Private-equity barons like to say they “create wealth.” But more frequently they merely redistribute it.

If health care is a right, must the government guarantee it? If it's not a right, what is it?

What Clint Eastwood & Rick Santorum Have in Common

The Obama administration has rejected appeals to exempt religious-affiliated institutions, such as hospitals and universities, from the mandate issued by the Department of Health and Human Services requiring all health-insurance policies to include free coverage for contraceptives and other “preventive” services such as sterilization. This was a serious mistake.

When people like Rick Santorum think of undocumented immigrants, they often think of the men waiting for day labor outside a Home Depot—“illegals” who take advantage of American generosity while taking jobs from U.S. citizens. That’s not the whole picture.

How Bad Policies Brought Us a New Gilded Age

Can the federal government finally say no to Big Oil?

An Exchange about UN Sanctions

How Sargent Shriver Built the Peace Corps

Obama owes more on religious freedom

Mitt Romney thinks grumbling about inequality is really about envy. Progressives say that vitriol about the wealth gap is not the voice of envy but instead expresses a concern about distributive justice. But Romney is right—justice and job prospects are not the only motivations behind the placards and chants of the occupy movements. Envy is also an engine, just as it was the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions.

Everyone expected President Obama's State of the Union address to include reference to the killing of Osama bin Laden. Fewer anticipated Obama's use of the episode to present a community-minded worldview that contrasts so sharply with the highly individualistic and antigovernment message that has been heard over and over from the Republicans seeking to replace him.

Two years after the Affordable Care Act became law, it remains a subject of controversy. Some say that, by allowing the government to require citizens to buy health insurance or pay an extra tax, it goes too far. Others argue that, by failing to offer a public option for health insurance, it does not go far enough. Hadley Arkes belongs to the first group. Here's why he's wrong.

What Newt Learned from Nixon

It was not supposed to end this way. Although President Barack Obama deserves credit for bringing an end to the war in Iraq that he inherited, if he had had his wishes, thousands of U.S. troops would nevertheless have remained stationed in Iraq indefinitely.

Habeas corpus, secret courts & Gitmo

Will emerging democracies produce new tyrannies?

The Afghan government's order a week ago to the U.S. to close its prison at Bagram Air Base near Kabul, where it holds unidentified prisoners, came as a shock to Washington, although President Karzai has before asked the U.S. to cease operations because of what he considered infringements upon Afghan sovereignty.

Thanks to Mitt Romney and such well-known socialist intellectuals as Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich, the United States is about to have the big debate on the nature of modern capitalism that should have started back in 2008. The focus will be on whether some kinds of capitalism are bad for the system as a whole.

Should Obama have signed the National Defense Authorization Act?

If the Republicans want to have a genuinely searching debate about the future of their party, they'd send Santorum and Huntsman off for the long fight.

Can Obama overcome post-election disappointment?

War crimes in Libya

The bishops, contraception & religious freedom

The great economic crisis has given birth to a smaller and tighter monetary union in Europe, under the influence of a Germany that is undergoing a certain estrangement from its European partners. This amounts to a possibly dangerous wager on what the European Union will ultimately become, which not everyone may like.

The president channels his inner Roosevelts

Two pols who speak their minds

The problems the United States faces are large but not insoluble. Yet sensible solutions can't be enacted. Why? Because an ideological bloc that sees every crisis as an opportunity to reduce the size of government holds enough power in Congress to stop us from doing what needs to be done.

Any time the Obama administration touches issues related to the Catholic Church, it seems to get itself caught in a rhetorical and moral crossfire that leaves all involved wounded and angry. This is what's happening in the battle over how contraception should be covered under the new health-care law.

Will the Occupy movement play into the hands of its enemies by living up to the stereotypes they are trying to create? Or will it instead move to a new phase that builds on its success?

Should the president of the United States be able to authorize the assassination of a U.S. citizen anywhere in the world without telling the public why—or even acknowledging that he has done so? The question is not theoretical. On September 30 a missile fired from an unmanned drone aircraft operated by the CIA killed two American citizens in Yemen.

The deficit hawks in Congress are ardent promoters of the economic well-being of future generations. And yet, when you look at the cuts, both those proposed and those enacted by these wizards of finance, you have to ask what kind of future they imagine will follow from their slashing frenzy, if not for their own children and grandchildren then for everyone else’s.

How Americans can save themselves from plutocracy

If Congress simply fails to act between now and January 1, 2013, the tax cuts passed under President George W. Bush expire, $1.2 trillion in additional budget cuts go through under the terms of last summer's debt-ceiling deal, and a variety of other tax cuts also go away. Are you still sure that a "failure" by the congressional supercommittee to reach a deal would be such a disaster?

What Perry & Cain Say about Today's GOP

This week's elections around the country were brought to you by the word "overreach," specifically conservative overreach. Given an opportunity in 2010 to build a long-term majority, Republicans instead pursued extreme and partisan measures. On Tuesday, they reaped angry voter rebellions.

Nearly three years ago Dennis Blair, President Obama’s director of national security, garnered headlines when he reported to Congress that the most serious threat to the United States and to world peace was not terrorism, or Iran, or the rise of China, but the economic crisis. Blair worried about a backlash against the United States, and especially against its promotion of increasingly unregulated financial and commercial markets. The Vatican, as it turns out, appears to agree with much of this assessment.

Americans are waking up to income disparity

Can Americans Save Their Country from Plutocracy?

Paul Ryan Decries the Politics of Division

When the Vatican Confounds Conservatives

This is a party that was once innovative in thinking about affirmative uses of government. The GOP instituted the Homestead Act and created land grant colleges, the interstate highway system, student loans, the Pure Food and Drug Act and, yes, a prescription drug benefit under Medicare. What happened?

Does Rick Santorum Understand What Keeps a Household Together?

In which our reporter joins Wall Street's new occupants

Zero and 9.1. Those figures aren’t the won-lost record of the Red Sox during the final week the season. They are the Labor Department’s statistics for the number of jobs created in August, followed by the official unemployment rate for the same month. No wonder President Obama belatedly hastened to propose a major job-creation plan to a joint session of Congress.

It’s hard to imagine a group of people that's more a product of this singularly nutty moment. Every serious GOP candidate is either a Tea Partier or is desperately trying to look like one. The anti-Obama protest movement is now steering the selection of an anti-Obama protest candidate, and the result is an awfully sad crew of presidential wannabes.

Why Elizabeth Warren Makes George Will Nervous

The only popular movements of modern times that made any difference to the United States were the civil-rights campaign and the anti-Vietnam-War demonstrations of the 1960s. Not even the Great Depression produced a popular protest that changed anything. What will Occupy Wall Street accomplish?

The Week that Changed Politics

Why hasn't there been a Tea Party on the left? And can President Barack Obama and the American left develop a functional relationship? That those two questions are not asked very often is a sign of how much of the nation's political energy has been monopolized by the right since Obama took office.

Will the United States ever leave Afghanistan?

Conservatives must lead the way

When socialism saves capitalism

No friend of Israel should minimize the security threats it faces. Yet no true friend of the Jewish state can pretend that the current right-wing government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has done much, if anything, to better secure Israel’s future in a region undergoing seismic political and social change.

With apologies to Winston Churchill: The talk in the political class is that this is the beginning of the end of the Obama administration, while the talk in the Obama administration is that this is the end of the beginning. Which will it be?

The Republican establishment is said to have grave qualms about Gov. Rick Perry. Here's the problem: the GOP establishment squandered its authority by building up the Tea Party's brigades and then fearing them too much to do anything to check their power. Worse for those who think Perry would be a general-election disaster is the growing confidence among conservatives that President Barack Obama will be easy to beat.

Our political system is not accustomed to the kind of battle that is going on now. President Barack Obama has been slow to adjust to it. The voters are understandably mystified and frustrated by it. In the meantime, the economy sits on the edge between stagnation and something worse.

Social Security has been an object of suspicion ever since it began in 1935. Conservative critics warned it would be a stalking horse for socialism, the death of thrift and charity, and a crippling burden on employers. It turned out to be none of these things, and instead became one of the most successful and popular government programs in the nation’s history.

Why so many Americans remain unemployed

As I watched the rioting in London last month snowball from the suburbs to the center of the city and then beyond the capital, it was easy to be reminded of Margaret Thatcher’s famous dictum that there is no such thing as society—only families and individuals. When I ran for Parliament in Enfield North in 2005, much of the tenor of that campaign reflected the voters’ implicit attitude toward the Iron Lady’s succinct philosophy.

What we lost in the decade since 9/11

How workers vanished from our national consciousness

Obama's poll numbers are dropping. Time to mount an offensive

“I don’t oppose war in all circumstances,” Obama said in a speech about Iraq in 2002. “What I am opposed to is a dumb war.... Even a successful war against Iraq” would “require a United States occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.” That speech captures much of what was exhilarating about Obama in 2008—and what is frustrating about him in 2011.

Europe in Crisis

Both Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann frequently decry federal power. Perry has suggested Texas might secede from the union. Bachmann has called President Obama's federalist views "anti-American." Either a bad case of constitutional amnesia has beset Perry-Bachmann or there was a grave failure in their high-school civics courses.

If unemployment were now at 6 percent, would President Obama be getting pummeled for not having us back to full employment already? The question comes to mind in the wake of the Libyan rebels' successes against Qaddafi. It's remarkable how reluctant Obama's opponents are to acknowledge that despite all the predictions that his policy of limited engagement could never work, it actually did.

President Obama should not be constrained by what the Tea Party might allow subservient Republican leaders in Congress to do. He should state plainly, eloquently, and in detail what he thinks needs to be happen. Neither history nor the voters will be kind to him if he lets caution and political calculation get in the way.

For President Obama, these are the days of never hearing an encouraging word. Not since his own supporters were losing faith in his presidential campaign in the summer of 2007 has Obama confronted so many bad reviews and such widespread frustration and angry criticism from his own side.

The MP at the epicenter of the UK riots

Is Accommodation a winning hand?

What's become known as the “Spanish youth revolution” began on May 15, when thousands took to the streets in cities throughout Spain, demanding “real democracy now.” Organizers issued a manifesto: “We are ordinary people. People who work hard to provide a better future for those around us.” The rallies turned out to be only the beginning of a movement still taking shape.

From the archives: Defending FDR's National Recovery Administration

The first week of August 2011 will be remembered as a singularly irrational, wasteful, and shameful moment in the political and economic history of the United States. It reflected much of what is wrong with the priorities of our political elites and the obsessions of those who now hold effective veto power over our government.

The plight of Afghan women

Thinking clearly about a slogan & a slur

Up with moderation

The debt 'crisis' distracts from the real problem: unemployment

Time for the GOP to cut the Tea Party loose

The debt 'crisis' has kept the government from doing its job

Danger remains in the the debt debate

Four myths about government spending

Our love affair with capital punishment

When the Tea Party comes home to roost

What our Declaration really said

The Supreme Court's preferential option for the rich

Why won't the GOP budge in the debt talks?

President Barack Obama finds himself almost alone in his effort to define a broad new middle ground in international affairs. It's not that the center isn't holding. It's that most politicians don't seem to want to go near it.

Does moderate Republican Jon Huntsman stand a chance?

Could Turkey lead Europe out of a tumultuous century?

Few recent Supreme Court decisions have been more vigorously contested than Brown v. Plata, in which the Court affirmed a ruling requiring California to release prisoners to reduce overcrowding.

Letter from Iran

Coming of age in East Germany

Whatever the punditocracy may have made of Mitt Romney's formal announcement of his presidential candidacy last week, we could all give the guy credit for trying to reassure us that not everything in politics has changed.

Why Paul Ryan is losing the argument

When Qaddafi is finally deposed, the world may agree that “all’s well that ends well.” But first, some questions: Why did France & Britain lead the way? Why did the United States join the effort? How humanitarian is this humanitarian intervention? Is Qaddafi’s fitting end being achieved by doubtful means?

While the United States remains utterly frozen in a debate about budget deficits and all the things that government shouldn't do, other countries are marrying public and private resources to make themselves stronger and more competitive.

Undoubtedly, in the killing of Osama bin Laden, a certain kind of justice was done, and the relief and satisfaction felt by many of the families of those murdered at bin Laden’s direction cannot be denied. Yet questions about the circumstances of bin Laden’s death remain.

The atomization of American society

There was much in Obama’s speech announcing the killing of Osama bin Laden—and in the scenes of chanting and jubilant flag-waving across the country that followed—that ought to give Christians, and not only pacifists such as myself, great pause.

It's likely you didn't hear much about the controversy over John Boehner's recent commencement speech at Catholic University. There are many reasons for this, but one of them is that Boehner's critics were civil and respectful.

Republicans holding the debt ceiling increase hostage to their efforts to eviscerate programs know perfectly well that Congress will not risk a financial crisis. They even acknowledge this.

As you watch suits against the Affordable Care Act work their way through the courts, consider that what you are really seeing is a great republic tying itself in knots to avoid facing up to a challenge that every other wealthy capitalist democracy in the world has met.

The U.S. government faces few challenges more important than renewing people’s trust in the honesty and fairness of our financial institutions and economic system.

We’re still debating whether what we’re doing in Libya can rightly be described as war, though bombs dropped amid an “intervention” are just as deadly. But where’s the debate over whether it’s fair or accurate to assert that Republicans in Congress have not-so-stealthily declared a “war on women”?

Saving Motown worked

Who is Obama? Now we know

How Republicans are gaming the debt-ceiling issue

As the United States gradually emerges from its worst recession since the 1930s, Washington has again turned its attention to the nation’s debt.

The idea that "false choices" are distorting our politics is under attack. I want to defend the concept for both substantive and personal reasons.

The GOP candidates might be more formidable if President Obama were less strongly favored. And over time, what Congress does will be shaped by the campaign's direction. Views of 2012 are heavily influenced by the metaphors that prognosticators invoke. Will it be 1984, 1988, or 1992?

The series of Arab uprisings during the past two months have yet to complete their destruction of what, since shortly after World War II, had seemed a fixed oppressive political order in the Muslim states of the Middle East and Central Asia, overseen by the United States.

The American ruling class is failing us—and itself.

President Obama has finally decided to take his own side in the philosophical struggle that is the true engine of this nation's budget debate. After months of mixed signals about what he was willing to fight for, Obama laid out his purposes and his principles.

In the weeks since Japan’s massive earthquake and tsunami, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has spewed contamination and displaced thousands. It has also rekindled fears across the globe about the risks of nuclear power and at least temporarily slowed the industry’s revival in the United States.

What budget cuts can tell us

In no serious country do threats to shut down the government become a routine way of doing business. Yet in our repertoire of dysfunction, we are on the verge of adding shutdown abuse to the abuse of the filibuster in the Senate. The GOP, however, was rewarded for going to the brink.

President Obama offered a robust defense of U.S. actions in Libya on March 28, but his words and ideas should not be taken for policy. What happens when Libya reaches the next of many forks in the road?

The Ryan budget reveals the Right's extremism.

Will Obama take on the GOP's irresponsible budget plan?

It's not too late to ask.

Did the GOP overplay its hand in the Midwest?

Yes & no

Republicans changed attack strategies in response to Obama's moves after the 2010 election designed to place himself above partisan infighting and to cast him as a nonideological voice trying to talk reason to politicians mired in the past's unproductive bickering.

Why I'm betting on Japan

The growing irrelevance of American power

Why won't Obama stand up to the NRA?

The afterlife of cluster bombs

According to the Department of Defense, 41,829 U.S. soldiers had been seriously wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan as of December 20, 2010. But while the media routinely report war fatalities, the huge numbers of wounded usually go unmentioned.

The GOP is using a bogus metaphor to cut programs & bust unions

What Wisconsin can teach Washington

Wisconsin is said to have a large budget deficit, which makes it no different from the federal government, most other states, and probably most municipalities in the United States. What makes Wisconsin different is that Gov. Walker is trying to cut costs by redefining the relationship between the state and public-sector unions.

Richard Nixon espoused what he called "the madman theory." It's a negotiating approach that induces the other side to believe you are capable of dangerously irrational actions and leads it to back down to avoid the wreckage your rage might let loose.

Has America given up on land wars?

The rich have recovered—the country hasn't

Never before have people in the Middle East mobilized in such vast numbers to shake off the chains of autocracy. Whether Egypt and Tunisia succeed in creating genuinely democratic societies remains to be seen—but already we can identify important lessons.

Why the Wisconsin fight matters

There are many in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere who believe that the democratic awakening of the Arab nations will consolidate a predominantly democratic order for nearly all the major states, with the United States enjoying a respected leadership role. Nothing is less likely.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has chosen the low road.

Consider the political conversation in our nation's capital. You'd never know that it's taking place at a moment when unemployment is at 9 percent, when wages are stagnating, and when the United States faces unprecedented challenges to its economic dominance.

Secularism & Democracy

Obama & the failure of the deficit hawks

How should we respond to the Tucson shootings?

After Obama delivers his budget proposal to Congress today, it will be hard to pretend anymore that the president and House Republicans even live in the same political galaxy, let alone have a chance of reaching lots of bipartisan agreements.

The bishops, health care & prudence

It is too late for Hosni Mubarak’s regime to make token concessions. President Barack Obama should urge Mubarak to step aside sooner rather than later, and call for an internationally supervised election to take place.

Washington's confused response misses the mark on Egypt

On a unanimous voice vote last Thursday, the Senate passed a bipartisan resolution urging Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to hand power over to a caretaker government. That slipped through the news cycle with barely a nod.

Whatever one’s political commitments, facing the question of Iraqi civilian deaths as honestly and objectively as possible is both an intellectual and a moral imperative.

When the paper trail disappears

America should butt out

The democratic uprising in Egypt has brought into relief a gradual and little-noticed transformation in American politics. Over the past decade, ideological divisions over the role of democracy and human rights in American foreign policy have been scrambled.

If House Republicans really wanted to make the health-care law less expensive, they could have voted to repeal only those parts of the Affordable Care Act that increase the deficit and kept the parts that reduce it. Why didn’t they?

Enacting sweeping legislation gets far more attention than the hard work of implementing programs, hiring people to carry them out, and managing (and, yes, inspiring) one of the largest work forces in the world. But that's exactly what Obama must do.

This State of the Union address laid out a rationale for Obama's presidency that stands a chance of enduring through 2012. The choice is between Republicans who talk about government spending and "Obamacare," and Democrats who would use government to restore American leadership and a humming economy.

What's our end game in Afghanistan?

How Obama can define moderation

Is it constitutional?

Dictatorships rarely end happily—for rulers or their people

On January 20, 1961, John F. Kennedy began his presidency with a speech at once soaring and solemn. Fifty years on, we have not heard an inaugural address like it. Tethered to its time and place, it still challenges with its ambition to harness realism to idealism, patriotism to service, national interest to universal aspiration.

Health care & the new civility

It wasn't our mental-health laws that enabled Loughner. It was our gun laws.

Not without moving beyond violent political talk

Are we committing economic suicide?

Gabrielle Giffords & the rhetoric of violence

Does the president have the legal authority to order the killing of a U.S. citizen?

After a tough 2008 and 2009, Wall Street and big companies made a strong comeback in 2010. By conventional wisdom, that is a harbinger of a broad, strong recovery. But these are strange times, and we may be seeing the economy of the super-rich finally decoupling from the rest of us.

Is the GOP interested in solving real problems?

There is already a standard line of advice to Speaker-to-be John Boehner that goes like this: Democrats overreached in the last Congress by ignoring "the center." Republicans should not to make the same mistake, lest they lose their majority, too. That counsel is wrong.

How are we to square the achievement of so many goals that have long been on progressive wish lists with the resounding defeat suffered by supporters of these measures in November?

The Civil War should be a no-spin zone

Africa's slavery system survives

Really

Bipartisanship is not the same as political moderation.

The country's desire to reverse its sense of decline was central to Obama's victory. Consider his emphasis on "Hope" and "Change We Can Believe In." Those sentiments were responses to fears of lost supremacy and explain the religious overtones of the Obama crusade.

What does President Barack Obama think of those who fought and bled to pass his bills in Congress (in some cases losing in this year's election for their pains) while also defending him against wild charges from the right wing?

A complex business agreement will often be preceded by a "term sheet." The term sheet outlines points of agreement of major consequence to both parties that must be settled. What would a term sheet for an Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty look like?

Where is Obama's conciliatory impulse leading the Democratic Party?

What the success of the Tea Party portends

Did Obama Learn the Wrong Lessons from Carter?

Republicans are risking the nation's security for short-term political gain

Nancy Pelosi promised a vote if 14 members of Obama's deficit-cutting commission could agree on a plan. If John Boehner and his new GOP majority are as serious about deficit cutting as they say, he should make clear he'll hold such a vote in the next Congress since there will be little time for debate in the lame-duck session.

For liberals, the publication of Bush’s memoirs has largely been an occasion for revisiting the areas in which they rate his presidency a catastrophic failure. It’s hard for liberals to fathom that there are any parts of the Bush legacy we might miss. But there are.

Obama, the bishops & the bomb

The lame-duck session of Congress that kicks off this week will test whether Democrats have spines made of Play-Doh, and whether President Barack Obama has decided to pretend that capitulation is conciliation.

Funny, isn't it? When progressives win, they are told to moderate their hopes. When conservatives win, progressives are told to retreat.

Germans bankrolled the European Union's bailout of Greece. Now they want the EU's governing treaty to be changed to shield them and other better-off countries from shouldering such responsibilities alone. Could their buyer's remorse eventually undo the EU?

The results of the midterm elections were both emphatic and ambiguous: a strong message was sent, but no one is entirely sure what it is. It’s easier to say what Americans are feeling right now—frustration, impatience, and, increasingly, anger—than to know what policies they expect their elected representatives to adopt.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is calmly assessing the political cyclone that routed her Democratic majority and will, at least temporarily, force her to vacate one of the best offices in the city, with its inspirational view of the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial.

The election was a setback for Democrats, not permanent defeat

The 2010 midterms will go down as one of the most fiercely fought campaigns in our political history. What was this strife all about? Yes, there were policies to fight over. But above all, there was a tsunami of money.

Discuss that and other issues at dotCommonweal's open thread on the midterm election results.

These ballot measures have been sold as job creators and tax cuts, but in fact they  would upend California’s landmark environmental legislation and force taxpayers to foot the bill for fees normally covered by polluting companies. No wonder big oil loves them. 

The place of passion in politics

Why, when & how

"People want to know you're fighting for them when they're hurting," argues Pennsylvania Congressman Patrick Murphy. If enough incumbent Democrats like Murphy survive on Tuesday, they will contain the damage of a difficult night.

What will the nation’s politics look like if, as expected, the Republicans take back the House on November 2? Indiana’s Mike Pence, chairman of the House Republican Conference, issues a warning and a prediction. “There will be no compromise on repealing Obamacare,” he said. “There will be no compromise on stopping Democrats from growing government and raising taxes. And if I haven’t been clear enough yet, let me say again: No compromise.”

Is Joe Sestak leading a Democratic surge?

Secret money is corrupting our democracy.

Let us contemplate the joys of being in the political opposition when unemployment in your state tops 10 percent. 

Open hearts & minds at Princeton

It's not as bad as you think

Letter from Sierra Leone

The GOP's disturbingly brilliant midterm strategy

The challenges facing Europe make America's Afghan problem look simple

Carl Paladino & the politics of anger

Liu Xiaobo's goodwill, courage, and humbling example were recognized by the Nobel Committee earlier this month when, to near universal if muted acclaim, it awarded the imprisoned activist the Nobel Peace Prize for his steadfast nonviolent resistance to the tyrannical rule of China's Communist Party.

How 'Citizens United' is deforming our elections

Can Virginia Democrat Tom Perriello Run on his convictions & win?

Damage & disappointment on the Gulf Coast

With the unemployment rate still hovering near 10 percent, Americans are understandably dissatisfied with the pace of economic recovery and apprehensive about the country’s future. What is perhaps less understandable is the degree of rancor toward President Barack Obama and the federal government as a whole.

More & more Democrats are running on the reforms

Obama's trip to Madison reflected the White House's realization that there is no substitute for a president making a coherent argument, taking on his opponents, and acknowledging his dependence on those who brought him to office.

The emergence of the Northeast as a Democratic firewall has been a long time in the making. The realignment of the South with the GOP, which made the party more conservative, called forth a counter-realignment among Northern moderates. That trend is accelerating.

The outsized influence of the extreme Right

Where are the serious Republicans?

Why isn't anyone talking about Obama's tax cuts?

GOP hopefuls Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina have much in common: Both are wealthy executives-turned-candidates, both want to dismantle "big government," and both want to win at any cost. Their victories would further frustrate the Democrats—and Obama's reelection chances.

How the Fourteenth Amendment became controversial

Where have all the moderate Republicans gone?

Instead of acknowledging that the government can no longer afford tax breaks for everyone, conservative politicians are calling for deep spending cuts—at precisely the moment when the private sector and states most need the federal government’s support. The politicians solemnly advertise their anxiety for future generations that will have to repay this debt; they seem somewhat less worried about a generation of children whose schools are being gutted by state cutbacks.

Why the French lost faith in Nicolas Sarkozy

In deciding Citizens United, the Supreme Court broke with decades of precedent and said Congress had no right to ban corporate or union spending to influence elections. In order to fix that mistake, three GOP senators will have to step up.

Until Obama's Labor Day speech in Milwaukee and his Cleveland-area statement of principles today, it was not clear how much heart he had in the fight, or whether he'd ever offer a comprehensive argument for the advantage of his party's approach over the other's. Now we know.

The nation's extraordinary prosperity from the end of World War II to the 1970s was in significant part the result of union contracts that, in words the right-wing hated Barack Obama for saying in 2008, "spread the wealth around." A broad middle class with spending power to keep the economy moving created a virtuous cycle of low joblessness and high wages.

By insisting that "it's time to turn the page," the president was talking about more than Iraq. He was also trying to turn the page on a particularly rough period for the Democrats and for his presidency.

The Democrats are in a hole because Obama has not engaged in an extended dialogue about what holds his achievements together, or why his view of government makes more sense than the GOP's attacks on everything Washington might do to improve the nation's lot.

Republicans are in the midst of an insurrection. Democrats are not. This vast gulf between the situations of the two parties—not some grand revolt against "the establishment" or "incumbents"—explains the year's primary results.

The principled case that must be made is that the brand of conservatism seeking power this year is irresponsible, incoherent, and untrue to the best of its own traditions.

During his recent tour of TV news programs, Petraeus suggested that sending troops home a year from now might be premature. Defense Secretary Gates then intervened to say that the promise given the president in 2009 by the military would be kept. Who's right?

German intransigence could threaten Europe

How not to settle the gay-marriage question

The prospect of giving Afghanistan a functioning and competent democratic government and a new and functional army is slight. That was what the counterinsurgency doctrine drafted by Gen. Petraeus was supposed to do. It has rarely succeeded.

Liberals may lament the administration’s failure to make progress on immigration and climate-change legislation in this congressional session, but it may be time to shift energies to protecting what has already been passed. 

It's not yet time to withdraw from Afghanistan.

When I sat down last week at the Capitol with Dodd to talk about his thirty-six years in Congress, he didn't change my attitude toward the longest-winded legislative body in the world. But he reminded me of something missing in our public life: an ebullient joy about what democratic politics can accomplish.

From the archives: our editorial decrying the bombing of Hiroshima & Nagasaki

Dear Republicans, do you really want to endanger your party's greatest political legacy by turning the Fourteenth Amendment to our Constitution into an excuse for election-year ugliness?

Don't for an instant imagine that the comeback of the nation's rescued car companies, particularly General Motors, will change the way we debate government's role in the economy. When it comes to almost anything the government does, ideology trumps facts, slogans trump reality, and loaded words ("socialism") trump data.

The notion that when we are fighting two wars, we're not supposed to consider raising taxes on wealthy Americans is one sign of a country that's no longer serious.

The mainstream media and the Obama administration must stop cowering before a right wing that has forced its own propaganda to be accepted as news by persuading journalists that "fairness" requires treating extremist rants as "one side of the story."

It's rare to see a dry run for an election campaign. But over the next month, Australia will provide a testing ground for some of the core themes in this November's American elections.

Helen Alvaré accuses me and Commonweal of being naive about the new health-care reform law, and suggests our analysis of the legislation is politically motivated. She's wrong.

The titans of the private sector say President Barack Obama is antibusiness. Many progressives say he coddles business. How does the administration manage to pull that off?

The minute you say there are racist elements in the Tea Party—reflected in signs at rallies, billboards, and speeches from some of its major figures—the pushback goes from cries of persecution to charges that those who are criticizing divisiveness are themselves the dividers.

If the midterm elections were held now, Republicans would likely take control of the House of the Representatives. It's as hard these days to find a Democrat who's not alarmed as it is to find a Cleveland Cavaliers fan who's cheering for LeBron James.

General McChrystal gets out just in time

Conservatives have long decried “activist” judges who supposedly “legislated from the bench,” but the Roberts Court is hardly shy about breaking new legal ground.

American arms spending is supposed to make Americans safe from its problems, but that is not working. Congressional attempts to reduce military spending over the years have consistently failed because military spending is a politically irresistible cause, even when the results are irrational.

A general's tasks involve executing policies made by the commander-in-chief, plotting strategy and winning wars—not playing politics in the media to get at civilian rivals inside the government.

Barack Obama's campaign promise of change did not include a pledge to transform American conservatism. But one of his presidency's major legacies may be a revolution on the American right in which older, more secular forms of politics displace religious activism.

Democrats should feel a lot better than they do. They enacted major health-care reform, pulled the country out of economic spiral, and are about to pass the biggest reform of Wall Street since the New Deal. The GOP seems to be making itself unelectable. Yet Democrats are petrified—and this was true before the oil spill made matters worse.

Lessons from the BP debacle

It will take some time before a new array of justices on the Court rethinks the labored departure from precedent made by the majority in Citizens United. Meanwhile, much corporate mischief will have been done.

An interview with Larry Summers

How the Obama administration deals with a challenge even more complicated than it looks will determine the kind of summer the president has and the kind of election the Democrats will face this fall.

It should become the philosophical shot heard 'round the country. In a speech that received far too little attention, former Supreme Court Justice David Souter took aim at conservatives' favorite theory of judging. Souter's verdict: It "has only a tenuous connection to reality."

What veterans can teach us

Those of us lucky enough to have worked for Justice Stevens never doubted his abilities as an impartial guardian. And we have taken comfort in his continued presence on the Court. No matter who replaces him, his departure is a loss for the institution and for the country.

For the British, a peacetime coalition is an unfamiliar animal, though they are common in other European countries. Anguished cries of “betrayal” have come from the left, and there is distress among idealistic Lib Dem voters, who have not understood that being in politics involves, on occasion, behaving politically.

Behind the jobless recovery

The fact that the answer to that question seems as murky as the water around the exploded oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico suggests that this is an excellent moment to recognize that our arguments pitting capitalism against socialism and the government against the private sector muddle far more than they clarify.

Compromise is not a dirty word in democratic politics, nor is the balancing of conflicting goods foreign to the church’s tradition of casuistic moral reasoning. So why do so many American bishops appear to spurn both in their prolife advocacy? Do they really think the hardest line is always the best one, or the most persuasive?

Why Washington's conventional wisdom of impending Democratic catastrophe is one of the best things Obama's party has going for it.

The European Union doesn’t know where it stands at the moment. NATO thinks it knows and is gambling.

How dirty a word?

Arizonans have plenty to be anxious about, but indulging in a crude nativism won’t stop the flow of undocumented immigrants or prevent violent crime along the border.

This year's elections may exacerbate the difference between our two political parties, but not in the way most people are talking about. Republicans will end the year a more philosophically coherent right-wing party. But the Democrats will, if anything, become more ideologically diverse.

Brace yourself for several months of occasionally biting but essentially meaningless political theater over the nomination of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court.

Ever heard the one about the guy who hated government until a deregulated Wall Street crashed, an oil spill devastated the Gulf of Mexico, a coal mine collapsed, and some good police work stopped a terrorist attack?

The Democrats’ financial-reform plan doesn't go far enough.

Maybe the next time someone calls Barack Obama a socialist, the president shouldn't issue a denial. He might instead urge his accuser to read the hearing transcript of this week's congressional testimony from the Goldman Sachs guys in their beautiful suits.

Why President Barack Obama's next Supreme Court nominee is so important

Hint: It's not Islam

Europe is on to something with proposed financial reforms

Only after disasters such as the collapse at Upper Big Branch Mine do we remember that regulations exist for a reason. We will eventually learn what went wrong at the mine and whether the safety violations were part of the problem. But then what will we do?

The men and women of the IRS collect the revenue that allows the government to finance our troops who are in harm's way, help our wounded warriors, and do so many of the other things the vast majority of us want our government to accomplish. Yes, if you support our troops, you have to support the work of the Internal Revenue Service.

Yes, the fight for health care seemed very much like the Greek myth: Every time the White House found itself on the verge of rolling the health-care stone up the hill, some event -- say, Scott Brown's win in Massachusetts -- would force it to start over with a new strategy.

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli seems determined to use an attack on health-care reform to bring us back to the 1830s. Cuccinelli, to cheers from the Tea Party crowd, went to court this week to overturn the new law, which he says conflicts with a Virginia statute "protecting its citizens from a government-imposed mandate to buy health insurance."

America needs more than populism from the Right

In approving the most sweeping piece of social legislation since the mid-1960s, Democrats proved that they can govern, even under challenging circumstances and in the face of significant internal divisions. The result is a historic victory for President Barack Obama.

The bishops' take on the health-care bill is wrong

The health-care debate has been costly for prolife groups.

There is a pathetic quality to our discussion of deficits and fiscal responsibility because we never face up to how much we need government to do. Our debates are also characterized by a politically convenient amnesia.

In a fit of radical judicial activism, the Montana Supreme Court has ruled that physician-assisted suicide does not violate state law, making Montana the third state (after Oregon and Washington) to legalize the "procedure." 

Are we fooling ourselves in Afghanistan?

In a city where the phrase bipartisan initiative is becoming an oxymoron, the urgency of containing the damage the Supreme Court could do to our electoral system creates an opportunity for a rare convergence of interest and principle.

Republicans don't want to talk much about the substance of health care. They want to discuss process, turn "reconciliation" into a four-letter word, and maintain that Democrats are just "ramming through" a health bill. What an astonishing exercise in hypocrisy.

If we learn nothing else in 2010, can we please finally acknowledge that our partisan divisions are about authentic principles that lead to very different approaches to governing?

Young Americans are the linchpin of a new progressive era in U.S. politics.

It is easy enough to despair over political paralysis and animosity in Washington, and economic uncertainty here and abroad. Yet even when it comes to the often ugly business of secular politics, despair remains a sin.

If the summit fails to shake things up and does not lead to the passage of a comprehensive health-care bill, Democrats and President Barack Obama are in for a miserable time for the rest of his term.

Why has this middle-of-the-road president inspired such enthusiastic counter-organizing, and called forth such venom? The most popular theory on the left is that Obama's race is a big part of the story, and that we are seeing a reaction among some whites against his multiracial, multicultural political coalition.

If President Barack Obama gets to sign a health-reform bill, as I believe he will, one reason may be Rep. Jay Inslee's difficult experience renovating his kitchen.

Last month’s 5–4 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission did not surprise students of this conservative-leaning Court. Still, the Court’s privileging of the “rights” of artificial legal entities over the democratic needs of the American public remains indefensible.

The Problem Of Climate-change Politics

Joe Biden on the Economy & American Power

Who on the national stage today would knowingly blow up his or her political future for the common good, no matter how important the issue? Pushing through health-care reform could be politically perilous for today’s Democrats, but wouldn’t that be better than caving on such an important moral issue?

Why abortion shouldn't derail health-care reform

It turns out there were core contradictions in the promises Barack Obama made to the country in 2008. They caught up with his party on Tuesday in Massachusetts.

Reaching agreement on a health-care bill is harder in theory than it will be in practice. Between now and the day the measure goes to President Obama's desk, there will be many crisis points, much posturing, and dire warnings of impending failure. There are real differences between the the House and Senate bills. The last few votes are always the hardest to get.

Time to turn indignation at what happened on Wall Street into prudent reform.

Not even the most optimistic Democrats think their party can escape losing seats. But with so many states now unexpectedly in play, surprise Democratic victories could offset some Republican gains. On the other side, retirements -- not to mention the moves of a certain president and vice president out of the Senate -- have opened terrain for the Republicans that would normally be blocked.

The Democrats are at each other's throats over health care legislation that should be seen as one of the party's greatest triumphs. They are being held hostage by political narcissists and narrow slivers of their coalition. An increasingly bitter and negative Republican Party may not be able to win the midterm elections, but Democrats definitely can lose them.

The United States & the mess in Honduras

The stars may—just—be aligned to squeeze a national health-care bill out of Congress within the next month or two. Both houses have (barely) passed bills, and now they must cobble together a lowest-common-denominator consensus that can survive one more vote in each house. President Barack Obama is almost certain to sign anything they send him.

Did the president make a convincing case for the Afghan surge? Given the impossibility of an immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces, he made a plausible, if not always consistent or convincing, case for his plan. The United States will get in deeper—if more selectively—in order to get out more quickly. That is the pledge Obama has now made to the American people, and he should be held to it.

If the few men who hold the strings of power can escalate one of the nation’s recurring political brawls into the overthrow of an elected president, how can future democratic leaders dare to challenge the culture of wealth and impunity that has made Honduras one of the most corrupt nations in the world?

This is the paradox of the moment: President Barack Obama's speech on Afghanistan and his subsequent jobs summit underscored why it's essential to get a health care bill done quickly. The calendar of politics has an urgency that the dilatory pace of the U.S. Senate doesn't match.

The fall of the Berlin Wall happened on live TV. East German Politbüro member Günter Schabowski announced a new law permitting the country’s citizens to travel to the West. “When does it go into effect?” asked a West German reporter. A confused Schabowski extemporized: “Sofort,” he said—“immediately.”

The U.S. bishops & health-care reform

Here we turn our attention, as we often do, to the uncertainties and dangers facing the nation as a whole.

Wishful thinking in Sacramento

How should “enemy combatants” captured and imprisoned by the United States in the so-called war on terror be brought to justice? Should they be prosecuted before military commissions or in the federal courts? The answer from the Obama administration is that both venues are necessary and legitimate, and that the Justice Department will decide who should be tried where.

If we wanted to be successful in Afghanistan, we wouldn't choose to start from where we are now. We wouldn't have put this war on the back burner for so long, and we would have dealt much earlier with the debilitating deficiencies of President Hamid Karzai's government.

Meeting the nation’s long-term obligations won’t be possible without a stable economy.

Why doesn’t the common good enter into our national health-care debate?

That’s the number of people who will starve this year—more than ever before.

If the uninsured can’t count on the do-gooders to help them, where else can they turn?

President Obama must do a better job of explaining our mission in Afghanistan.

How mean-spirited will we allow our politics to become?

Why Obama should have kept the Council on Bioethics

Solidarity and subsidiarity in Benedict XVI’s ’Caritas in veritate’

What is it about Afghanistan, possessing next to nothing that the United States requires, that justifies such lavish attention?

The biggest obstacle to health-care reform is political escapism.

How Obama can win the battle for health-care reform

  In just a few months’ time, the Obama administration has replaced a grandiose, counterproductive fantasy with realistic attention to a set of grievous but real problems. There is a new awareness in American diplomacy that international relations are now complicated by intercultural relations, including strange new culture-to-religion-to-government hybrids; and that the U.S. government ignores these realities at its own peril.

Obama & the autoworkers

Obama Meets the Catholic Press

Why the death penalty’s complete elimination is a long way off.

Obama, Sotomayor, and the wisdom of John Noonan.

  A mother reflects on her son’s years as a Marine in Iraq.

  Why now is the time for real action on health-care reform.

  Obama meets the neighbors, and tries to rekindle Latin America’s faith in Washington.

  Why a full and fair torture investigation is necessary, no matter where it leads.

  Stranded in Nogales: A reflection on the lives of new deportees.

  How broad should conscience protections be?

  A review of two new books on the prospects for peace in the Middle East

  The risks involved in withdrawing U.S. troops must not be underestimated.

  How well is Team Obama handling the crisis?

  The surprising incoherence of President Obama’s stem-cell research announcement.

  Why we need new labor laws

  Keeping the "faith" in faith-based initiatives

  "Our present straits require a basic reordering of national priorities."

  What effect will an Obama presidency have on America’s racial politics?

  What will "choosing our better history" mean under President Barack Obama?

Israel’s determination to "punish" the Gazan people, hoping they will repudiate their leaders, seems destined to fail.

What would the Freedom of Choice Act do?

  American-style capitalism & the demise of free-market fanaticism

  The trouble with blaming religion for California’s Proposition 8

  Can we forgive the Bush administration?

  For some Muslims, it is the worst kind of torture.

  Cleaning up after the Bush administration

  The unborn need more than prophets.

  Moderate Islamic groups & the maturation of Danish Muslim democracy

  How should we talk about the financial crisis?

  Why the international community must not let Mugabe off the hook

  Fighting about religion in politics is very un-Canadian.

A review of The Forever War by Dexter Filkins.

  Have we reached a postracial America?

  Remember when President George W. Bush wanted to privatize Social Security?

From the archives: a review of Archbishop Charles Chaput's Render unto Caesar

  How to undo thirty years of bad economic policy

  What voting is—and isn’t

  What went wrong, and why is it so hard to fix?

  The fundamentalism of free-market theology

  Is there a double standard at work?

  How to cope with the aftermath

  With just two months left in the campaign, where do the candidates stand?

Why Catholics shouldn’t fear faith-based arguments about economic policy

  How to navigate a political and financial minefield

  It’s time for the country to get serious about renewable energy.

  The Bush administration, torture & obfuscation in the ’war on terror’

Like Christianity, it’s never been tried.

  A Catholic feminist reflects.

  How to rebuild it

It’s a matter of conscience.

Hard truths about the ’American Way of Life’

  Why did the California Supreme Court follow in the wayward footsteps of Massachusetts?

  How the next president of the United States can get sanctions right.

  The senator’s Philadelphia speech on race was brilliant—but also troubling.

What can be done about the global food crisis?

  A life-long Democrat explains how his party lost his vote.

  Immigration is the wedge issue on which the election is likeliest to turn.

There will be no solution to Iraq’s political problems as long as it is occupied by the U.S. military.

  Why the House of Representatives was right to say no to warrantless wiretapping

Time to listen to the planet.

  Time to ditch the Bush Doctrine

  President George W. Bush’s troubling theological arguments for the "war on terror"

  Hope is a theological virtue.

  The economy is in deep trouble. How did we get here and where are we headed?

  The second piece in our ’Issues 2008’ series asks what’s become of welfare reform.

  Rethinking religion’s public role

  In a report from Kenya, Nagele tells the harrowing story of her corner of the chaos.

  Why this interminable election cycle may not be all bad—for voters and candidates

  An unjust anomaly in federal prison-sentencing rules is finally corrected.

A review of the controversial new book ’The Israel Lobby & U.S. Foreign Policy.’

How helpful is the U.S. bishops’ new statement on politics & church teaching?

  What’s at stake in the debate over Attorney General-nominee Michael Mukasey?

A welcome reminder that piety and the longing for freedom can work together.

Why does U.S. health care cost so much and have so little to show for it?

What does the United States owe Iraqis?

  Avoiding the bigger war with Iran is as morally imperative as containing violence in Iraq.

  Lessons from Michael Moore’s ’Sicko’

How can an unjust war be brought to a just conclusion?

  Gender in the French election.

Is the Supreme Court’s decision a step toward overturning Roe, or something more complicated?

  As income concentration among the wealthiest increases, what about the rest?

  Are we in for another thirty years of abortion wars?

Zimbabwe’s dictator has gotten away with too much for too long. That has to end now.

Why does the United States pay so much for health care and have so little to show for it?

What does the ’surge’ really mean? Hint: it’s about the administration’s reduced strategic appetite.

The Taliban vs. Bollywood

Almost nothing the Bush administration does works and almost nothing it says adds up.

The Bush administration showed its capacity for self-deception in the Iraq war. Why should we trust it on Iran?

  Global warming is an undeniable threat. It’s time for the Bush administration to act like it.

  Using the word ’genocide’ is not enough. The term requires action—now.

It’s well past time for the president to realize that the U.S. alone can’t fix what it has broken in Iraq.

America’s "liberating tradition" isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.

How Deval L. Patrick became the first African-American governor of Massachusetts.

Whatever happened to political compromise?

  What is habeas corpus and why shouldn’t it be eviscerated—not even in wartime?

Will the much-needed clean-up of Bush administration policies start on Nov. 7? What’s at stake in the midterm elections?

A look inside the prolife movement in the heartland. Can the prolife tent be enlarged?

Candidates are finally talking about climate change on the campaign trail. Why?

A detainees’ attorney explains the problems with Gitmo.

What two words best describe our recent military adventures in Iraq?

In the race for governor in Ohio, it’s the Preacher vs. the Pastor.

  Abortion isn’t the only issue to consider when casting your ballot.

The rich are riding high on Bush’s fiscal policy. What about the rest of America?

Military might alone won’t solve the Middle East crisis. It’s time for multilateral diplomacy.

Will the Democrats ever overcome their ’religion problem’?

How organized labor can help immigrants learn democracy.

The "war on terror" comes to Canada.

It’s time to put an end to the terror-detainee system in Guantanamo.

  What is the price of "progress"?

  Can a Mandela- like figure emerge in South Africa’s presidential race?

  Can the United States both secure its borders and welcome the needy stranger?

What a hurricane can teach us about the immigration controversy.

  Breaking the law is a terrible thing, except when it isn’t.

Why have boys fallen so far behind girls?

What will become of England in the post-Tony Blair era?

Executing this man would be a calculated distraction, a delusion, and a crime.

Why is the Bush administration attempting to undercut the nuclear nonproliferation treaty?

What does the unlikely pairing of evangelicals and Catholics mean for U.S. politics?

Where is the Catholic vote and what should it look like?

In Iraq, President Bush has made a bad situation worse. Can he accept responsibility for his failures?

In his State of the Union address, George W. Bush said the unsayable: America is addicted to foreign oil, and we must wean ourselves from it. Coming from an oil man, it was a surprising admission. How serious Bush is remains to be seen. The Editors.

How did a single mother become the first woman president in Latin America to be elected in her own right?

  "Like John Roberts, Judge Samuel Alito appears to be a very decent person, a meticulous legal craftsman, and a man of deep conservative conviction. His all-but-certain elevation to the U.S. Supreme Court promises to fulfill the hopes of the Republican Party’s right wing and the fears of many others, especially abortion-rights advocates." The Editors on the latest Supreme Court nominee.

  "When discussing Supreme Court nominees, President George W. Bush has long repeated the mantra: he wants judges who ’will strictly apply the Constitution and laws, not legislate from the bench.’ Yet Bush’s mantra sets up a false dichotomy. Good judges do far more than apply the law; they also interpret it." Cathleen Kaveny on the coming Supreme Court hearings.

Despite President George W. Bush’s recent attacks on his Democratic critics, it is the loss of confidence among Republicans and the public at large in the president’s credibility and conduct of the war in Iraq that is now driving the debate about how long U.S. troops should remain there. The president claims that those calling for withdrawal want to “cut and run,” but he has yet to put forward a plausible strategy for winning. Without a strategy, “staying the course” will not change the outcome.

“Twenty-five years ago, on December 2, 1980, security forces in El Salvador tortured and murdered Sisters Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, Dorothy Kazel, and Miss Jane Donovan,” writes Robert E. White, who was U.S. ambassador to El Salvador at the time. He was fired for his failure to release a statement declaring that the Salvadoran government was doing its best to get to the bottom of the case. On the anniversary of the slayings, White reflects on recent troubling U.S. foreign policy failures and political interventions, from Latin America to Iraq—“arguably the most reckless war in our history.”

"Despite threatening disarray on nearly all fronts, President George W. Bush moved quickly and with characteristic political focus to nominate Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. to replace Harriet Miers as his choice for the seat on the Supreme Court that will eventually be vacated by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor."

How did the Democratic Party lose the Catholic vote? As Mark Stricherz explains, it was the brainchild of Democratic strategist Fred Dutton, who, in the late 1960s and early ’70s, hoped to broaden the party’s constituent base but ended up weakening its historic ties with Catholic voters. Dutton’s motives were not anti-Catholic, Stricherz explains: “he simply misjudged the importance of Catholics to the Democratic Party.”

  Tom Reiss’s article on Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes (1911) in the New York Times Book Review (“The True Classic of Terrorism,” September 11) criticizes the stock figures and cartoon characters of Conrad’s earlier novel, The Secret Agent (1907), and claims that it is “not especially prescient about terrorism.” But Reiss also concedes that the “tightly constructed” earlier novel “seems stunningly up-to-date” and “remains the most brilliant novelistic study of terrorism as viewed from the blood-splattered outside.” In fact, the more ambitious Under Western Eyes builds on and complements The Secret Agent.

  Two recent developments in the “war on terror” give hope that the nation, and especially Congress, may be coming to its senses about the failure of President George W. Bush’s misconceived campaign to defeat Islamic terrorism by invading Iraq.

What are the politics we need today? Historian David O’Brien has a few ideas. “Democrats have been able to repackage the Republican message in more attractive dress,” O’Brien argues. Taking on both parties, O’Brien offers a manifesto of the common good: “Democracy requires all of us to take responsibility for our history. Let’s find a party that will help us do that.”

"John Roberts’s performance before the Senate Judiciary Committee was lauded as brilliant by his advocates and as evasive by his critics. Perhaps brilliantly evasive is the best way to characterize his vague and incomplete answers to questions about his judicial philosophy. If one of the purposes of the hearings was to inform the American public about the philosophy and moral convictions of a man who might preside over the Court for decades, it failed."

  Though continuity with his predecessor has been the norm so far, Pope Benedict XVI has already diverged from several positions held by John Paul II. One concerns the proposed accession of Turkey to the European Union, a question the EU will take up on October 3.

  “Catholics are everywhere,” writes David O’Brien. John Roberts is about to be confirmed as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Some of the most prominent members of Congress are Catholic. And much of the last presidential campaign was taken up with the issue of whether prochoice Catholic politicians could receive Communion. The Roberts nomination is an occasion for the church to put its social teachings into play in the debates about abortion, privacy, the family, economics, war and peace, and other issues.

  "With the Republican Party in control of both houses of Congress as well as the White House, it will be a neat trick if Republicans can parlay their own failures of leadership and management in the aftermath of the hurricane into a further justification of the party’s antigovernment, tax-cutting agenda." The Editors on Katrina.

One of the issues likely to play a critical role in this month’s hearings on Supreme Court nominee John Roberts will be unpacking his views on federalism. In the past, as both lawyer and judge, Roberts has often favored states’ rights over national regulatory policy. That is in line with the Bush administration’s approach to a variety of issues, especially the environment. At times, administration policy has bordered on abdicating federal oversight of environmental concerns in favor of the market’s purported self-correcting mechanisms.

So much has happened to obscure the real nature of the crisis the nation faced on September 11, 2001, as well as the remarkable solidarity shown by the American people in the aftermath, that it is hard to believe it has been only four years since Al Qaeda terrorists flew hijacked planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Another area where Catholics and evangelicals have shown joint concern is over ending the long-running civil war in southern Sudan, and, more recently, the genocide in Darfur, the western portion of that huge African nation. In the past two years, perhaps two hundred thousand people have died in Darfur, and 2 million more have been displaced by government-sponsored militias. (For a compelling fictional account of the Sudanese civil war that reflects today’s headlines, see Philip Caputo’s Acts of Faith [Random House], an explosive mix of arms running, tribalism, American exceptionalism, and misguided religious idealism.)

Should Judge John G. Roberts be confirmed by the Senate, he will become the fourth Roman Catholic sitting on this Supreme Court, joining Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Clarence Thomas. That the Court, long a bastion of the nation’s Protestant establishment, may soon have a preponderance of Catholics is a remarkable historical development.

The all-volunteer army, arguably the most successful federal program of the past thirty years, is failing, argues Andrew Bacevich, a West Point graduate and Vietnam veteran. The war in Iraq, coupled with U.S. interventionalist foreign policy, has placed a great strain on the volunteer force, exposing as false the assumption that the U.S. can enjoy the prerogatives of being the world’s sole superpower on the cheap.

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s retirement may not dramatically change the direction of the court, especially on issues like abortion. Since six justices currently support Roe, it is likely that the appointment of two or even three new justices would be required before that decision could be overturned.

Bush’s June 28 speech on the war in Iraq was yet another lost opportunity for the president to level with the American people. In order to do that, however, the president would have to own up to the disastrous mistakes made both in going to war and in thinking that the Iraqis would embrace the occupation with open arms.

New Yorker writer Mark Danner’s recent commencement address at the University of California at Berkeley is an eloquent, if disheartening, reminder of the fact that under the George W. Bush administration "our government decided to change this country from a nation that officially does not torture to one, officially, that does.”

It was an arresting photograph: President George W. Bush holding a baby, and surrounded by children, all of whom began life as “excess” embryos otherwise destined for destruction or possibly for use in stem-cell experimentation.

Nearly two hundred and fifty years ago, Benjamin Franklin observed that it is “better to go to bed supperless than wake up in debt.” During the past four and a half years of the Bush administration, the American people have bought supper on credit and supersized the debt left to their children.

How the banks and credit-card companies had their way with the new bankruptcy ’reform’ law. Mark Sargent reports.

The final shape of the health-care system won’t be reached by means of some grand plan, writes Charles R. Morris. It will be a lot messier than that.

"Today, empowering individuals means giving them educational opportunities. If we do not find a way to make a college education more widely available, the trend toward economic inequality will only increase, rendering hollow our belief in America as a land of opportunity and justice for all."

  Because the United States was founded on Enlightenment ideas, and nationalism is usually connected to romantic notions of terrain, history, and a unique cultural experience, little is ordinarily said about American nationalism. But, of course, the United States is perhaps the most nationalistic society on earth.

  The nuclear threat is anything but over, argues Douglas Roche.

It’s time to reexamine Catholics’ conformity to the ideologies of their chosen parties, argues J. Peter Nixon.

Since the Great Depression, the American people-whether rich or poor-have had an ace in their back pocket. You might lose your shirt in the stock market, get frisked in an embezzlement scheme, suffer a medical catastrophe, or be pulled under by a periodic recession, but one thing was certain: the American people were pledged to stand by you in your old age.

With all the rhetoric one hears on Social Security these days, you’d think the whole system was headed for disaster. Truth is, it’s not, explains Charles R. Morris.

Senator Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) just created headlines calling for prolife and prochoice groups to work together to reduce unwanted pregnancies. William J. Byron, SJ, former president of the Catholic University of America, agrees that it’s time for people on both sides of the abortion issue to find some common ground.

President Bush was right to warn the American people that the high turnout for the January 30 Iraqi elections was only a first step toward democracy and independence. He was also right to describe the greater-than-expected turnout as an important indication of the Iraqi people’s desire for freedom and self-government.

In nominating Alberto Gonzales to be U.S. attorney general, highest law enforcement officer in the country, President George W. Bush flouted not only the laws and treaty commitments of the United States on torture, but more than two hundred years of military tradition as well.

An important struggle is being waged in Illinois today. On the surface, it’s about the sale of video games to kids. It’s also a debate about a deeper question: To what degree does the responsibility for teaching good values to children fall solely on parents? Should some of that responsibility be shared by the state? Barbara Dafoe Whitehead reports.

President George W. Bush has been criticized for his slow response to the tsunami disaster and for the “stingy” amount of U.S. government aid ($15 million) he was initially willing to offer the victims. The president has since raised that amount to $350 million, but governments of smaller and less wealthy nations have contributed much more proportionally than the United States. Bush is unimpressed by such comparisons and used the relief effort to slyly deprecate what government can do in such situations, extolling the private generosity-and thus the moral superiority-of individual Americans.

"Much of the world’s attention has rightly been focused on the catastrophic loss of life caused by the tsunami that swept across the Indian Ocean last month, reminding us in the most horrific way that nature’s capriciousness can be as deadly as man’s own enmity or folly. It is perhaps just as sobering, then, to be reminded that estimates of the Iraqi loss of life following the U.S. invasion and occupation of that country are of a similar magnitude."

On November 3, Western Europe’s morning papers had only inconclusive results on the U.S. election to report. The following day, there was no getting around the fact of George W. Bush’s victory. The UK’s liberal daily, the Guardian, summed it up with two small words in white against a full-page black background: “Oh God.” Inside, it reported that “we went to bed daring to hope and awoke to the crushing news....George Bush’s victory catapulted liberal Britain into a collective depression.” The front page of Germany’s Die Zeit echoed that disappointment: “The world had wished for another president,” but America chose to stay with Bush.

The relationship between Canada and the United States is complicated and convoluted, yet in a sense simple. Depending on whom you ask, we are family, friends, neighbors, business partners, or simply an accident of history. We are each other’s largest trading partners. We share, or did share until 9/11, the world’s largest undefended border. We have a common political and legal heritage, and for better or worse, your culture is ours. Ultimately what spurs our obsession, and we are obsessed, is the knowledge and fear that what happens in your country tends to eventually happen in ours. We have a saying: You sneeze, we get pneumonia. So, when America votes, we watch avidly. While it is true that the November election was watched by the world, Canadians were your most consistent and attentive viewers.

"Looking back over the results of the presidential election, pundits now agree that the war over terror, not the war over “moral values,” led to John Kerry’s defeat. Still, that doesn’t mean that values are off the political agenda. As the Democrats look ahead to the congressional elections of 2006, they will again confront one of the more troubling aspects of the “values” divide: the growing marriage gap." Barbara Dafoe Whitehead reports.

  Were influential Catholic conservatives right to support the war in Iraq? No, argues theologian and aid worker Peter Dula.

"There are two kinds of defeats in electoral politics," explains former Clinton adviser William A. Galston: "Some are expected, even felt to be inevitable (Mondale in 1984). Such losses are sad for the losers, but they do not lead the losing party to reflect on fundamentals. Other defeats are stinging because they are unexpected (Dukakis in 1988)." Kerry’s loss falls into this category. What happened?

"No single incident in the ’war’ on terror has done more to damage America’s credibility and moral stature, or to fuel the indignation and ambitions of Islamic terrorists in Iraq and throughout the Middle East, than the torture of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison." Why then, is someone implicated in making policy to relax U.S. adherence to the Geneva Conventions going to be the new attorney general?

A sadness has set in. Throughout my small town in southeastern, Appalachian Ohio, people ask, “How’s it going?” Typically you hear, “Could be better.” Most skulk away after saying this; few need elaboration. Some neighbors can’t bring themselves to tear down their Kerry/Edwards yard signs. There’s even nostalgia for the morning of November 3, when we learned Bush led in our state but that provisional ballots hadn’t been counted. The hope, odd as it seems now, was to become the next Florida. Then the hope died, and it was final. A president who led us into war without planning for the peace and who relished handing money back to the rich was reelected.

"George W. Bush does not deserve a second term as president. His record of miscalculation, error, and deceit with regard to the invasion of Iraq alone should have been enough for voters to return him to Texas. For that to happen, however, Senator John Kerry had to convince the American electorate that he had a clear plan of action for dealing with the problems we face as a nation during a time of terrorism and economic uncertainty. Kerry failed to do that."

Some readers may recall that I have a serendipitous connection with Commonweal’s founding editor, Michael Williams (1877-1950). Williams lived, died, and is buried in Westport, Connecticut, the town where I grew up. Upon learning this, I went on a little expedition to find his grave (see “Our Man in Westport,” February 11, 2001). He’s buried not far from the elementary school I attended, and his funeral Mass was held in the church where I received my First Holy Communion and confirmation. Of all the unlikely occurrences related to my becoming editor of Commonweal, the fact that Williams and I had trod much of the same turf is the oddest.

"This eightieth anniversary issue of Commonweal goes to press a week before Election Day. Many of our subscribers will know the result of the 2004 presidential race-if there is a clear-cut result-before they receive this special double issue in the mail."

Catholics face a curious choice in this year’s presidential election, writes Margaret O’Brien Steinfels. When Bush, a Methodist, is touted as the Catholic candidate and Kerry, a Catholic, is painted as a heretic, Steinfels writes, “you know that the Catholic community has been chopped and blended in the great American food processor.” Still, Catholic values can still inform a citizen’s vote. Steinfels explains how.

When will the United States wake up to the health-care crisis? Bioethicist Andrew Lustig laments the “state of denial” hobbling both parties’ understanding of the scope of the problem, and assessing both Bush’s and Kerry’s proposals, wonders no one’s made the moral argument for health-care reform.

With less than a month to go, I’m planning not to vote in this November’s presidential election. I’m not happy about this situation: it’s rare that a day goes by without the difficulty of my decision pressing itself upon me in one way or another. My children, for both of whom this election is the first they’re old enough to vote, find it puzzling, since I constantly encourage them to take their new civic status with all the seriousness they can muster. My wife, who belongs to the anything-but-Bush school (as do most of my colleagues), finds it reprehensible because she thinks that not voting only makes it more likely that our president will be reelected. And the U.S. Catholic bishops and the pope have clearly and repeatedly pressed upon me, as a Catholic, the importance of my civic duty to participate fully in the political life of my country-which certainly means voting. All this I take very seriously: it is my duty to vote, and yet I’m planning not to.

This week, Commonweal asks three Catholic writers to explain their votes for president. Thomas Higgins sides with John Kerry, even though “he wasn’t my first choice to be the nominee of the Democratic Party.” Robert Royal argues that, while his attachment to George W. Bush is hardly overwhelming, “my own enthusiasm in this election, I will confess, is that the Republicans are not Democrats.”

At the dual risk of being a prig and a bore, let me begin with what the scholastics called the via remotionis (crudely: what something is not). I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the Republican Party. In the Catholic ghetto where I grew up, I never laid eyes on a known Republican until I was in high school. And while I accept that, alas, man is by nature a political animal, I have always thought that you really have to be some kind of dumb to expect much of, identify with, or invest yourself wholly in any political party, including the Republicans.

  The editors take on the Bush economic plan: "Bush’s reliance on tax cuts to solve every problem is not just bad public policy, it is bad economics. By pushing through the largest tax breaks since the Reagan years, Bush has done more than any modern president to widen the disparity between rich and poor."

In Mario Cuomo’s spirited rebuttal to Kenneth Woodward, he summons the work of Thomas Aquinas, who wrote that good law must be enforceable, otherwise contempt for all laws could be engendered. “As I understood my religion,” Cuomo writes, commenting on his time as governor, “it required me to accept the restraints imposed by my religion in my own life, but it did not require that I seek to impose them on all New Yorkers-Catholic or not.”

  Can Catholic politicians be both personally opposed to abortion and unwilling to act against Roe v. Wade? Long-time religion journalist Kenneth Woodward says no, and takes on former governor of New York Mario Cuomo.

Abortion isn’t the only Catholic issue this election year. As political scientist Clarke Cochran points out, affordable health insurance is another crucial concern. “That 45 million Americans lack such insurance is a national disgrace,” Cochran writes. Which candidate’s solution lines up closest to Catholic social teaching? “Both major parties fall short...although Kerry at least works toward it.”

This summer’s hurricanes in Florida, coupled with even more destructive monsoons in Bangladesh; last year’s European heat wave that killed thirty thousand and massive wildfires that scalded Australia: suddenly, people everywhere are beginning to wonder what’s afoot. Might we be in the grip of a warming process that is tipping the Earth’s ecological balance, knocking the whole thing off kilter? Is there some way to stop it?

Has the Republican Party cornered the religion-rhetoric market? The received wisdom is that voters who go to church regularly side with the GOP. But the conventional wisdom is wrong, argues Amy Sullivan, an editor at the Washington Monthly. “Many Americans, it turns out, are Democrats precisely because of their religious beliefs, not despite them.”

Now that George W. Bush has been officially nominated, the editors take stock of his first four years in office: "Too often, Bush has proceeded as though his intentions should define reality, and therefore the ends justify the means. This president has shown little patience for being held accountable for the unintended consequences of his actions."

  Charles Morris reports on the irresponsible tax policy of George W. Bush and the increasing disparity between rich and poor.

Early summer is the season for Supreme Court rulings, and few boil the pot more than those having to do with religion. So in this parade of headline-grabbing judicial decisions, when the Court ruled on subjects ranging from terrorism to Internet porn, what happened to God? Richard Garnett reports.

In the Editors’ open letter to the U.S. Catholic bishops, clarification is sought from the bishops on their own teaching on abortion. They call for greater clarification on whether the bishops intend to translate Catholic moral teaching and enactment into civil law.

In their open letter to John Kerry, the Editors of Commonweal have some questions for the first Catholic presidential candidate in forty-four years.

Now that his home state has legalized same-sex marriage, John Kerry may forever be branded a “Massachusetts liberal.” But Massachusetts is not quite as liberal as some would have you believe. The Bay State has the lowest divorce rate in the nation, far below states in the Bible Belt. Journalist William Bole reports.

“When my seventeen-year-old daughter first saw the photos of tortured and abused Iraqi prisoners, she said, ‘I’m ashamed to be an American.’ So was I.” Jo McGowan writes from India.

  Is eugenics is making a comeback in the guise of selective abortion? More and more parents are choosing to abort babies because they are physically or mentally handicapped. The editors address a disturbing trend.

"Defending a Catholic politician’s access to the Eucharist is not the same thing as defending his or her support for unrestricted access to abortion. Sad to say, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry’s position on the legal status of abortion is extreme." The Editors address Kerry’s "Catholic problem."

From the archives: Why law & morality can part company

From the archives: A response to Paul Griffiths 

  Who could blame the bishops for wanting to do something about abortion? Frans Jozef van Beeck asks. But denying Communion to prochoice Catholic politicians won’t do. This blanket condemnation smacks of the pastoral debacle of Humanae vitae.

I voted for George W. Bush and I’m heartily sorry now,” says psychologist and former Commonweal columnist Sidney Callahan. Being prolife is about more than abortion.

The U.S. must act to end ethnic cleansing in Darfur.

Who is responsible for the egregious failures at Abu Ghraib?

Can John Kerry reach “persuadable” Catholic voters? Not until he starts talking about his Catholicism in a way that avoids disowning it by blithely invoking the separation of church and state, argues Amy Sullivan. Toeing the tired middling line of church-and-state rhetoric won’t wash with Catholics of any stripe.

From the archives: four responses to the terrorist attacks of 9/11

From the archives: our editorial of September 28, 2001

What do bishops who propose refusing the Eucharist to prochoice politicians hope to accomplish?

And how that book’s author (Steven Englund) imagines Napoleon might correspond with George W. Bush in The Last Word

From his apartment overlooking Germany’s Wannsee River, Andrew J. Bacevich gives us “The View from Berlin: Reflections on Empire.”

From the archives (1993): the debate over gays in the military