Tommy Thompson had had a long day. The secretary of Health and Human Services had been on Capitol Hill since morning, trying to persuade conservatives in the House and Senate to vote for a prescription drug bill he described as good policy, good medicine and good politics.Now he had to speak to a room full […]

It’s only the first step in a bureaucratic maze, but we’ll take progress where we can find it.Telecommunications giant MCI, which used to be called WorldCom, could receive an estimated $700 million in annual revenue from contracts with the federal government.The company shouldn’t receive one cent of taxpayer money.On Friday, the General Services Administration informed […]

For years, some of us have joked about GOP conservatives being a “Beltway Mafia,” but little did we know they take the moniker seriously.Republicans, last Thursday’s Washington Post reports, have ousted Democrats from the top lobbyist jobs in Washington, D.C., rather like Don Fanucci ousted Vito Corleone from his job at the Italian grocery in […]

These are Howard Dean’s “salad days,” whether by the dictionary definition of them as “the best time of youth” or the reference by William Shakespeare’s Cleopatra to “when I was green in judgment.”His presidential candidacy, which he formally unveiled recently after months of campaigning, is attracting far more interest than might have been imagined for […]

Democrats need to kill the Medicare prescription drug bills now steamrolling through Congress for two paradoxical reasons: The bills are (1) too generous a political gift to President Bush, and also (2) too generous in their subsidies to seniors who aren’t poor.Since you are almost certainly not going to hear these two arguments made by […]

Red and white bobbers hanging from trees. Plastic worm containers wedged between rocks. Pepsi bottles floating in shallow water and half-burned beer cans littering fire rings.We are just past the height of the fishing season in Maine and a walk or paddle along some of the area’s prime fishing rivers, streams and lakes shows it.Fishermen […]

BAGHDAD – Whoever was responsible at top levels in the Pentagon for postwar planning should be fired.But then no one would be fired. Three weeks in Iraq makes very clear that no one in the Bush administration made serious postwar plans before the start of the Iraq war.That lack of foresight is largely responsible for […]

Any definition of a “good” or “moral” war must logically include that it was fought for its stated reasons.However, long after the so-called “end of hostilities” in Iraq, the American people are increasingly dismayed by our government’s inability to find any evidence of our primary reason for invading that nation: weapons of mass destruction.In fact, […]

The following editorial appeared in the Miami Herald on Wednesday, June 25: Ambushes. Sabotage. Discontent among the populace. The reconstruction of Iraq by the United States and Great Britain hasn’t been going smoothly at all. It’s not too late to turn things around, but to do so, the Bush administration should swallow its pride and […]

Orrin Hatch wants to blow up your computer.Well, OK, he didn’t say “blow up” exactly. The actual verb was “destroy.” So I guess he’d be just as happy to see it melted into a steaming plastic heap or dropped from the top of a very tall building. The main point is that your computer ceases […]