Rod Blagojevich may be a little bit crazy. If so, he's crazy like a fox. In appointing former Illinois Attorney General Roland Burris to fill Barack Obama's vacated Senate seat, it looks like he's outsmarted US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, the Illinois State Legislature, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. In...

Here's an email I'm sending to my friends and contacts: I urge you to highlight it, copy it, and send it to your friends and contacts, too--or personalize it with your own message. If you have a blog, website, Facebook page or MySpace page, please promote it there, too. Let's...

The key reforms of the New Deal--Social Security, the Works Projects Administration, the Wagner Labor Relations Act, higher minimum wages--didn't come about simply because FDR was elected and surrounded himself with smart advisors. They also came about because there was an active and militant labor movement pushing FDR and Congress...

It's been a perplexing week for progressives watching President-elect Obama appoint his top economic advisors. There's no question that they are a brilliant, accomplished, competent group who have reassured financial markets and a worried nation that help is on the way.

There's some reason, however, to be concerned that...

First things first--I find Joe Lieberman to be despicable. He had a right to support John McCain, just as a number of prominent Republicans had a right to support Barack Obama. But his personal attacks on Barack Obama's patriotism--after promising that he would campaign positively for John McCain but not...

When I was a child my mother and I travelled by bus to our nation's capitol where I joined 250,000 other Americans of all races and backgrounds spread along the great mall from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial and heard Martin Luther King deliver his famous "I Have...

It may appear as though the McCain/Palin campaign is erratically lurching from tactic to tactic on an almost daily basis and, in many ways, it is. But the various McCain/Palin campaign tactics do tie together in a pattern that reflects a level of Republican strategic thinking which would be a...

If you recorded the Presidential debate and haven't erased it, try watching for 5 or 10 minutes with the sound off and you'll have few doubts that Barack Obama will be the next President. This is particularly true if you recorded CNN, which split the screen for most of the...

With the presidential election only 3 weeks away, John McCain faces a stark choice: Will he go down in history as a principled conservative who lost an election standing on his convictions? Or will he go down as an opportunist who lost while bringing out the darkest elements in American...

In a cave somewhere on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border, Osama Bin Laden must be laughing as he watches the collapse of American capitalism as we know it, which -- with an assist from George Bush -- he has done so much to catalyze.

Indeed Osama Bin Laden's efforts to help...

Medium Shot of Tina Fey in full Sarah Palin costume sitting behind a large executive desk with a Vice-Presidential seal attached, American, Confederate and Alaska Independence flags in the background, plastic Jesus on the desk. Through the monologue, the camera slowly zooms in until Tina is in close-up by the...

Charlie Gibson, the journalist personally selected by the McCain/Palin campaign to conduct the first interview of Palin since her nomination, has said that questions about Palin's family are off-limits. Does that mean that he will ask Palin serious questions about issues? Or will he follow her around Alaska for 2...

Sarah Palin is the most extremist major party candidate since Barry Goldwater, aligned with the most far right wing elements in American politics on issues ranging from denying that human activity has helped bring about global warming, to seeking to block protection of endangered species, to advocating the teaching of...

"Rope-A-Dope"
"Rumble in the Jungle"
"Float Like a Buttefly, Sting Like a Bee"

Watching Barack Obama's extraordinary performance at Mile High Stadium, lines from Muhammad Ali kept popping into my mind.

And it's not because of Obama's and Ali's race. It's because each may be among the...

Like lots of progressive Democrats, I've been pulling my hair out for the past month as John McCain and his new campaign operatives have successfully tagged Obama as an effete, elitist celebrity, with no core principles who would sell out his country to win an election, while they successfully painted...

On Wednesday I posted a blog on Huffington Post asking readers to sign a Petition requesting that our friends at MoveOn.Org let its members vote on whether they support universal single payer health care or reforming private health insurance (while adding an optional public plan that the uninsured...

I'm a longtime admirer and member MoveOn.Org. MoveOn has helped transform progressive politics, point the way to a new web-based activism, and raised millions of dollars to support progressive candidates.

The key to MoveOn's success has been its core democratic principles. As its web site puts it, "Every member has...

John McCain's new favorite campaign line seems to be "I know how to win wars." He used the line in numerous interviews and speeches in the past week in response to Barack Obama's overseas trip. In fact, McCain likes the line so much that in one speech he used it...

In the past two days, Huffington Post blogs by Roger Hickey of the Campaign For America's Future and Gerald McEntee of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union have proclaimed the creation of "Health Care for America Now!", a new coalition to fight for universal...

When Barack Obama was on The Daily Show recently, Jon Stewart ended the program with the question, "I wonder when he'll break our hearts?" The answer should not come as a surprise to any mature progressive -- soon. With Obama's announced intention to vote for the FISA bill which will...