Having taken the oath of office just one year ago, Barack Obama is a flashing meteor that sputtered out too soon—or so the national media narrative tells us. According to this story line, the young president is a presumptuous liberal who disappointed his own idealistic followers while irritating...

I’m Art Kumbalek and man oh manischewitz what a world, ain’a? So listen, during troubled economic times such as right here, right now, I know there’s a boatload of American citizens who desperately need whatever assistance our beleaguered states and federal US-focking-A government can pony up. (Tea partiers, be damned. How ’bout you go spend a couple, three years down...

Every now and then, an insider inadvertently exposes the hideous rationalizations that run the American political grotesquerie. The best known of these statements are memorialized on TV as "gaffes." But the ones that never become famous tend to reveal the ugliest assumptions of all. Case in point is the comment the pharmaceutical...

What’s worse: Knowingly approving a racially charged campaign ad that wrongly implies that your opponent did something horrendous, or determining that airing that lie-filled ad isn’t so awful? That’s the problem created by a three-judge panel’s ruling...

Corruption on the Wisconsin Supreme Court took a brazen leap forward last week when a majority of the justices officially went on record in favor of accepting millions of dollars in bribes. That is a slight oversimplification of the court’s action—but very slight. Consider this: Four of the seven justices approved a rule allowing them to accept millions in campaign contributions from special interests without being required to remove themselves from cases before...

I know I should be mortified by the lobbyist-organized mobs of angry Brooks Brothers mannequins who are now making headlines by shutting down congressional town hall meetings. I know I should be despondent during this, the Khaki Pants Offensive in the Great American Health Care and Tax War. And yet, I'm euphorically repeating...

Most of us were not alive to remember a time in America when women couldn't vote, and many are too young to recall when they marched for equal pay and reproductive rights in the 1970s. The stakes were higher then, and today there is more...

As you read this, I am somewhere in rural China, probably disoriented, perhaps eating a fish eye, and certainly not paying attention to the news. This column was the last thing I wrote before embarking on what's become an all-too-rare experiment in human life: I decided to see what will happen when I go fully off the grid. Because I am completely cut off, you cannot call or text me from your phone...

Without a bailout, newspapers will lay off staff, fewer journalists will report important stories, there will be no Fourth-Estate check on state and corporate power, and the country will suffer. So goes the pro-democracy case for government and/or altruistic investors to save the newspaper industry with an infusion of cash.