When the world was about to cave in; when Hank Paulson assured us that the only way to keep the world from caving in was to do what he said, now; when he told us it had to be unreviewable or else-- What he said to be done was this:...

The drunken boat that was the Modified Paulson Plan sank yesterday, capsized by a crew of pirate freemarketeers in the House. What this means: we won't be giving away a trillion dollars of taxpayer money to the world's largest investment banks until sometime after the Jewish New Year.

But in...

In today's New York Times, we see the headline:

Goldman to Raise Capital, With $5 Billion From Buffett

And in the accompanying story written by Ben White, we can read the following:

The billionaire Warren E. Buffett will invest $5 billion in the investment bank Goldman Sachs,...

"Pay should be for performance, not for failure. But we need the system to work, so the reforms need to come afterward." --Treasury Secretary Henry Merritt "Hank" Paulson Jr.

Like the early days of the Coalition Provisional Authority, it's a thieves' jamboree. Cement trucks full of cash, just...

On May 3, 1971 I found myself in Dupont Circle, Washington, D.C. -- as did a lot of others, most young, mostly "disreputable," all appalled by the war in Vietnam. I was covering the manifestations for The Cornell Daily Sun, and had taken the precaution of obtaining a District...

Road Runner has once again avoided the trap, evaded the roadblock, meep-meeped his way past his pursuer. He gathers up momentum, runs off the cliff, glides in air, continues his unbroken sprint on the other rim of the canyon.

Wile E. Coyote attempts to pursue. (Why? It's his nature.)...

When I was fourteen -- the same age as my own son is now -- I came across, or, more likely, was given, a copy of James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time. I was in my black turtleneck phase, taking each Friday the E train to bohemia (West Village branch),...

In the way that the first robin can be a harbinger of spring, so the arrival of the season's first swag tells us that Sundance is just around the corner. Mine came 10 days ago. It was an invitation to one of the many lounges of Sundance. But the invitation,...

10. Letterman has been a strong supporter. As he said in his last outing before the show went dark, "You think the show's not funny now, wait 'til the writers go on strike. I mean it really won't be funny."

9. The AMPTP says that we're too crazy,

For most of the week, the AMPTP seemed very much a Coalition of the Unwilling.

On Monday, on Tuesday, on Wednesday, they spent most of their time, and ours, reiterating in laborious detail their old positions. As Wolcott Gibbs once said, "backwards ran sentences until reeled the mind."

But then,...

The Writers Guild of America is a middle-class union. Almost half our membership receives no income from Guild-covered employment in any given year. As a result, the median income of Guild members from screen and television writing work is $5,000 per year. That's right: five thousand.

Among the lucky half...

For long time now, perhaps a year, I've been hearing (we've all been hearing) that the White House is planning to bomb Iran. As the neo-cons say, "Boys go to Baghdad; real men go to Tehran." It's a strategy so seductive that John McCain set it to

These two posts appeared, adjacent, one atop the other, on the splash page of HuffPost today.

The first:

Novak: Bush Isolated From GOP Lawmakers

The second:

Rocket Infiltrates Heavily Fortified Green Zone

Butting up against each other, the two headlines generate a metaphor: the White House as the Green Zone....

The Roberts Court--left to right, Kennedy, Scalia, Roberts--at the Gerald Ford service.

Look at the ties. Now look at the hands.

Kennedy is, by conventional wisdom, the "swing vote." Which way do you suppose he'll swing this term?

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

The Rumsfeld memo hits with the force of revelation only if you were one of the three or four people who believed that the war was going well.

The New York Times says that the memo "acknowledges that the administration's strategy in Iraq was not working." Sadly, this...

Webb's lead over Allen is more than ten times larger than that of Bush over Gore in Florida when Roger Ailes called the presidential race for Bush in 2000. Tester's lead over Burns is as of this writing at least twice as large as Bush's 2000 Florida victory margin.

When...

I grew up in Brooklyn, in red Brooklyn, in the arms of the Henry Wallace campaign and the Committee for the Negro in the Arts. I went to a progressive school where we learned math and folk songs and equality. The summer camp had the same chef, and the same...

As I write, the Senate is today in the very midst of passing a bill which would repeal habeas corpus; allow the Bush regime to "continue the Program" (i.e., to torture); allow anyone to be scooped up at any time (without judicial review, of course) and be held, well, forever....

The White House is full of Sneaky People. They whisper. They leak. They insinuate. Even with Scotty gone, they still talk in code.

Planning for Gulf War III? "What you are reading is just wild speculation," says the President, which means "we're already doing it." "Prevention... In this case,...

WASHINGTON, District of Columbia (CNN) -- The family of President Lincoln said today they were sorry for what John Wilkes Booth and his family have "had to go through" after Booth shot the President in last weekend's incident at Ford's Theatre. The men were gathered to watch a performance of...