It’s tempting to see our deepening economic crisis through the prism of the culture of greed that flourished under the let-markets-run-wild ideology of the outgoing Bush administration.
To be sure, any administration that lets private companies rip off the military in wartime…
AP Photo by Seth Perlman, February 2003.
I MET ROD BLAGOJEVICH just once. It was March 9, 2007. Twenty-one months later, I don’t know what to think about what I saw and experienced that day.
The Democratic governor of Illinois and several senior…
By R.J. Matson, Post-Dispatch
IT’S TIME WE STOPPED lying to our kids.
We tell them that they are our future. We encourage them to follow their dreams and work hard to achieve anything they want. We hammer into their heads that the key…
Post-Dispatch photo by J.B. Forbes
canard
ca·nard (kə -NÄRD)
n. 1. An unfounded or false, deliberately misleading story.
Here in the editorial/commentary/letters area of the newspaper, our principal mission is to analyze issues and advocate positions that are consistent with the values and principles of…
Photo: EPA
I don’t care what the advance polls say: Right now, neither I nor anyone else knows who our next president will be. Nor can anyone say for certain why those who vote for Barack Obama or John McCain will do…
Photo by Emmanuel Dunand AFP/GettyImages
SO NOW, in the waning days of the campaign, here is the alleged storyline: Those polls that show Barack Obama leading in the race against John McCain for president? Even widening his lead? Those polls are warped.…
THE FOLLOWING paragraphs are from an actual published newspaper story about problems with voter registrations. I’ve edited out certain identifying information, so as not to spoil the punchline:
“Investigators for [deleted] attorney general and secretary of state have launched an inquiry into…
Photo by Scout Tufankjian, Polaris
I didn’t know that when Barack Obama was elected president of the Harvard Law Review in 1990, he named more student members of the ultra-conservative Federalist Society to top editor jobs at The Review than he named African-American law…
You know that vague, shapeless worry that never quite goes away? That sense that the things you count on for your security and that of your family — your spouse, your children, your brothers, sisters and parents — aren’t quite solid?
It…
Courtesy of CBS News
Pop quiz:
Below, you’ll find transcripts from two television interviews that aired last week. One comes from the interview of Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican nominee for vice president, by “CBS Evening News” anchor Katie Couric. The other…
Let’s grant that the precarious condition of the country’s financial system requires government intervention on a massive scale. The hands-off-business Bush administration has confessed as much, and no responsible observer claims otherwise - although there is considerable disagreement about the right…
After two weeks’ vacation and more than 1,700 Midwestern highway miles, I came home looking for some wisdom. I found it on the editorial page of Sunday’s Post-Dispatch — in a letter to the editor by Dorothy Anderson of Spanish Lake:
“I have…
My column this week dives into oil and energy, drawing heavily on the delightful work of Lisa Margonelli. She’s the author of the 2007 non-fiction best-seller “Oil on the Brain,” which tracks petroleum from deep in the ground to the…
Fallout from the Anheuser-Busch deal with InBev:
A colleague (who shall remain unnamed) suggested in an editorial board meeting Monday that “Budweiser is (crummy) beer.”
This particular colleague does not drink beer. His defense was that “everyone I know who knows anything…
My column today pulls together and reflects on last week’s three major developments in America’s ongoing effort to understand how the Bush administration came to approve and use abusive interrogation techniques on prisoners — something that violates every principle of…
Earlier this week, I wrote a blog item about the debate over U.S. domestic oil exploration. It includes background information on the issue, including data about estimated oil reserves and U.S. production, importation and consumption.
My Wednesday column contrasted the solicitous treatment the government gives to retired senior officers moonlighting as on-air military analysts with the years of continuing struggle faced by active-duty troops and veterans to get decent care for mental problems, including post-traumatic…
Of course the murder of Nancy Miller, my friend and former Post-Dispatch colleague, has received more coverage than it would have if she hadn’t worked here and been known in our community. But what does that really mean?
That was the…
For anyone interested in diving into the torture pool, which was the subject of my oped column of April 9, there’s no shortage of original documents on the subject. Here are links to a few that are mentioned in the column –…
