Say what you will about the post-Bush decline of the GOP, its current shenanigans make Democrats look like the Partridge family. Compared to Obama’s solemnity, last night’s Washington fundraiser was a hoot. After rounds of will-she, won’t-she speculation, Sarah Palin turned up, not as the keynote speaker but to stroll the stage of the ballroom as the body-language answer to Newt Gingrich’s hour-long flood of words. If the faithful, who donated $14.5 million to the cause, were...

The table is set for the Senate to cut the heart out of health care reform, with an ailing Ted Kennedy pitted against Max Baucus, recipient of $3 million from the industry over five years with a platoon of former staff members working as lobbyists for them. Unless the White House rallies constituents to rise up, the Senate sellout will come from lawmakers hiding behind surgical masks–so-called compromises that will effectively kill what the President has called a public plan “to keep...

The Senate Republican leader is channeling a couple of GOP golden oldies to oppose a public option in the health care reform pending in Congress. Unlike Harry and Louise in the 1993 TV commercials to torpedo the Clintons’ initiative, Mitch McConnell’s protagonists are real people–sort of–Bruce Hardy of England and Shona Holmes of Canada, who have been brought out to personify the horrors of “socialized medicine.” But their stories have been as edited as a TV commercial...

The Cairo speech has come and gone, an American president preaching the Golden Rule to the Muslim world, trying to walk a fine line between faith and reason through murderous beliefs and irrational hatreds. Parsing what Barack Obama said will keep “experts” busy for some time, but the words were less exceptional than the act, an American leader presenting himself as both the product of and the bridge between two seemingly irreconcilable cultures. “I am a Christian,” he said, “but...

Charges of racism against Sonia Sotomayor are being reduced to exceeding the speed limit for empathy as Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions instructs former House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia on the finer points of demographic discrimination. In the scramble to discredit the President’s Supreme Court nominee, what remains of the Republican Party is being decimated even more by open conflict between elected officials and “mouths” such as Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh. After the former Speaker...

The Atlantic Ocean rises to consciousness this week after silently swallowing 228 people on an airliner from Brazil just after the death in England of a 97-year-old woman, the last survivor of the Titanic. Almost a century apart, the disasters recall the fragility of human life in the face of all the technological advances of 21st century life. Sitting in the vast darkness over an ocean has become so safe and familiar that Flight 447’s sudden disappearance sends only a ripple of anxiety around...

Approaching her 88th birthday, the former First Lady ventures an opinion on Barack Obama: Sometimes he isn’t political enough. Interviewed in Vanity Fair, Nancy Reagan says the new President could have gained more advantage from reversing Bush’s policy on embryonic-stem-cell research by inviting her to the announcement. “I would have gone, and you know I don’t like to travel,” she says. “Politically it would have been a good thing for him to do. Oh, well, nobody’s perfect. He called...

The American Century ends today with the death of General Motors as we knew it, the free-market engine that powered an economy and a culture to global preeminence, selling physical and social mobility to millions who had previously lived in small insular worlds. The news about bankruptcy and hope for renewal with taxpayer money is disorienting to generations who came of age in an America where success was defined by whether you drove a Chevrolet or a Cadillac and how often you could afford to trade...

Yesterday’s joint statement by Sens. Max Baucus and Ted Kennedy promising to “seek common ground on health reform legislation” is, in essence, a declaration of war over inclusion of a public insurance plan to compete with private companies. As chairmen of the two powerful committees shaping the legislation, Baucus (Finance) and Kennedy (Health, Education, Labor and Pensions) will be jousting over the core issue that the Obama Administration has been tap-dancing around but will eventually...

With a decade of rehearsal, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have their act down pat–the regular guy who never raises his voice and his hair-trigger partner who chews the scenery. After weeks of shaking up by the Snarler, here is the former Decider to sooth our nerves. Defending his torture policy as unequivocally as his vice president has done, Bush gave an audience of business people this week a spoonful of sugar with the reheated argument that, after checking with the lawyers, he only did...

For the coming political battle, the last Kennedy of his generation is sounding the trumpet for health care reform. “Over the last year,” he writes in a Boston Globe OpEd, “I’ve seen our healthcare system up close. I’ve benefitted from the best of medicine, but I’ve also witnessed the frustration and outrage of patients and doctors alike as they face the challenges of a system that shortchanges millions of Americans.” In his manifesto, Kennedy hits all...

Since the President made so much of biography in introducing his Supreme Court nominee, every facet of Sonia Sotomayor’s life seems up for discussion, including her marital history. Divorced in her twenties, the new Justice would be taking over what is being called “the single seat” on the Court from David Souter, a bachelor. At her 1994 appellate confirmation hearing, Sotomayor introduced a fiancé who subsequently faded from the picture. If matrimonial status has any bearing on...

A newly released transcript shows the President’s Senate replacement craven but just short of corrupt in his slavering for the appointment by the former Gov. Rod Blagojevich–more “pray” than “pay to play.” “In the call,” the New York Times reports, “he seemed almost in a crass negotiation with Mr. Blagojevich’s brother–also his chief fund-raiser–over how he could help the governor, win the appointment and not run into trouble over...

As Republicans mull their response to the naming of a Latino woman to the Supreme Court, they have the benefit of legal scholarship from John Yoo, who suggests that Sonia Sotomayor would be “voting her emotions and politics rather than the law.” George W. Bush’s torture expert is troubled by the nominee’s lack of legal “firepower.” He points out, “There are no opinions that suggest she would change the direction of constitutional law as have Antonin Scalia...

The New York Yankees went on a winning streak at their new stadium last week, and two products of the neighborhood have scored big on the political scene–Colin Powell in a challenge to save the Republican Party from Dick Cheney and today Sonia Sotomayor as President Obama’s pick for the Supreme Court. As the confirmation buzz starts, Americans will get to know much more about the new nominee, potentially the first Hispanic on the Court, but for a start, Judge Sotomayor grew up near Yankee...

Stooping to psychobabble this Memorial Day weekend, I find myself wondering: What is the former Vice President, who evaded military service in his youth, trying to prove with his late-in-life display of extreme machismo? What fuels his tougher-than-thou attacks on Barack Obama, a Commander-in-Chief from a post-draft generation that did not have to face a public test of personal courage? In his weekend address yesterday, the President observes that “our survival as a nation came down not simply...

A note to Washington Central Casting: Now that the President has signed on for a 9/11 Commission to investigate the economic downturn, let’s skip the usual suspects to head it and, as in the 1930s, find a fresh face for the role of shaking up Wall Street. Back then, ethnic outsider Ferdinand Pecora was the new star. This time, Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren looks like the best choice for a gender change in taking on the old-boy network that brought the country to the brink of ruin. As...

As the President begins one-on-one interviews with replacements for David Souter, his eventual choice will be only the start of a four- or eight-year struggle for the soul of the Supreme Court in the 21st century. The lines are clearly drawn. In voting against the confirmation of John Roberts, then-Sen. Barack Obama acknowledged the Chief Justice’s intellect and scholarship but questioned “what is in the judge’s heart. It is my personal estimation that he has far more often used his...

The 9/11 world is back with full force as Barack Obama makes the case for a judicious approach to terrorism, Dick Cheney argues that only bare knuckles can keep us safe and New York police stage a perp walk of petty criminals scammed into believing they could bomb synagogues and shoot down Air National Guard planes. It’s one of those wake-me-when-it’s-over days as the overloaded mind wants only to watch an old movie on TV or hide under the covers, but the dueling speeches and the terrorist...

Banks getting taxpayer bailouts are also cashing in on the demise of people who work for them or once did. The Wall Street Journal has a tutorial explaining how banks are holding $122.3 billion in life insurance on workers and retirees with themselves as beneficiaries in order to escape taxes, inflate their earnings and to fund bonuses and pension benefits: “Though not improper, the practice is similar to what is known as ‘janitors insurance,’ an insurance-on-employees technique...

As Americans struggle metaphorically with where the country is heading comes news of an imminent loss of our literal sense of direction. A GAO report on the $2 billion Air Force modernization of global position satellites warns that the system is at risk of failing as early as next year: “If the Air Force does not meet its schedule goals for development of GPS IIIA satellites, there will be an increased likelihood that in 2010, as old satellites begin to fail, the overall GPS constellation...

“CNN’s Heroes” confers fame on so-called ordinary people reaching out to help others in extraordinary ways, this weekend a 57-year-old suburban single mother named Pam Koner who, inspired by a newspaper picture of a hungry child, started a network of 600 sponsors to provide families in 13 communities across the country with over 800,000 meals and counting. My admiration for Pam Koner is intensified by knowing her since childhood as the daughter of close friends–Marvin Koner,...

Frank Rich’s New York Times column yesterday, headed “Obama Can’t Turn the Page on Bush,” was a sad symptom of America’s best and brightest still obsessing over eight years of a national nightmare to the detriment of what needs to be done now. With an economy in shambles and the Mideast a potential nuclear tinderbox, the Obama Administration has its hands full without “a new commission, backed up by serious law enforcement, to shed light on where every body is...

Last Sunday’s sneer that he preferred Rush Limbaugh to Powell (”I didn’t know he was still a Republican”) has inspired a response to Dick Cheney from Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff for Colin Powell, when he was Secretary of State. In a blog post to The Washington Note, Wilkerson reveals that, starting in 2002, the torture Cheney is now defending “was not aimed at preempting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al Qaeda.” In...

The President told listeners at a town hall meeting in New Mexico yesterday that they have a right not to be “ripped off” by credit-card issuers, the day after the Senate rejected a proposal to limit banks to the 15 percent interest rate of credit unions. “When banks are charging 30 percent interest rates, they are not making credit available,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders, who proposed the cap. “They are engaged in loan-sharking.” But his colleagues, who have approved billions of...