This is the story of how the three most powerful men in America were responsible for the gang rape of a 14-year-old girl, who was burned to a blackened char, and the murder of her parents and sister. The enablers of these heinous crimes were President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who conspired to invade Iraq for bogus reasons, then starved the Army of the men and materiel to get the job done, which led to a lengthy occupation that triggered...

Life got you down, Bunky? Afraid that our Islamofascist president will send you to a reeducation camp? That Rick Santorum will be sitting in your marital bed when it’s time to turn in tonight? That the price of gasoline will continue going through the roof? Well, we feel your pain. But don’t fret because you can join us for the 1st Annual & Probably Last Moderate Voice Baker’s Dozen of Great Music. To get the ball rolling, here is my list and explanations about why each...

The latest Republican-centric Rasmussen nightly tracking poll is out and it’s bad news for the struggling Mitt Romney: For the first time, he dropped below 40 percent against President Obama despite a strong performance in the Arizona presidential debate. Rasmussen tracked the incumbent at 49 percent while Romney got 39 percent, and if the pattern of tit-for-tat primary victories — with Romney taking one or two and then Rick Santorum taking two or three — continues, the likelihood...

The Warren and Roberts Supreme Courts bookend my life. The court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren from 1953 to 1969, expanded civil rights, civil liberties and federal power in dramatic ways, while the court led by Chief Justice John Roberts beginning in 2005 has inhibited civil rights and civil liberties and expanded the power of the court to make law and cast law aside when it doesn’t meet its right-leaning political criteria. Chief among the laws it has cast aside is that limiting political...

Is there any connection between Rick Santorum slipping into second place behind Mitt Romney in some Michigan pre-primary polls and the video of a speech he gave in 2008 saying that Satan is systematically destroying America that has now gone viral? One can only hope so, but the more likely case is that as they have with other presidential candidates, Santorum becomes less appealing to voters when they look under his hook and kick his tires, especially because of his fondness for demagoguery and...

This column is being reposted because some readers could not leave comments. You have to go all the way back to 1948 to find an instance where a political party’s strategy is predicated on a president being so weak that the voters can pretty much be ignored. That’s what the Republicans did in 1948 only to see Harry Truman get re-elected and that’s what they have been doing over the past two years only to see Barack Obama take a healthy lead in national horse race and popularity...

(Republished on the occasion of the great man’s 280th birthday) There has been a tsunami of books about George Washington in recent years, but none has captured a man whose birthday we once celebrated today with such wit and charm than Johnny One-Eye: A Tale of the American Revolution. No matter that Jerome Charyn’s account of Manhattan Island during the Revolutionary War, save for the broad historical overlay and the deeds of the familiar figures, is apocryphal from start...

Have you ever been to Greece? If you have, then you know what has happened to that deeply historic, incredibly beautiful and once vibrant country is heartbreaking. And that its ills are self inflicted. The economic crisis in Greece has caused a devolution that is shocking by Western standards. Some 25 percent of all Greek companies have gone out of business since 2009, half of all small businesses are unable to meet payroll, nearly half of the population under 25 is unemployed, and the suicide rate...

RICK’S NAME WAS ON THE LEASE BUT HE DIDN’T LIVE THERE Rick Santorum was once one of my U.S. senators, but that ended abruptly after the 2006 election when he lost by 18 percentage points, a record for an incumbent. I’ve been asked a lot recently why he got clobbered since Pennsylvania trends toward the conservative side, and the answer is easy: He went off the deep end. This took the form of ranting against gays, Iran and religious freedom. He showed his children the dead fetus...

There is one scenario that I and others are not taking into account in predicting that President Obama will win — and possibly win in a landslide — in November: An Israeli air strike on Iranian nuclear facilities that would plunge the Middle East into war and rupture relations between Washington and Jerusalem. Such a strike is a distinct possibility, according to an unimpeachable source: Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who has acknowledged that he was the source for a column earlier...

The late great Molly Ivins commented after Pat Buchanan’s keynote address at the 1992 Republican National Convention that “it probably sounded better in the original German.” As people given thousands of hours of face time on cable news go, Buchanan was as vile as they come: A virulent homophobe, racist, anti-Semite and apologist for Hitler, who . . . um, was misunderstood and the U.S. should have fought on his side in The Big One. And so I took some satisfaction when...

For me, the drug methotrexate is the difference between discomfort and comfort. For children with certain forms of leukemia, it is the difference between life and death. And yet another cautionary tale about regulation of the profit-greedy American drug industry. Methotrexate has been around for six decades and has long proved to be effective against acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), which strikes thousand children each year, as well as osteogenic sarcoma. In injectable preservative-free form,...

CADILLAC 16 CONCEPT CAR If Mitt Romney had gotten his way, General Motors would not be reporting its largest profit ever today. The automaker, which has wrested the title of world’s largest back from Toyota, made $7.6 billion in 2011, up 62 percent from 2010. Full-year revenue rose 11 percent to $105 billion. There was one dark cloud: G.M. lost $747 million in Europe, where it is speeding up a restructuring of its Opel brand. The company says union workers will get $7,000 profit-sharing...

There is no doubt that Rick Santorum is crazy, but to the distress of Mitt Romney and Karl Rove and other Republican Party elders, he is crazy like a fox. I have yet to read a plausible scenario through which this right-wing upstart can beat President Obama. He wouldn’t even be able to win Pennsylvania, where as an incumbent U.S. Senator he got throttled by 16 percentage points in 2006, the largest losing margin for a Senate incumbent in history. But grabbing the Republican nomination no...

Roman Catholic bishops oppose birth control. Many Republican congressfolk and some Democrats oppose birth control. All of the Republican presidential candidates, to one degree or another, oppose birth control. All this despite the fact that a strong majority of Americans are adamant about having the right to decide whether to use birth control and what method to use, and support the Obama administration’s requirement that health insurance plans cover the cost of contraceptives for religiously-affiliated...

A new breeding program will: “[I]solate the few remaining specimens of moderate Republicans, mate them in captivity, and then safely release these rare and precious creatures back into the electorate. Within our safe, enclosed habitats, these middle-of-the-road Republican Party members can freely support increased funding for public education and even gay rights without being threatened by the far-right subgenus.” More here on this promising endeavor.

And so we come — perhaps inevitably — to the moment in the battle for the Republican presidential nomination when party elders begin to suggest that settling for less than the best isn’t so bad if the guy can somehow beat President Obama. This pearl of wisdom comes from Grover Norquist, one of the key players in the marginalization of the GOP as a national force. Speaking last weekend at the annual CPAC sitdown in Washington, D.C., the head of the Americans for Tax Reform advocacy...

A person’s faith should in no way be a disqualifier for the presidency or any other public office. That certainly was true of John F. Kennedy’s Catholicism in 1960 and that is true of Mitt Romney’s Mormonism in 2012, but there the similarities end because there are aspects of Romney’s relationship with the Church of Latter Day Saints that do not necessarily disqualify him but do raise troubling questions — questions that are likely to go unanswered. The fact that some...

BISHOP DOLAN IS GROUCHY In for a dime in for a dollar seems to be the modus operandi in the latest round of culture warfare and even when reasonable compromise is within reach it remains elusive. And so we have the sight of Catholic bishops locking horns with the Obama administration over its principled view that all women need affordable access to contraceptive services and products, including the morning-after pill, which pro-lifers view as a form of abortion. This right happens to be a cornerstone...

A centerpiece of the Republican Party’s social agenda in the new millennium has been to deny women new rights and take away old rights, but it stands to reason that everyone of every political stripe would be opposed to neutering laws that seek to combat domestic violence and sexual assault. But Republicans are less reasonable with every passing election cycle, and so we had the specter this week of every Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee voting against the reauthorization of the...