Mushrooming from lower Manhattan, the inchoate backlash brings expectable reactions in Washington from Democratic cheerleading to GOP hypocrisy. As Eric Cantor calls protesters “a mob…pitting Americans against Americans,” Nancy Pelosi reminds the Tea Party toad, “I didn’t hear him say anything when the Tea Party was out demonstrating, actually spitting on members of Congress right here in the Capitol, and he and his colleagues were putting signs in the windows encouraging them.” But...

The clearest voice for sanity in the GOP race has gone all in for tonight’s New Hampshire debate with a foreign-policy speech that actually makes sense. But will sanity sell? “We still have remnants of a top-heavy, post-cold war infrastructure,” Jon Huntsman says. “It needs to be transformed to reflect the 21st Century world and the growing asymmetric threats we face.” The former ambassador to China argues that “America once had a foreign policy based on containment–the containment...

In this political climate of loud no’s and yesses, good journalism is vital to disentangle all the maybes and what if’s. As Republicans brand the 2009 stimulus of $787 billion a total failure and Democrats defend it as keeping the recession from getting worse, Ezra Klein of the Washington Post reports what economists and politicians were actually thinking and doing back then. He cites the 2008 book of Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff, “This Time Is Different,” a study of nine centuries of financial...

This weekend, GOP presidential candidates are groveling at the “Values Voters Summit” in Washington, a noisy minority with frontrunner Mitt Romney defending his faith from attacks as “a cult.” All this is reported with a straight face by media large and small, who a generation ago would have dismissed such fringe doings as a crackpot sideshow. Today, the Tea Party and the Religious Right hold America hostage, with few signs of dissent among America’s real Silent Majority (not the one Nixon...

The contest for the GOP presidential nomination is like one of those grade-school elocution contests, in which the winner was always the kid who declaimed the best, without the least idea of what he or she was talking about. Herman Cain is spouting nonsense, but he does it with enough verbal dexterity to keep pundits busy pointing out that none of it makes sense while Tea Party voters lap it up. Rick Perry, on the other hand, has dived in the polls, less for his policy positions than hoof-in-mouth...

With Chris Christie and Sarah Palin folding, it looks like Mitt Romney has won the Republican tontine—-a survivor not a savior. As he celebrates on the campaign trail in Florida, he may be within shouting distance of his logical running mate, freshman Sen. Marco Rubio, the Tea Party favorite who would bring youth, Latino-ness and a few months of legislative experience to the ticket. Rubio has been busy polishing his credentials. Just back from a trip to Libya with John McCain, the 40-year-old...

A majority now see Barack Obama as a one-term president and he calls himself the “underdog,” but social networks may be changing the political landscape for 2012 in a way that the new medium of television did during the “youthquake” of the 1960s. What started as a small disorganized rally on Wall Street three weeks ago is spreading to Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston and elsewhere into a movement. “With little organization and a reliance on Facebook, Twitter and Google groups to share methods,”...

As the GOP plods through its revival of last century’s Absurdist masterpiece, “Waiting for Godot,” (Christie, Palin, whoever), there are reminders that Americans have an actual president trying to govern in the real world. In his Weekly Address, Barack Obama says, “It’s been almost three weeks since I sent the American Jobs Act to Congress–three weeks since I sent them a bill that would put people back to work and put money in people’s pockets…And now I want it back. It is...

He is good at selling things, and now Herman Cain is outdoing his Burger King and Godfather Pizza triumphs by getting hungry GOP voters to order him up for the White House. From the bottom of the pack, Cain has surged to third in the national Fox poll at 17 percent, two points behind Rick Perry, after surprisingly eating the Texas governor’s lunch in a Florida straw poll this week. The political noise is all about Cain’s race, a furor he fuels with the claim that black voters have been “brainwashed...

Today’s subject is how complicated it is to be a good person in today’s world. David Brooks offers deep-think about the “empathy craze,” citing research that “Empathy makes you more aware of other people’s suffering, but it’s not clear it actually motivates you to take moral action or prevents you from taking immoral action.” Half a century ago, Mike Nichols and Elaine May made that point by satirizing an elitist couple’s detachment (“It’s basically a moral problem.”...

Osama bin Laden used to brag about making Americans so paranoid about terror attacks that just raising an al Qaeda flag would panic us into self-damage without any effort on his part. His legacy comes back in headlines about the arrest of a 26-year-old Massachusetts man, who has been working for months with FBI sting agents to prepare attacks on the Capitol and Pentagon with remote-controlled aircraft, fake C-4 explosives, automatic AK-47 assault rifles, grenades and cellphones to act as detonation...

As Chris Christie dithers at stage left, the candidate-filing curtain is coming down on Republicans with no one but Mitt Romney and hapless Jon Huntsman standing between them and nomination of a possibly suicidal candidate for next year. Only 100 days away from the first primaries, 2012 is shaping up to be the year in which the GOP has to decide what kind of Change is more important—-expressing hatred for Barack Obama or getting him out of the White House. Will they choose someone who satisfies...

As deadlines near for filing to get on the ballot, the most peculiar Republican candidate of them all is running (or not) true to form-—in all directions. The chief of Sarah Palin’s PAC is panhandling supporters by telling them time is “running out,” that “someone must save our nation from this road to European socialism” and she is “on the verge of making her decision of whether or not to run for office.” In Palinspeak, this is either a last bid for bucks before the Tease ends with...

A pitiful Wall Street parody of 1960s populist protests is a reminder of what has changed in American life over half a century. The hippie trappings are there, but the joyous anarchy and hope back then are nowhere to be seen in today’s crybaby culture. More real passion was generated by a recent increase in Netflix prices than “Occupy Wall Street,” a diffuse demonstration against corporate greed that started a week ago with street-theater demonstrations by a few hundred activists and dwindled...

Trump, Bachmann, Perry…and, on the horizon, Chris Christie. Republicans are using up frontrunners like disposable tissues, evoking a personal memory. FDR was inaugurated on March 4, 1933, my ninth birthday. In 1945 I was a 21-year-old foot soldier sleeping on the floor of a German farmhouse shaken awake to hear that the only president I could remember was dead. Our world now manufactures public figures like Kleenex and, in this turbulent year, gives us no time to learn much about them before...

Elizabeth Warren, 62 and Michele Bachmann, 55 are American women of the same generation, but they live on different planets. As Bachmann grows more desperate in the GOP race to fire up the fringe of the Tea Party, Warren emerges in Massachusetts to remind Americans of their traditional values. “If there was any election when we conservatives don’t settle,” Bachmann warns about her “radical” opponents, Mitt Romney and Rick Perry, ”it’s this election. This is the election where we can...

Tonight’s installment of the “Mitt and Rick Show,” AKA presidential debates, will introduce a new fringe character to be ignored—-former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson, who will bring to the party the novelty of a GOP wannabe who favors gay rights. Meanwhile, the Texas governor keeps providing colorful language for the long-running sitcom by denouncing Romney to Fox News, “We need to nominate someone who has a stark clear difference between the Republican nominee and President Obama....

George W. Bush never admitted a mistake. It’s time for his successor to save a crumbling presidency by admitting his own while going head-to-head with Tea Party treason that is subverting his and America’s future. “These guys are playing a different game than the president’s playing,” Vice President Biden tells Democrats about the intransigence of Congressional Republicans. “And we are no longer playing.” Good enough, but Barack Obama has to do more than that—-start a new game (perhaps...

The President has finally stepped up to deal with his personal pushback deficit by promising to veto any bill that cuts Social Security and Medicare without raising taxes on “millionaires and billionaires.” Until now, the White House has been threat-free as the Boehner-McConnell gang holds the government hostage and sends all the ransom notes. The turnaround is long overdue. Now, let the Republican candidate clowns show voters exactly how going back to pre-George W. Bush tax rates will cripple...

Unless Mitt Romney (or Jeb Bush) stops the Rick Perry steamroller, we are heading toward a referendum on the value of human life next year. When Sarah Palin invented death panels to bash health care reform two years ago, with perfect pitch for political devastation, she planted a seed that has now flowered in the Tea Party frontrunner, who is being cheered for multiple executions in Texas by crowds who are also thrilled by the prospect of letting uninsured young people die. How did Hope and Change...

At what point do stubborn blindness, knee-jerk resistance and blanket refusal to negotiate cross the line from ideological opposition to subversion of government? In what has now become coded language for “The Tea party won’t let me,” House Speaker John Boehner, after lauding tax cuts and less regulation as the answers to job creation he learned working in his grandfather’s tavern, concludes that solutions “will require everyone coming to the table with their best ideas first and leaving...

For decades, Joe McGinniss has been to journalism what Sarah Palin has become to politics–a relentless self-promoter who rarely lets facts get in the way of a good story-—and now they come together with the former’s book about the latter as she is on the brink of possibly becoming a presidential candidate. The next media scandals du jour will emanate from that 320-page tome, the flavor of which is imparted by a review in the New York Times: “’The Rogue’” suggests that Todd Palin...

A prime-time TV special introduces new generations to “the most mysterious, fascinating–and feline–woman in American political history” through 47-year-old audiotapes made soon after JFK’s assassination. For those possibly confused by abject adoration of her husband and bitchiness toward most other political figures of their time, some first-hand footnotes on the apparent contradictions. In the tapes, Jacqueline Kennedy describes her marriage as “a rather terribly Victorian or...

A Tea Party remake of “The Rocky Horror Show” could become as much a cult classic as the original that ended with space aliens leaving behind “crawling on the planet’s face, tiny insects called the human race, lost in time, and lost in space–and meaning.” Last night’s performance was a howl with other actors taking turns whacking at the mad scientist’s creation, Rocky Horror, the Frankenstein Adonis who threatens their well-being. Rick Perry played the robotic lead...

The weekend was spent mourning almost 3000 Americans who were killed on September 11, 2001. In the aftermath of that day, more than 6200 have died in Iraq and Afghanistan with the toll still rising. The 9/11 dead were victims of a vicious attack on American civilization. Those since then were put in harm’s way by the conscious decision of our political and military leaders. During all the speeches and commemorations here, 77 U.S. troops were wounded yesterday by a truck bomb in Afghanistan. Every...