John McCain and other Republicans making criminal allegations against the community-organizing group ACORN know exactly what they're doing. They're using alarmist allegations of "voter fraud" to fire up their conservative base and suppress the votes of some citizens who may, out of fear, stay away from the polls.

They exploit...

Sitting in an old oak pew in Nashville's historic Ryman Auditorium, "the Mother Church of Country Music," I'm waiting for American roots music apparitions to rise from the dark pine floors and whisper to me the secret key to a rebirth of a progressive nation. A guy can dream.

You...

If nothing else, and I suspect there may really be nothing else, Sarah Palin gives us a magnified view of weaknesses of the punditocracy, which we might begin to call the Palindrones.

Can't you feel the "what planet are they from?" dissonance in your bones as the Right Wing complains...

If screen credits appear at the end of the 2008 presidential election, I'd guess they'll tell us the story was created by Kurt Vonnegut and Harriet Beecher Stowe, with a screenplay by Thomas Pynchon and Tom Stoppard, as directed by the Robert Altman of Nashville.

This election season has offered...

As Thanksgiving approaches, we should pay homage to the 17th Century Blackwater-like private security firms who made the very first Thanksgiving possible. That's the message from Serviam, a magazine committed to the unstinting defense of private profiteering in every realm of human endeavor. By the magazine's stuffed-turkey logic we should...

Well, that didn't take long. No sooner did the writers grab their picket signs and head for Rockefeller Center than the New York Times belittled and mocked them, paragraph after paragraph. A bit painful, isn't it, this writerly write-down of writers?

In the first paragraph of its initial story,...

George Bush doesn't want you to think about sick children. He wants you thinking about the fine print of health insurance policies. He wants us to debate types of coverage, premiums and the size of networks, and whether we can afford catastrophic, comprehensive, limited, mini-med or scheduled health insurance. But...

For those in U.S. House or Senate inclined to sustain a presidential veto of a bill that will provide basic health care to more than 3 million additional American children, ask yourselves this question: Are you willing to explain your decision to a schoolroom of fragile young children who cannot...

President Bush is holding our troops hostage and threatening them with death. Here is what he is saying to Congress:

"Order me out of Iraq, and I will abandon the troops in the field. The blood of your children will be on your hands, not mine."

Every coffin that comes...

Karl Rove is smart enough, but he's no genius. Rove's political depravity put moral Americans at a disadvantage in contests with him. But crediting him with innovation or genius is like crediting Jack the Ripper with the invention of the knife. So why did the political press do it? Why...

Why are Harold Ford and others from the more paternalistic and condescending quarters of the Democratic Party so keen on discrediting the rising progressive movement? What have been the consequences of their obsession with "the middle"? Most importantly, how have the Tory Democrats managed to bury the expression of deep...

America is in the midst of an authentic constitutional crisis as the Bush Administration moves to reduce Congress to little more than an irrelevant focus group and achieve what no U.S. President has ever achieved: a true above-the-law presidency.

These are the stakes: Will the United States save what is...

The day after U.S. Senate Democrats stayed up all night trying to force Republicans to stop their filibuster of a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, the Austin-American Statesman hard-copy headline read, "Senate Achieves Gridlock." The Hartford Courant headline read, "Gridlock on Iraq." Similar words were used by media throughout...

Why does the national media insist on characterizing President Bush's refusal to alter his Iraq policy as firmness, rather than stubbornness? Because, in the strict father morality that emphasizes authority and obedience, presidents are strict fathers. They are firm. Only children can be stubborn. Reporters, probably unconscious of the worldview...

I can empathize with MSNBC's Tucker Carlson. It's not easy, but I can do it. Maybe even with President Bush. Our religious traditions and classical philosophers extol the importance of seeing with the eyes of others.

Carlson attacked Senator Barack Obama for speaking about the importance of empathy in...

On a dark Texas highway in November 1967, a fourteen-year-old boy rides beside his father in an old Chevy pickup. The radio's off; there's a mist on the road through which the headlamps cut tunnels of light. The boy and his father are headed south and west, to the border...

With no apparent shame, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales pleaded the Ken Lay defense -- also known by his own prosecutors as the "Aw, shucks" defense or the "deliberate ignorance" defense -- in his explanation of the political executions of United States attorneys by his office and the White House.

Gonzales...

How Neocon David Brooks Gets Human Nature (and Everything Else) Completely Wrong

Humans are a brutish, belligerent and evil species, rotten to the core of our incorrigible selves, according to New York Times columnist and neo-conservative propagandist David Brooks.

We should consider ourselves lucky to have committed, self-sacrificing leaders like,...