America’s war dead will continue to return home in the shadows, hidden from the public and the press.The Senate voted, 54-39, Monday to support the Bush administration and keep the prohibition on media coverage of flag-draped caskets arriving at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.Maine’s senators split on the issue. Sen. Olympia Snowe voted to […]

Iran, while our national attention has been focused on neighboring Iraq, may become the biggest foreign policy problem facing the United States and its allies.President Bush and Sen. John Kerry, who hopes to replace him, have arrived at a similar position regarding Iraq. Despite violence and instability, the United States has an obligation to help […]

A year into the occupations of Japan and Germany, supporters of World War II should have been having second thoughts – at least if America then were operating by contemporary rules. In his provocative new book, “Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire,” historian Niall Ferguson recounts the troubled rebuilding efforts in Japan and Germany that […]

Looking for a quick policy fix between The Reagan Farewell and The Clinton Rollout? Then try this idea: There’s a chance to make 2005 a breakthrough year on the uninsured (whoever wins!) if enough of us get creative in the next few months.This year presents an opportunity that 2000 did not, because Al Gore was […]

iving a lie takes a heavy toll.Stress, paranoia and depression all work to undermine the life of a man who has built his place in the community with deception.It’s a terrible life.I know because just such a man has told me about it. About the medication to help him sleep and work. About the fear […]

Ten years later, it feels like a fever dream.There is to it a sense of unreality. You want to say, did that actually happen? But you know it did. You saw it. You were there.Ten years ago, O.J. Simpson was arrested for murder and the whole country went nuts. Not all at once, granted. In […]

Oscar Wilde famously spoke so many years ago, referring to homosexuality, of “the love that dare not speak its name.” Today, of course, homosexuality shouts its name and affixes it to marriage licenses. But there is a new kind of open secret – “the right that dare not speak its name.”In a June decision, a […]

Over the past weeks, I have given many miles of careful consideration to the trials and tribulations of Martha Stewart. My feelings concerning her plight are far from set. On the one hand, she did break the law and then lied about it. On the other hand, would you or I do differently given the […]

The Reagan Revolution began in 1980 in Philadelphia, Miss.Philadelphia, a speck of town north and east of Jackson, is infamous as the place three young civil rights workers were murdered in 1964 for registering black people to vote. Now here came Ronald Reagan, Republican presidential aspirant, opening his campaign at a fair that for generations […]

The conspiracy theorists and Bush haters who won’t be satisfied until high Bush administration officials have been implicated in the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal should be asking: Which Pentagon official authorized the brutality at Pennsylvania’s Fayette County Prison? Because, in a sense, that is where the scandal has its roots. That is where Army Spec. […]