On November 9, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu returns to Washington, this time to the White House at the invitation of Barack Obama. Netanyahu’s previous trip, in early March of this year, was a foreign policy coup for Speaker of the House John Boehner, who invited Netanyahu to address Congress without consulting the White House––and an […]

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  When Lester Maddox was governor of Georgia in the late 1960s, he insisted that the problem with the state’s prisons was “the poor quality of its inmates.” Maddox was a Democrat and an ardent defender of the Apartheid South, not exactly an American statesman. Yet his defense of Georgia’s prison system turns out to […]

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A reporter friend writes me to ask a question about my exposés of grifting and deception as the warp and weft of the conservative movement. He tells me he’s trying to write about that story, instead of the clichéd horse-race one about “GOP IN DISARRAY.” But aren’t they the same story? An institution built on […]

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I sure hope you didn’t bother to watch the absurd Republican debate on CNBC Wednesday night. That’s what you have me for. Here are two takeaways: Ben Carson said “crap.” (Specifically, that “the government picking winners and losers” is “a bunch of crap.”) And, remember that time a few years ago when I wrote that […]

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In September, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced a carbon cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse emissions, delivering on a bi-national agreement he reached with President Obama in November 2014. The United States and China together account for one-third of global greenhouse emissions. In the United States, the process of reducing emissions to the agreed-upon 25-28 percent […]

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