Forty-eight years ago, President-Elect John F. Kennedy thought it would be a good idea to show "bipartisanship" and continuity by keeping on Allen Dulles from the previous administration as Director of Central Intelligence. He found out after the Bay of Pigs fiasco of April 1961 that he had made a...

In the lead story on the front page of today's New York Times,David M. Herszenhorn notes that Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd "did not believe there would be enough Republican support to get the 60 votes needed to move a bill forward" on the General Motors bailout. Later in the...

In his "Political Memo" today in The New York Times titled "Dean Seeks a Share of Credit in Obama Victory," political guru Adam Nagourney draws some bizarre conclusions and makes some strange inferences about alleged internal conflicts and petty beefs inside the Democratic Party. It's interesting that at a...

Just minutes ago on Fox News I saw Sarah Palin tell Greta van Susteren that the rumors that she wanted to ban books in the local library while she was mayor of Wasilla, Alaska were false.

Governor Palin said the charge was untrue because someone accused her of banning...

I have read numerous articles over the past eight years by neo-conservative commentators like Bill Kristol and David Brooks offering their unsolicited advice to the Democratic Party about what it "must" do to move forward in the Bush era. So I thought it might be a good time for me...

It was a beautiful thing seeing a planetary celebration over the results of an American presidential election. Hundreds of millions of people were wondering whether or not the American people would succumb to another tainted election where the only winners were the corrupt purveyors of aggressive militarism abroad and religion-tinged...

If Barack Obama wins the election today not only will it be "historic" for all of the reasons we've discussed throughout the long campaign, he surely will be our president for the next eight years. My nine-month old baby daughter, Gianna Isabella, will be in the third grade when President...

John Steinbeck's widow asked Studs Terkel to write an introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of The Grapes of Wrath. And while he was working on it Robert F. Kennedy's eldest son, then Congressman Joe Kennedy, called Terkel to come to Iowa and see for himself the plight of American...

When John McCain grabbed the microphone out of the hand of that disheveled Republican lady in Minnesota who called Barack Obama an "Arab" he was sincerely trying to rise above the woman's racist misconceptions to set the record straight. But what came out of his mouth was this: "No ma'am,...

Below is a purely fictional scenario for the rigging of the upcoming election we face next week and its aftermath:

Busloads of khaki and polo-shirted white guys descend into swing districts and disrupt the voting process and polling places just like Tom DeLay's polo-shirted thugs did in 2000 when they...

On October 24, 2008, John McCain's communications director for Pennsylvania, Peter Feldman, fanned the flames of racial bigotry to score political points. Feldman peddled the story to at least two Pittsburgh TV news outlets (KDKA and WPXI) that a 6' 4" "dark skinned" African-American man assaulted, robbed, and carved a...

John McCain is running one of the most divisive, negative, and dishonorable presidential campaigns in modern history. By spreading the Big Lie that Barack Obama is a "terrorist sympathizer" who is not from the "real" America, McCain is fanning the flames of latent racism and xenophobia. He is doing everything...

John McCain apparently loves workers now (except for those in Columbia who are being killed trying to form labor unions). He brought up the apocryphal demographic, "Joe the Plumber," and then accused Barack Obama of "class warfare." He was condescending to working people and to women. It's an outrage that...

For 30 years the American economy has undergone profound changes for the worse. Throughout the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush era there have been five main themes that have eaten away at the wellbeing of millions of working Americans: Outsourcing; McJobs; Deregulation; Inequality; and Cuts in Welfare Spending. These five trends have wreaked havoc...

Alaska Governor and Republican Vice Presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, while out on the hustings likes to ask her audiences: "Who is the real Barack Obama?" But it took a bipartisan commission of the Alaska State Legislature to give us a more accurate glimpse at the real Sarah Palin. The commission...

In a superb front-page article in today's New York Times, "Taking a Hard Look at a Greenspan Legacy," Peter S. Goodman treats his readers to a banquet of former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's oracular pronouncements in favor of deregulating derivative markets -- Yes, those unregulated, absurdly inflated "swaps"...

First, let me just say that the format of tonight's debate was a disservice to American democracy because NBC and Gallup went out of their way to fill their ersatz "town hall" with the most checked-out, uninformed and disengaged "citizens" who remain "undecided" after eight years of George W. Bush,...

After seeing the collapse of some of America's most highly esteemed financial services corporations and the federal government's subsequent attempt at bailing them out, I thought it would be a good idea to once again view the 2004 documentary about the bankruptcy of Enron, "The Smartest Guys in the Room."...

The Hill reported today: "Unlike the three-hour vote on the 2003 Medicare drug bill, House Republican leaders did not put much pressure on their rank-and-file members to back the rescue package." John Boehner, Roy Blunt and other "leaders" of the House Republicans thought they could strike a public pose as...

I do not want to be just another voice from the Democratic base "spinning" the performances we saw tonight to the benefit of my favored candidate, Barack Obama, regardless of my true perception. The aspect of the debate that most concerned me about Obama's strategy tonight was his allowing John...