I have nothing against the folks who created Tumblr and managed to get Yahoo to bid a whopping $1.1 billion this week to buy the company. More power to them, I thought as I attended the event they helped sponsor Monday night for winners of this year’s Webby Awards, one of which—best political site—went to Truthdig, the online news magazine I proudly ...

My state of Texas seems to have an inordinate share of nincompoops in public office. But it's only fair that officeholders from other place be considered before deciding which state is the nincompoopiest of all.

Give credit to Pennsylvania, for example, whose GOP governor, Tom Corbett, recently scored big nincompoop points by ...

Back in their day, the tea party folks were riding high, fueling indignation over alleged government-run death panels, a treasonous Federal Reserve and the like. They commandeered sparsely attended Republican primaries, managing to nominate for Senate seats a dabbler in witchcraft in Delaware, holders of strange views on rape ...

As global capital becomes ever more powerful, giant corporations are holding governments and citizens up for ransom — eliciting subsidies and tax breaks from countries concerned about their nation’s “competitiveness” — ...

Joe Sacco and I spent two years reporting from the poorest pockets of the United States for our book “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.” We went into our nation’s impoverished “sacrifice zones”—the first areas forced to kneel before the dictates of the marketplace—to show what happens when unfettered corporate ...

Having served in Congress for more than three decades — and in the upper chamber since 1996 — Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden has established a reputation as one of the Senate's more serious and diligent members. Over the years on Capitol Hill, he has watched the Republican Party veer constantly further rightward, and yet he continues to believe against all evidence that bipartisan legislative cooperation is possible — even likely. His habitual reaching across the partisan ...

For years, conservatives have pushed for a health-insurance model emphasizing catastrophic coverage. It works as follows:

Consumers pay the cost of ordinary care, such as ...

“This systematic abuse cannot be fixed with just one resignation, or two,” said David Camp, the Republican chairman of the House tax-writing committee, at an oversight hearing Friday morning dealing with the IRS. “This is not a personnel problem. This is a problem of the IRS being too large, too intrusive, too abusive.”

David Camp has it wrong. There has been a “systematic” abuse of power, but it’s not what Camp has in ...

If I told you that government officials possessed ironclad proof that an imminent threat to this nation had the capacity to create a 9/11's worth of injuries and deaths every year at an annual economic cost of a quarter trillion dollars, ask yourself: Would you say we should do something about it?

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Six months into a second term and the Obama White House is on the defensive and floundering: Benghazi, the IRS’s investigations of right-wing groups, the Justice Department’s snooping into journalists’ phone records, Obamacare behind schedule, the Administration’s push for gun control ending in failure.

Should the blame fall mainly on congressional Republicans and their allies in the right-wing media, whose vitriolic attacks on Obama ...

At last, some excellent economic news for folks long-mired in the stagnant labor market.

“Jobs Spring Back,” exclaimed a typical ...

As we move toward the fifth anniversary of the great financial crisis of 2008, people should be outraged that cutting Social Security is now on the national agenda, while taxing Wall Street is not. After all, if we take at face value the claims made back in 2008 by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and former Treasury Secretaries Henry Paulson and Timothy Geithner, Wall Street excesses brought the economy to the brink of collapse.

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At last, some excellent economic news for folks long-mired in the stagnant labor market!

At least, those were the headlines recently trumpeted across the country. "Jobs Spring Back," exclaimed a typical headline or report that companies added a better than expected 165,000 private-sector jobs in April. Wow — the ...

Elizabeth Warren does great email. One payoff of my pittance of a contribution to her grass-roots funded campaign—I regret not contributing more—is that I am regularly alerted by the new Massachusetts senator to the favoritism of our Congress toward Wall Street.

That’s how I was reminded this week that Congress is about to let the interest rate charged for ...

Max Baucus' reputation as one of the most ethically challenged members of the U.S. Senate is well earned. The Montana Democrat's decision to retire in 2014 can't help but improve the chamber's sorry record of self-enrichment at taxpayers' expense. But Baucus has over a year left to do more ...

By now almost everyone knows of the famous Excel spreadsheet error by Harvard professors Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff. It turns out that the main conclusions from their paper warning of the risks of high public sector debt were driven by miscalculations.

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My mother went into paid work soon after my father’s clothing store was flooded out in a hurricane, almost wiping him out. She had no choice. We needed the money.

This was some two decades before a tidal wave of wives and mothers went into paid ...

Less than four months after Barack Obama's inauguration, the right-wing propaganda machine is already promoting the only imaginable conclusion to a Democratic administration that dares to achieve a second term: impeachment. Once confined to the ranks of the birthers, the fantasy of removing President Obama from office is ...

The love fest between Barack Obama and his top fundraiser Penny Pritzker that has led to her being nominated as Commerce secretary would not be so unseemly if they both just confessed that they did it for the money. Her money, not his, financed his rise to the White House from less promising days back in Chicago.

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You see it in stores across our country and around the world: colorful and stylish clothing with happy-sounding brand names like Children’s Place, Papaya, Joe Fresh, and Mango.

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