As the nation was reeling from the Ft. Hood horror yesterday, a pathetic loner killed one man and wounded five other people in an Orlando office building shootout. Compared to the complexity of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, Jason Rodriguez looks like a run-of-the-mill loser with a failed marriage and the inability to hold a job after being fired two years ago from the architectural firm he shot up and later from a Subway eatery in a career of downward mobility. As he was being led away by police, he told...

The TV screen today looks like the vision of a demented performance artist. You can click from images of wildly cheering crowds in a Manhattan canyon celebrating what 25 young man did on a baseball field to talking heads and replays of a massacre of other young people in Texas and then suddenly to an Orlando, Florida office building for the familiar confusion in the first moments after another shooting spree. This is a portrait of 21st century America, light and dark, torn by high emotions in a new...

In the annals of sexual politics and odd couples, none could ever match the possibilities of mating Maureen Dowd and Rush Limbaugh, a power pairing that would have made Mary Matalin and James Carville look like America’s Sweethearts. The image comes to mind from Dowd’s column yesterday, recounting a four-hour dinner at Manhattan’s 21 Club back when she was “a reportette” and El Rushbo’s puss had not yet been carved on the Mt. Rushmore of the Rabid Right. “He...

Sarah Palin has upended politics-as-usual again, this time electing a Democratic Congressman in an upstate New York district that has been Republican for over 100 years. In drumming out of the party Dede Scozzafava, a member of the State Assembly with solid GOP credentials in favor of an inexperienced Conservative with a scared-rabbit persona, Palin has once again demonstrated that her gifts are better suited to show business than elective politics. Even as voters show their unease in Virginia, New...

As CIT goes bankrupt and Treasury Secretary Geithner warns that the “damage caused by this crisis” will “take some time” to repair, a key Wall Street player has managed to weather the storm at the expense of an unwary, drenched public. “All men are equal,” E.M. Forster wrote a century ago, “all men, that is to say, who possess umbrellas.” An old saying puts it more tartly: “The rain falls equally on the just and the unjust, but more on the just...

In northern New York State, they are staging a 21st century version of an American classic, old-time hardball without the Iowa corn. “People will come,” said the prophetic Voice in the 1989 movie. “They’ll turn up not knowing for sure why they’re doing it. They’ll arrive as innocent as children, longing for the past. They’ll pass over their money without even thinking about it: for it is money they have and peace they lack.” In a trance of hope, they...

Two days after his 90th birthday, Edward Brooke was at the Capitol yesterday to receive the Congressional Gold Medal from President Obama and scold Mitch McConnell for his failure to be bipartisan. Brooke, the first African-American ever elected to the Senate in 1966 as a Republican from Massachusetts, took the occasion to tell his party’s leader: “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. We’ve got to get together…It’s time for politics to be put aside on the back...

Yes, yes, to fight the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. But eight years later, American blood and treasure are still being poured into a country of dirt-poor, illiterate people who support themselves by growing poppy for opium and heroin under one of the most corrupt governments in the world. As Barack Obama makes a midnight visit to honor the incoming dead and console their families, critics may sneer at his theatricality, but the President seems to be trying to clear his head and heart of the...

“I won’t risk your lives unless it is absolutely necessary,” the President said this week at the Jacksonville Naval Air Station. “And if it’s necessary, we will back you up to the hilt.” He was talking to men and women in uniform but answering an American who never wore one, Dick Cheney, who has accused him of “dithering” about sending more troops to Afghanistan during a speech at the Center for Security Policy last week to accept a “Keeper of the...

As Congress stumbles toward a final deal, the process is a reminder of the disheartening political climate in which we live today. No one will really be happy with the final result. How could they be? In a world where human considerations are swamped by partisan posturing, the bottom line, if anyone can figure out what it is, will not be how much better or worse it makes our society but who wins and who loses. At heart, it will be a collection of poor compromises. Here, for example, is Harry Reid,...

The journalism gods turned prankish Friday. As Chesley Sullenberger was taping a PBS News Hour interview about how he how saved 155 lives by landing safely in the Hudson River last January, two other pilots were overshooting Minneapolis by 150 miles. The incident recalled an old standup routine in which Bob Newhart comes on the intercom as a clueless cockpit voice to ask, “Would any of you folks back there recognize Cleveland if you saw it?” Now, the Northwest pilots are facing suspension...

Campaign attacks on Barack Obama and his crew as latte-drinking elitists are finally coming into play in their war of words with Rupert Murdoch’s rough-and-ready outback minions. Any country boy could have told them a basic rule of rural life: Never get into a contest with a skunk. Now, the Administration is finding itself befouled by controversy as an ABC correspondent asks at a briefing why “one of our sister organizations” was excluded from a round of official interviews and...

Life imitates and irritates art as leading musicians join a Freedom of Information suit to discover how loud rock was used as an instrument of torture against Guantanamo detainees. Members of REM, Pearl Jam and Nine Inch Nails want to know details of when and how their work was employed to break down terror suspects, although the CIA insists that the sounds were “not for punitive purposes–and at levels far below a live rock band.” Not so, says a Human Rights group’s report,...

A movement is stirring both here and in Britain to roll back commercial banks to the post-Depression era, when they were barred from gambling on markets with depositors’ money by the Glass-Steagall Act. Today Paul Volcker, the former Fed chairman who heads the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board but is overshadowed by ex-Wall Streeters Tim Geithner and Lawrence Summers, goes public with his proposal to do just that. “The banks are there to serve the public,” Volcker says,...

If Barack Obama had been president in 2002, he says he would have stayed out of Iraq and pursued al Qaeda in Afghanistan. But that “war of necessity” is now morphing into the biggest foreign policy headache of our time, a Hydra of impossible choices in Pakistan, the whole Middle East and beyond. Even as Hamid Karzai agrees to an election runoff with who-knows-what prospects of national unity in Kabul, the perception of a growing gulf between the American military and the White House stirs...

The medical specialists most likely to benefit from the health care debate are optometrists as the Senate Finance Committee releases its 1502-page text and mental health professionals as a new poll shows a national mood swing from August rage against a public option to 57 percent of Americans in favor of it. Max Baucus’ masterwork can now be read as a sequel to the 839-page tome by the Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee, with which it will be merged into a doorstop of legislation...

The knock on Barack Obama from the start was his unwillingness to go head to head–”mix it up a little,” as Maureen Dowd urged during the campaign. Now, after a Nobel Peace prize, he suddenly seems to be brawling with everybody, from the health insurance industry down to Fox News. “They’re filling the airwaves with deceptive and dishonest ads,” he said this weekend in counterattacking the insurers. “They’re flooding Capitol Hill with lobbyists and campaign contributions....

If there is an emergency room for lobbyists, the gunslingers for America’s health insurance giants need treatment for shooting themselves in the foot when they went on the attack this week against the Senate Finance Committee’s bill. Their coming out of the weeds has drawn fire, first from the White House (”everyone recognizes their motives: profits”) and now Nancy Pelosi as she warns of tougher regulation and notes: “It is absolutely clear that it is an unsustainable...

Symbolism comes with a heavy hand these days as Stock Exchange traders cheer at the Dow hitting 10,000 while the national employment rate heads for double digits. The disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street keeps widening as money jugglers, who caused the credit crisis that led to bailouts with taxpayer billions, are getting record bonuses while those who do real work in the world, such as airline pilots, with hundreds of lives in their hands daily, are seeing their salaries slashed. (On...

The assembly line in the Congressional sausage factory is ready to roll, to stuff what Max Baucus’ butchers have hacked up into a casing with scraps from four other committees in the Senate and House. Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and the “Bill Blenders” start work today in a process that will make the past few months look like the Lincoln-Douglas debates as lobbying groups across the spectrum flood Washington with “a torrent of spending and grassroots activity” to influence...

Olympia Snowe may not be out of a Frank Capra movie but, as an independent-minded Republican in an era of hard-line party politics, she is certainly an anachronism. When Time Magazine picked her as one of “America’s 10 Best Senators” in 2006, it noted: “Because of her centrist views and eagerness to get beyond partisan point scoring, Maine Republican Olympia Snowe is in the center of every policy debate in Washington.” As the Senate Finance Committee votes today on health...

On the momentous issue of whether or not the Mouth That Roared should be allowed to become an owner of a professional football team, as cogently debated in one of the posts below, let me add another view that may excite debate in another direction: Al Sharpton has his knickers in a twist over news that Rush Limbaugh is trying to acquire the National Football League franchise in St. Louis, but with all due respect, the Reverend and other protesters fail to see the internal logic of such a move. With...

If the election had gone the other way, Americans would have been spared all this doubt and deliberation about the Middle East. Asked whether adding 10 or 20,000 troops for Afghanistan would suffice, John McCain tells CNN it would be “an error of historic proportions” not to meet Gen. McChrystal’s request for 40,000 or more. If Barack Obama were as sure of anything as McCain is of everything, there would be no need for agonizing over what conservative Peggy Noonan calls “a...

Those too mesmerized by baseball playoffs to watch Letterman, Conan et al last night did not miss much. All day long politicians had been doing stand-ups about Obama’s Nobel Prize. The President himself led off his Rose Garden turn with “Well, this is not how I expected to wake up this morning. After I received the news, Malia walked in and said, ‘Daddy, you won the Nobel Peace Prize, and it is Bo’s birthday!’ And then Sasha added, ‘Plus, we have a three-day...

In time for Halloween, Republican specters are rising up to scare some sense into their Congressional heirs as they move zombielike toward a possible pyrrhic victory in the hope that poll numbers “may get worse for Democrats if they pass a health-care bill.” That prediction is the wisdom according to Karl Rove, who engineered the party’s 2006 loss, but older and wiser Republican heads are emerging to warn against the short-term politics of being intractable on what all sides agree...