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 mischief.
What were Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton thinking? Why did they keep pitching the line that the 9/11/12 Benghazi attack that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans started as a spontaneous protest against an anti-Muslim video?
The story of three girls grabbed from the streets of Cleveland and caged in their neighborhood for some 10 years demands scrutiny beyond expressions of shock. We can't let this gruesome tale of Ariel Castro allegedly imprisoning, impregnating and tormenting young women simply pass into the annals of true crime -- not just yet. But how are we to process it? The man was clearly a sicko, but what kind of sicko was he?
Foreign policy matters rarely top the list of voter concerns. That's especially true in times of challenging economic news. In recent weeks, though, national security topics have been working their way into the headlines. First came the Boston Marathon bombings and questions about terrorist connections. The civil war in Syria entered the news with reports of chemical warfare followed by an Israeli bombing near Damascus. Finally, congressional hearings have provided additional details about what happened in Benghazi, Libya, on the day Ambassador Christopher Stevens and other Americans were murdered during a terrorist attack.
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 starting to fester in supposedly saner minds.
Markets work. But sometimes they take time.
That's the uncomfortable lesson that proprietors of America's colleges and universities are learning.
Forty-three million Americans moved from one state to another between 1995 and 2010 -- about one-seventh of Americans.
It's good that we can move! Moving provides one of the few limits on the megalomania of state bureaucrats.
Americans have moved away from high-taxed, heavily regulated states to lower-taxed, less-regulated states. Most don't think of it as a political decision. They just go where opportunities are, and that usually means where there's less government.
They're leaving my state, New York, in droves. California, despite its great weather, also lost people, and wealth. Other biggest losers were Illinois, New Jersey and Ohio.
You know a corner's been turned when someone in a legion of foreign sweatshop workers is given a face. That's happened in Bangladesh, home of hideous factory conditions -- as seen in the ruins of Rana Plaza, a former eight-story work warren. Death toll: over 600.
Many loud voices in the debate over immigration have been insisting that effective border enforcement must precede any steps that legalize the status of current illegal immigrants.
We may not have time for exercise, but there's always time to read about exercising. And while the motivation to exercise may not be tops, the motivation to shop for "aids" to exercise seems forever strong.
There are many ways to describe the enormous gap between the American people and their elected politicians. Most in official Washington tend to think that their elite community is smarter and better than the rest of us. Many hold a condescending view of voters and suggest that the general public is too ignorant to be treated seriously. Only 5 percent of the nation's voters, however, believe that Congress and its staff members represent the nation's best and brightest.
Like all such monuments that former presidents construct to edify the public, the George W. Bush Presidential Center -- opened with great ceremony in Texas last week -- is mounted from its subject's point of view.
"We're eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked," Secretary of State Dean Rusk famously said during the Cuban missile crisis.
Most Americans -- even those who are legislators -- know very little about the details of President Obama's Affordable Care Act, so-called Obamacare. Next year, when it goes into effect, we will learn the hard way.
Many people lazily assume that the law will do roughly what it promises: give insurance to the uninsured and lower the cost of health care by limiting spending on dubious procedures.
Don't count on it.
Consider just the complexity: The act itself is more than 906 pages long, and again and again in those 906 pages are the words, "the Secretary shall promulgate regulations ..."
The good things that should happen after marijuana is legalized are happening in Colorado. In November, voters in Colorado -- and Washington state -- legalized pot for recreational use. (Many states allow medical use of marijuana.)
What are the good things?
For starters, money, money, money for the state coffers. As of last week, lawmakers in Denver were still tussling over how heavily to tax marijuana sales. A leading plan centers on excise and sales taxes totaling 30 percent. The tax can't go so high that it encourages a black market.
"What difference, at this point, does it make?"
We who work through colds, bad backs and low moods -- however liberal we might be -- have permission to resent those who could hold a job but don't, preferring to collect disability checks unto the decades. You see them at the coffee shop, refilling their cups in leisure, or even pumping iron at the gym.
The news from Boston over the past couple of weeks has been the stuff of nightmares. Homemade bombs killing and injuring innocent people at a high-profile public event were followed by a massive manhunt. People in the surrounding suburbs were ordered to stay inside, businesses closed, and SWAT teams overwhelmed a typically quiet community. The Boston police commissioner warned everyone: "We believe this is a terrorist. We believe this is a man that's come here to kill people."
Having directed NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies for most of the past four decades, Dr. James E. Hansen retired this month to devote himself to the scientific activism that has brought both awards and catcalls during his long and distinguished career. On April 24, he will receive the Ridenhour Courage Prize in Washington, D.C., for "bravely and urgently telling the truth about climate change."
Tomorrow, the George W. Bush Presidential Center will be dedicated at Southern Methodist University in Texas. It's a good time to look back on the performance of the 43rd president, who has been almost entirely missing from the public stage these past four years.
