior year in high school. My family was sitting at the dinner table when my mother turned to me: “I was talking to some mothers today, and their kids are all applying for colleges. When are you going to get to it?” I stared back, “I already told you. […]

In contrast to a president’s coattails that sweep his party to congressional victories, skunktails have the reverse effect. Bush’s skunktails consist of abuses of power, corruption, and incompetence now so widely recognized that, according to recent polls, those who “strongly disapprove” of his administration now equal those who merely “approve.” Because turnout in midterm elections […]