Two years ago, they ran against Barack Obama, accusing him of “wealth redistribution.” In two months, Republicans have been working to do just that–upward. After holding the President hostage in December to save $4 trillion in tax cuts for the richest Americans, the new House majority is now pushing for budget reductions out of the hides of the poor and middle class. The GOP will have to change its symbolic elephant to a more forgetful creature as it bamboozles the public with a...

New controversies about inclusion and exclusion in American life bring to mind Groucho’s dictum, “I don’t want to belong to any club that takes people like me as members.” At a recent meeting of social psychologists, 80 percent defined themselves as politically liberal, leading to a broader debate about under-representation of conservatives in academia. On a more parochial level, nasty disagreement about who’s in and who’s out has roiled Manhattan’s Century...

This is foreign correspondence, reporting from an alien time and space, on the Grammy Awards. The music industry seems to have been infiltrated by the Tea Party as the multiple winner is Lady Antebellum, a white-bread trio looking like well-behaved children of old Nashville who could make Sarah Palin’s “A” list. Even CBS, which telecast the event, is caught off guard with a 60 Minutes feature on the outrageous Lady Gaga, who did not have a good night at the awards. The past was...

How many people plant an expression in the English language that half a century later becomes shorthand for the state of the world? As Obama’s dilemmas on the economy and the Middle East are labeled “Catch-22s,” I recall my friend Joseph Heller whose novel of that name has become shorthand for no-win situations of insane proportions. Back then, Joe seemed an unlikely candidate for immortality–a happy-go-lucky guy who wrote promotion copy for McCalls while I worked for Redbook...

Just as Tunisia ignited Egypt, how far will their example go in the wider Arab world, where many join in celebration of Mubarak’s overthrow? Could Iran be next? A parallel comes to mind from half a century ago. Just as social media played a big role in this month’s events, TV in its infancy enabled the civil rights movement in the U.S. The young protesters in Cairo, with no formal organization, attained critical mass and become a force through their Internet connections just as the oppression...

“Rip van Winkle meets Facebook,” the New York Times‘ Thomas Friedman nails the drama unfolding in Egypt as the White House struggles with the dilemma of how hard to shake Mubarak awake after his soporific speech “from the father to his sons and daughters.” “The administration has to put everything on the line now,” says an official of Human Rights Watch, who has been advising the White House. “Whatever cards they have, this is the time to play them.” The pressure...

Update: After a day of false reports that he would be stepping down, Hosni Mubarak appears on Egyptian TV to offer a rambling self-justification and enrage protesting crowds with double-talk about peaceful transition. By doing so, he is inviting the chaos his supporters have been warning about–a self-fulfilling prophecy. The question arises, “Would you buy a used camel from this man?” as Foreign Minister Aboul Gheit insists that Egypt has a “road map” for peaceful transformation...

“In recent weeks,” writes a culinary columnist, “we’ve seen a big, powerful government agency, a big, powerful person and a big, powerful corporation telling us what to eat.” He is critiquing the efforts of the USDA, Oprah and Wal-Mart (partnering with Michelle Obama) to persuade Americans to “Eat Real Food”–more fruit and vegetables, less processed gunk. A noble goal, but easier said than done in the Supermarket and Fast Food Ages. The dilemma brings back...

A merger couples the Huffington Post and what remains of the dial-up service that tried to eat the media world. For Arianna H., a giant financial step for Womankind but hardly a “Merger of Visions“–more a cautionary tale about 21st century competition for eyeballs. In a 1997 New York Times OpEd, at the height of a subscriber and stock boom, I compared AOL to mass magazines of my era which kept buying ever higher circulations at cut rates while consumers needed them less and less...

Over a century ago, Americans were wowed by belly dancers called Little Egypt who did the Hoochee-Coochee for the yokels’ amazement. Now, with the real Egypt in upheaval, the Far Right has gone into its ritual dance to blame Barack Obama and show themselves as insular rubes to the point that even conservative guru William Kristol is disgusted: “When Glenn Beck rants about the caliphate taking over the Middle East from Morocco to the Philippines, and lists (invents?) the connections between...

The Gipper would have enjoyed celebrating his centennial on that most American of days when two football teams beat each other’s brains out while the nation watches with barbecue and beer. Ronald Wilson Reagan lived all his life in an imagined country, starting as a sportscaster in a small room with a teletype that told him “GO 3B,” from which, with recorded crowd noises, he would spin a breathless description of a hard smash down the left field line, the third baseman diving headlong...

The First Lady, who has been promoting healthy diets for Americans, has misspoken herself into, of all things, a grease pit of controversy and even worse just before Super Bowl Sunday in Texas, where barbecue is sacred. In her memo to supporters announcing next year’s Democratic convention in Charlotte, Mrs. Obama praises the city’s many virtues, adding “And of course great barbecue.” This prompts the local North Carolina newspaper to respond “Charlotte=great barbecue?...

Two narratives dominate the news–the revolt in Egypt and the future of American health care. How bad can a Pyrrhic victory get and how long can it last? As the Senate votes down health care repeal, Congress has wasted a full month on partisan posturing, leaving what was a national mess to the courts and states to scramble it into 50 forms of incoherence. Just as the House and Senate split on undoing the Act, implementing it is breaking down by party lines as well with Democratic governors moving...

February arrives with a reminder that life takes turns that don’t fit into the mold our minds have constructed for the world: An uprising in Egypt suddenly changes the Middle East power equation and forces us to recalibrate our investment of blood and money in the region. Here at home, state courts keep overturning the essence of health care reform, racing ahead of GOP Congressional efforts to repeal it. And winter storms across the country wreck damaged local government budgets with new debt...

The GOP ideological kitchen is being overrun by too many cooks, including a pizza magnate presidential candidate and a chain that sells God-fearing breaded chicken to say nothing of Sarah Palin’s WTF moose chili and Michele Bachmann’s side dish of apple sauce. All this complicates 2012 for the white-bread front runner Mitt Romney, whose ever-changing menu will have to take on historic proportions to accommodate the varying tastes of primary voters. But not to worry, says the conservative...

In the spotlight this weekend–60 Minutes and the New York Times Magazine–and from now on no doubt a subject of study in journalism schools, the question about him remains: Is Julian Assange a publisher, as he insists, or a fence providing stolen goods to the media? One of the beneficiaries, executive editor Bill Keller, takes great pains to explain how the Times struggled with the temptation to partner with him, finally gave in and is now trying to keep him at long arm’s length. Labeling...

The year I was born, Charlie Chaplin filmed a classic scene in “The Gold Rush,” boiling and eating his shoe while snowbound. This month, as driveways are piled high, I know just how he felt, consuming not footwear but an overdose of many movies made since then. In the grip of cabin fever, the mind reels at thoughts of lowering the deficit, Winning the Future or understanding Egypt or Tunisia and just wants to settle into two-hour hammocks of alternate reality in which people behave the...

Authorship is the issue as the President is accused of State of the Union plagiarism, a McCain aide is unmasked for writing an anonymous novel about 2012, and Republican economists boycott a news conference on publication of their own 576-page volume about the financial meltdown. “Some on Wall Street and Washington with a stake in the status quo,” the chairman of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, declares, “may be tempted to wipe from memory this crisis or to suggest again that...

In a word, the State of the Union is stupefied. The President, under pressure to rally a nation while placating a patchwork Congress, did his oratorical best but looked like a man leaning backward while urging Americans to “out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world” in the future. Unlike Tuscon, this speech came, as it had to, less from Barack Obama’s heart than a region of his political brain calculated to co-opt GOP opposition while laying out a blueprint...

“We have met the enemy,” the comic strip character said four decades ago, “and he is us,” but a new generation of politicians is making that look like an understatement. As the President rules out immediate Social Security cuts, Rep. Paul Ryan, head of the Ayn Rand caucus, prepares to answer the State of the Union with his plan to scale back benefits for what his guru called “moochers” in American society. A generational target isn’t enough for House Majority...

The story line is set: What George W. Bush tried to do by doubling down in Iraq, Barack Obama is accomplishing with a wave of empathic vigor–health care for 9/11 responders, repealing DADT, consoling and uplifting the nation after the Tucson atrocity and now the State of the Union. “What Obama seeks,” says New York Magazine, “is to reconnect with the essence of why he was elected, to reanimate the unifying, postpartisan, pragmatic yet visionary persona that inspired so many...

Robert Sargent Shriver, a Kennedy by marriage and in spirit, died this week at the age of 95 just as Joseph Lieberman, 68 announces he is leaving the Senate next year, offering a contrast in public figures. Shriver, brother-in-law of JFK and Robert, the first director of the Peace Corps who later led LBJ’s “war on poverty,” was a modest man. Lieberman, who claims to have been inspired to run for public office by President Kennedy, is not. As Gail Collins puts it, “Normally...

Between the Tucson speech and the State of the Union next week, there is the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address, an apt moment to compare two Presidents in their 40′s who broke ethnic barriers to get to the White House and found rough going. Kennedy had his Bay of Pigs in the first months, which in retrospect looks like a walk in the park compared to Obama’s term so far, but the President is now poised to recapture the momentum from his own inaugural and JFK’s. As...

The dots connect between Sarah Palin’s self-absorbed interview on the Tucson shootings and the response of Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother after the death of her son who killed JFK and was gunned down two days later. In Washington to testify before the Warren Commission investigating the assassination, Mrs. Oswald told reporters she was miffed about not being invited to the White House by Lady Bird Johnson. “After all,” Mrs. Oswald reasoned, “her husband became President...

Out of respect for Tucson victims, House Republicans have downgraded their designation of health care reform from “job-killing” to “job-crushing” and “job-destroying.” But with this new verbal sensitivity, John Boehner is insisting, “No act of violence is going to keep us from doing our jobs and representing the will of our constituents. The American people have made it clear they want us to focus on cutting spending and removing barriers to job creation.” This...