There are lessons to be learned from Sen. Dianne Feinstein's reaction to the nomination of Leon Panetta as CIA head. One is that powerful Democratic Senators can be no less sensitive or arbitrary than their GOP counterparts. Another is that the phrase "intelligence professional" can be used like a mantra...

Another New Year, another war. Once again, the place they call the Holy Land is Ground Zero. But there are invisible wars, too, and they're all around us.

An estimated 22,000 Americans will die next year because they don't have health insurance. Millions more will suffer even though...

Every Christmas Americans indulge in their many book, stage, and screen versions of Dickens' Christmas Carol. Then the nation that sighs over the Cratchit family goes back to acting like Ebenezer Scrooge. But the economic crisis has shaken a middle-class veneer of prosperous self-satisfaction. Does that mean we can change?

The Democratic leadership may be prepared to ride out the current storms over Caroline Kennedy and Rick Warren. That would be a mistake. This is a time to heal wounds, not create new ones.

If the Party wants to demonstrate a new and inclusive style, however, this is a real...

When my Southern pals used to say "The South is gonna rise again," I doubt this is what they had in mind: A cadre of Southern Senators, heavily financed by foreign automakers and special interests, declaring war on the American Dream of good wages and decent benefits. When did...

The auto industry bailout is stalled. Opponents can't seem to decide what's most objectionable: the lack of punishment for bad planning, or the idea that taxpayer money is being used to pay decent wages. There's a proposal to force UAW workers to accept the wage levels paid in the US...

A lot of subjects flashed through my mind when I was invited to write a Thanksgiving post. The slow, corrosive effects of greed. The holiday celebrations of Wall Street CEOs, golden parachutes rippling in the wind, and those of Americans who can't find work through no fault of their own....

Josh Marshall links to a piece by Fareed Zakaria which begins this way:

Some of us--especially those under 60--have always wondered what it would be like to live through the kind of epochal event one reads about in books. Well, this is it. We're now living history, suffering one...

A pattern is starting to emerge for the Obama administration's governing style: Look into all viewpoints on major issues, listen to as many perspectives as possible, then attempt to synthesize them and find common ground on which to build its initiatives. If that's true, then one way to get a...

History is a dialogue between humanity and time. And humanity's nothing more than the sum of individual behaviors - millions of them - behaviors that eventually become currents and patterns only visible at a distance. Barack Obama saw something in those patterns that everyone else missed. And he was sure...

Read more Election Day Liveblogs, Reaction and Analysis from HuffPost Bloggers

It was the question everybody asked back when my parents were kids: "What did you do in the Great War, Daddy?" That was before Pearl Harbor, when people thought we had fought the War to End All Wars.

Now we're fighting two wars at once, with Mommy and Daddy...

In the end, the decision couldn't be clearer. This is more than just a choice between parties, or ideologies, or policy positions. It's a choice between philosophies and worldviews. It's a choice grounded in moral psychology. We will choose between different portions of our own brains, between our baser instincts...

You know what they say about payback.

The clothes purchased by the RNC for Sarah Palin may turn out to be the final blow to the McCain campaign. If so, it will be poetic justice for the self-styled maverick who always tried to keep a card up his sleeve --...

This campaign gets stranger and stranger -- and more and more frightening. Brian Williams asked Sarah Palin a fairly straightforward question, based on her repeated use of the phrase "domestic terrorist" to characterize Bill Ayers. Williams asked: "Is an abortion clinic bomber a terrorist under this definition, Governor?"

Palin...

Two stories about Al Qaeda surfaced recently, but only one of them should be surprising. Nobody should be surprised to hear that some Al Qaeda supporters want McCain to win, or that they hope for a new terrorist attack that will boost his chances. The surprise came a few...

Some questions about a colleague's work came up yesterday during a business call. We couldn't ask her about them, though. Why? Because she was somewhere between the 95th and 99th tower of the World Trade Center's North Tower on the morning of September 11, 2001.

Sarah Palin says that...

Obama has built a massive lead over McCain in the last several weeks. But while McCain now lags in all age groups, he retains his strongest support among voters 65 and older. Maybe that's because the overall economic crisis has received so much attention. The country hasn't devoted enough time...

Strange. On the same day that a new poll showed McCain's negative campaign is damaging his chances, he used the final debate to go even more negative. And McCain and Palin are both going deeper into black-helicopter territory, with talk of "terrorists" and a scary organization they say is...

Here's what I've been doing for the past week: When I'm not working my day job or obsessing about the 2008 election, I've been hanging out in the year 2019, trying to figure out how to save humanity....