Hey kids! Time to be thinking about summer camp! Tired of sailboats and archery? Drama camp too much like school? Weight loss camp too depressing? I have just the ticket for you and your anxious parents!

Worried your kid can't get into sports camp? Listen to Becky Ross of Louisville,...

I have just returned from two weeks in Europe and Istanbul, where, as is apparent to all American travelers, the world is watching the US elections with fervent hope, if also some trepidation. A possible Obama presidency is seen everywhere as a potentially transformational moment for American leadership in the...

The presidential candidates in the endless primary go on about leadership and unity and change and experience, but meanwhile in Congress its politics as usual. i.e., bipartisan pandering to special interests.

That's right, here comes the Farm Bill -- a whopping $300 billion plus dollars, passed over President Bush's...

If you've been watching the John Adams chronicles on HBO, you know that the birth of the young American Republic was accompanied by enough controversy, bitterness, infighting and rage to sink the project before it ever got off the ground. If it hadn't been for the fact that democracy, rough...

Senators Obama and Clinton are competing in the Senator Edwards sweepstakes to prove who can be more hostile to free trade and critical of NAFTA - although neither has been notably critical in the past. Obama says he is going to bring jobs back to Wisconsin; Clinton is making protectionist...

Like most of us, I have been impressed and energized by the way in which the Obama "movement" has inspired young people, independents and the skeptical, drawing back into politics many who seemed weary of their citizenship. In a country where only a bare majority vote in Presidential elections (far...

I like Hillary. And I like Obama. If they don't drive each other's supporters into angry corners of resentment and fatally divide the Party, either one will have a pretty good chance to prevail in the fall. But that requires that voters remember the election is neither about Bill Clinton...

In the 1960s, when the peace movement called for reductions in arms spending, otherwise 'neutral' economists would say "you can't cut back on armaments without destroying the domestic economy!" As President Eisenhower had said in his farewell address, we had become dependent for our prosperity on the arms race and...

It took me almost a week to gather my thoughts - have you gathered yours?

Looking back, it feels like we survived two media coronations and are back to an election contest worthy of our democracy. The pollsters lost, the voters won. The pundits looked stupid, citizens looked smart. In...

Like many Democrats (I suspect), I am "decided" only in that I have decided I will support any Democrat nominated. Otherwise, I am undecided and unwilling to jump on any bandwagon in an election crucial to America's future. Here then are key questions I would pose to each of the...

The intelligence bombshell that came with the revised estimate of Iran's nuclear weapons program - oops, sorry, they seem to have given it up in 2003, so maybe World War III is not around the corner after all! - is another nail in a lying President's career coffin. But it...

On this blue Monday following Black Friday, can anyone remember Thursday? Thanksgiving, once America's holiday of gratitude and family solidarity, has become the staging area for Christmas shopping. It is no longer just the day after Thanksgiving -- Black Friday (as in "in the black, or profitable") -- that is...

John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt, the authors of the ever controversial Israeli Lobby, continue to insist that the U.S. government is in the pocket of the American Jewish lobby. No, they are not anti-Semites. But yes, they are wrong - not because the Israeli lobby isn't powerful, but because Middle...

Pick your poison -- and it's not just Ahmadinejad at Columbia University! Faculty at Stanford say the Hoover Institute has no business inviting former Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld as a visitor.

The Board of Regents of the University of California rescinds a speaking invitation to former Harvard President Larry...

The Benghazi Six -- five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor condemned to death for allegedly spreading HIV among children in a Libyan hospital -- were finally released last month. The media, looking for an explanation that grabs credit for the West, have fixed on Cécilia Sarkozy, wife of the...

Pundits continue to worry about democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere, but it's in the United States that democracy seems to be in real crisis. Just three items from the news (you can no doubt find another dozen exemplars of crisis by reading today's paper) that suggest how distanced...

President Sarkozy, France's new "rightist" (ha ha) leader, is driving his vanquished leftist rivals completement fou (that would be 'crazy') with his ideological zigs and intellectual zags.

To start with, not only is his wife grandstanding in Libya (taking credit for the release of the Bulgarian nurses), but he has...

Push aside just for a moment the stories about Paris Hilton and the endless Presidential campaign and the sub-prime mortgage crisis, and behold to the East the grim specter of civil war in the Arab world.

The fiercest wars are civil wars. More Americans were killed in our civil war...

A quick report on the response to my DRAFT AL GORE! blog last week. More than 160 people wrote in, almost all in vigorous support of a Gore candidacy. A few were not only pro-Gore, but irritated that I had not simply signed the petition at draftgore.com. Why "reinvent...

Will he or won't he? I wrote last week about David Brook's panicky assault on former Vice President Gore suggesting how fearful Republicans are of his candidacy. More and more Democrats appear to see Gore as the heavyweight (no, I mean figuratively) and want him as their presidential nominee....