All Articles of 2009

Bedtime = book time. Parents know that equation by heart, or at least they're supposed to. The drill goes like this: Just before the goodnight kiss, we snuggle up with our young kids, open a book, and read with them. Okay, so maybe at first we have to beg them to just settle down. And maybe the baby is more prone to eat the pages than look at them. But still, we try. We're the ones responsible for these little human beings. It's part of our… more

The depth of cynicism behind the Vatican's invitation last month to right-wing Episcopalians "to enter full communion with the Catholic Church while preserving elements of the distinctive Anglican spiritual and liturgical patrimony" is best understood through one of Rome's most high-profile converts, a certain John Henry Newman.

In 1994, after Democrats lost control of the Senate, Senator Joe Lieberman called a press conference with his colleague Tom Harkin to announce their plan to reform the filibuster. "[People] are fed up--frustrated and fed up and angry about the way in which our government does not work," Lieberman said. "And I think the filibuster has become not only in reality an obstacle to accomplishment here, but it is also a symbol of a lot that ails Washington today." Lieberman and Harkin's proposal to weaken the filibuster… more

The night of September 9 appeared to fulfill all the promise underlying NBC Universal's ambitious $2.7 billion acquisition in 2001 of Telemundo, the second-largest Spanish language television network in the U.S. On that night, the NBC sibling carried President Obama's important healthcare address to a joint session of Congress-on a slight delay to allow for dubbing into Spanish-followed by its highest-rated program ever, which reached more than 5 million viewers.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stepped from the frying pan into the fire this weekend, when she sparked a controversy regarding U.S. policy toward Israeli settlements right after some tough days of public and private diplomacy in Pakistan. But was the controversy as serious as it seemed? And what does it means for the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts? Here, a fact check on some settlement myths and misconceptions.  

1. What is the significance of Clinton's linguistic acrobatics? 

After Republican victories in Virginia and New Jersey and a near-miss in upstate New York, conservatives have supposedly gotten their groove back. But it's not the same old groove. In the late 1990s, it was social issues that obsessed the American right: abortion, gay rights, gun control, Monica Lewinsky. After 9/11, it was the war on terror. Now both obsessions have faded. Doug Hoffman-the right-wing insurgent candidate for Congress in the 23rd District of New York-didn't even list his position on the Afghanistan surge on his Web… more

"Are you ready to put on your white wigs?" That is a question I have been posing lately to many everyday Californians, as the Golden State considers if a constitutional convention composed of regular folks might hold the solution to California's ongoing political and budgetary woes.

Where are tomorrow's jobs going to come from? The question is more urgent than ever, with official unemployment hovering around 10 percent and with nearly one in five Americans unemployed, if you count part-time workers who want full-time jobs and people so desperate that they have given up looking for work entirely.

Over the last several weeks, the dollar's depreciation against the euro and yen has grabbed global attention. In a normal world, the dollar's weakening would be welcome, as it would help the United States come to grips with its unsustainable trade deficit.

But, in a world where China links its currency to the dollar at an undervalued parity, the dollar's depreciation risks major global economic damage that will further complicate recovery from the current worldwide recession.

There is widespread agreement that if federal health care reform passes, making it work will depend in great part on getting a handle on spiraling medical costs that already consume nearly one of every five dollars spent in the United States.

Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was expected to come to the White House on Thursday for a meeting with President Barack Obama. Erdogan's visit has now been postponed, and the decision to postpone comes on the heels of the Turkish leader's high-profile visit to Iran this week.

The Obama administration has dramatically ratcheted up the American drone warfare program in Pakistan. Since President Obama took office, U.S. drone strikes have killed about a half-dozen militant leaders along with hundreds of other people, a quarter of whom were civilians.

As a result of the unprecedented 42 strikes by drone aircraft into Pakistan authorized by the Obama administration, aimed at Taliban and al Qaeda networks based there, about a half-dozen leaders of militant organizations have been killed.

American presidents have tried seven times to bring us into the community of nations that provide health care to all citizens. Seven times the effort failed. More accurately, it was blocked. In the 1940s, the anti-reform movement was led by doctors, through the American Medical Association. In the 1990s, it was led by the insurance and small-business lobbies.

A recent op-ed in the Boston Globe argues that microlending "doesn't actually do much to fight poverty" and that it may be time to "think macro rather than micro." Maybe the hype surrounding microcredit as a panacea for everything from poverty to discrimination is undeserved. But debunking the whole bottom-up, micro approach on the basis of two unpublished papers is not just premature, but dangerous. Macro, trickle-down development policies have rather effectively kept billions of people poor

Here's the latest bold new idea for reconciling the costs of national defense with the need to avoid adding to federal deficits or raising taxes. A bipartisan coalition of "New Democrats" and moderate Republicans has proposed buying weapons for the U.S. military through the IRS rather than the Pentagon. Here's how it would work. Instead of being paid to deliver planes, missiles and tanks, defense contractors would receive "weapon supply tax credits" (WSTC). The defense contractors would be

The most vital region in this world today, for U.S. interests at least, remains a maze of cloud-shearing piles of rock and sweeping valleys, both checkered by impoverished towns and men clutching AKs-- but this pile is hundreds of miles from Kabul.

Charlie Crist is an extraordinarily gifted politician, known for his unpretentious and warm demeanor. He might also be America's worst governor. Given that there is a great deal of competition for this dubious honor, that's saying rather a lot.

We are losing in Afghanistan, on two fronts. The most important center of gravity of the conflict -- as the Taliban well recognizes -- is the American public. And now, most Americans are opposed to the war.

For years, Afghanistan was "the forgotten war," and when Americans started paying attention again -- roughly around the time of President Obama's inauguration -- what they saw was not a pretty sight: a corrupt Afghan government, a world-class drug trade, a resurgent Taliban and steadily rising U.S. casualties.

At the age of forty-three, Martine Leveque decided it was time to start over. For several years, she had worked in the movie business, writing subtitles in Italian and French for English-language films, but her employer moved overseas. She then tried her hand at sales, but each time the economy dipped sales tumbled, along with her income, and as a single mother with a teenage son, she wanted a job that offered more security. She decided to pursue a career in nursing, a high-demand field where she… more

Three weeks ago, when the Nobel committee awarded its literature prize to Romanian writer Herta Muller, it lauded her courageous and unflinching fictional portraits of "daily life in a stagnated dictatorship" in communist Romania. What they did not mention, however, was Muller's ongoing nonfictional critique of the leadership of post-communist Romania.

Shepard Fairey may have hoped to teach something new about art and copyright with his iconic "Hope" poster of Barack Obama. Instead, he is accused of lyring about which Associated Press photo he used. (He says he made a mistake.) But if Fairey's lying has probably made a hash of his case and lost him a lawyer, it has also raised that pesky question yet again: Just what is fair use? Was it legal for Fairey to take an AP photo and turn it into… more

Over the summer, the Afghan Taliban's military committee distributed "A Book of Rules," in Pashto, to its fighters. The book's eleven chapters seem to draw from the population-centric principles of F.M. 3-24, the U.S. Army's much publicized counter-insurgency field manual, released in 2006. Henceforth, the Taliban guide declares, suicide bombers must take "the utmost steps . . . to avoid civilian human loss." Commanders should generally insure the "safety and security of the civilian's life and property." Also, lest

While environmentalists are keen to fight climate change by reducing carbon emissions, rank-and-file voters seem more taken by the promise of energy independence. Last year, Republicans energized the conservative base by promising to "drill here, drill now," a rallying cry that promised to exploit domestic energy reserves to reduce America's reliance on foreign oil. Energy experts insisted, however, that because oil is a global commodity, exploiting offshore oil would have a trivial impact on our exposure to geopolitical instability in

I'm all for the separation of church and state. I believe that government endorsement of any particular religious sect or tradition has a corrosive effect on both the state and the faith in question. But I also think the attempt to separate religion from government is veering toward a foolish, parochial and ultimately impossible quest to separate religion from culture.

In a recent speech to the Academy of Arts and Sciences, California Chief Justice Ronald M. George became the latest sharp critic of the state's system of direct democracy. "Frequent amendments -- coupled with the implicit threat of more in the future -- have rendered our state government dysfunctional," he said.

The chief justice isn't the first state leader to take aim at the way ballot measures are enacted in California, and he won't be the last.