(7 comments) SHARE        Thursday, December 13, 2012
"Slightly Above Zero": A Slogan for Our Age of Diminished Expectations Wherever you look, there are ominous signs that threaten to take our struggling economy over a much bigger cliff than the one looming on December 31st. And yet none of our political leaders seem to even be looking beyond the cliff, let alone planning for what happens next. No one is talking about a plan for real growth. Our entire conversation stops at the cliff's edge. But, unfortunately, our problems won't.

SHARE        Thursday, December 16, 2010
The Media Gets It Wrong on WikiLeaks: It's About Broken Trust, Not Broken Condoms If our government is successful in its efforts to shut down this new avenue of accountability, it will have done our country far more damage than what it claims is being done by WikiLeaks.

(2 comments) SHARE        Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Mitt Romney Brazenly Lies and the Media Lets Him Slide Mitt Romney's brazenly dishonest ad is far from the garden-variety truth stretching we're used to in political campaigns. It is so breathtakingly cynical it should cause us to question whether a candidate that would put it forth is fit for any public office -- let alone the presidency. Along with being deceitful, the ad is also a challenge to the media.

(5 comments) SHARE        Tuesday, December 27, 2011
2011: The Year the Power Went Off in Washington According to a Pew Research Center poll released this month, dissatisfaction with Washington incumbents is at a record high, with 67 percent of registered voters saying that "most members of Congress" should lose their jobs. A Gallup poll from earlier in the month put the number of those who think most members of Congress don't deserve to be re-elected at an astounding 76 percent.

(2 comments) SHARE        Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Postcard From Greece: This Should Not Be About Austerity, It's About The Future Of Democracy Can a truly democratic movement break the stranglehold of corrupt elites and powerful anti-democratic institutional forces that have come to characterize not just the politics of Greece, but most Western democracies, including our own? Greece is only an extreme example of an unfolding seismic social shift that is challenging democracies the world over.

SHARE        Friday, February 18, 2011
Debating the Two-Party System The two-party system has not just narrowed our choices, it's narrowed our thinking. It has deeply infected our political discourse, our media, and our politicians. To paraphrase Einstein, the problems we are facing today cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.

(4 comments) SHARE        Friday, August 10, 2012
Half a Billion Dollars and All We Got Is This Lousy Election? Even before the London games have ended, the political press corps has already turned its attention to its favorite sport: the VP speculation marathon. Will it be T-Paw? Will it be Portman? Will Romney risk taking a risk? Can the GOP afford to put two white men on the ticket? How will his pick affect the electoral college? How about the popular vote? What does Intrade say?

(2 comments) SHARE        Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Pepper-Spraying Occupy: An Assault on Our Democracy The Occupy movement has been a test -- a national MRI -- that has allowed us to check-in on the health of our democracy by allowing us to see what's going on underneath the surface of America's power structures. And the results are dire. What the movement, and the response to it, has shown is a government almost completely disconnected from those it purports to represent.

(1 comments) SHARE        Wednesday, May 25, 2011
On Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Shakespeare, and the Enemy in the Mirror Others, looking for scapegoats, want to lay the blame for our troubles on Muslims. Or government workers. Or teachers. Or gay people. Or rappers. Or, or, or, or... In short, anyone but ourselves. As my compatriot Socrates told us all those centuries ago: "The unexamined life is not worth living."

(6 comments) SHARE        Friday, June 17, 2011
The Internet Grows Up: Goodbye Messy Adolescence The Internet of the future, the mature, grown-up Internet, has the potential to take what's best about the human experience -- our passion, our knowledge, our desire to connect -- and channel it into an online experience that truly resonates with how people live.

(2 comments) SHARE        Thursday, July 11, 2013
"Signature Strikes" and the President's Empty Rhetoric on Drones By the time Obama accepted his Nobel Peace Prize 11 months into his presidency, he'd already ordered more drone strikes than George W. Bush had in his entire presidency. By the end of 2012, he'd ordered six times as many strikes in Pakistan as Bush had. Missiles from drones might be exploding in Pakistan and Afghanistan and Yemen, but the fallout will impact us here at home for years to come.

(5 comments) SHARE        Thursday, May 5, 2011
The Bin Laden Bounce: How Will Obama Use This Moment of Unexpected Unity? There are so many issues -- some small, some big, but all worthwhile, tangible and concrete -- that we agree on. Or at least that we could agree on, if only a president with newfound political capital were to spend some of it to get a few more victories under our collective belt.

(1 comments) SHARE        Wednesday, December 22, 2010
South American Diary, Chile: More Than Miners Are Being Rescued When I ask Chile's President Sebastián Piñera about President Obama, he pauses for a moment then tells me: "Life is tough -- and you have to be tougher than life to change the world."

(2 comments) SHARE        Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Iraq and Iran: A Partnership Made in America When a witness with a long history of being wrong takes the stand, a skilled cross-examiner will introduce those errors to cast doubt on whether that witness' judgment should be trusted now. We should do the same in the court of public opinion. Those who fomented war with Iraq must not be allowed to do it again with Iran without being held accountable.

(3 comments) SHARE        Thursday, November 3, 2011
Shakespeare, The Bible, And America's Shift Into A Punitive Society The growing punitive tone of our national debate is not only inhumane, it undermines what needs to be done to turn around the economy for the sake of everyone -- including the 1 percent. As we head into the thick of the 2012 race, let's be mindful of the chasm between truly trying to make things better and just trying to be caught trying.

(1 comments) SHARE        Monday, February 7, 2011
When HuffPost Met AOL: "A Merger of Visions" Far from changing our editorial approach, our culture, or our mission, this moment will be for HuffPost like stepping off a fast-moving train and onto a supersonic jet. We're still traveling toward the same destination, with the same people at the wheel, and with the same goals, but we're now going to get there much, much faster.

(1 comments) SHARE        Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Neocon Nightmare: The Truth Behind the Attacks on Chuck Hagel This nomination, even though Hagel is a Republican, shouldn't be looked at as another attempt by President Obama to curry favor with the opposition. It's the best kind of decision -- one made not to placate some interest group, but, rather, in the interest of the country.

(2 comments) SHARE        Thursday, May 19, 2011
Dear Class of 2011: Good Luck... You're Really Going to Need It! The road ahead is definitely rockier than the Class of 2011 imagined it would be. But while this may be the most debt-burdened graduating class in history, it's also the most tech-savvy, the most connected, and the most engaged. They should use these attributes to help hold our leaders accountable, and keep them from turning away from the mess they've made--with so many missed opportunities and perverted priorities.

(1 comments) SHARE        Thursday, March 7, 2013
10 Years Later: Looking Back on the Iraq War So We Can Clearly Look Forward The consequences of this disastrous war are still very much with us. In the seemingly endless manufactured crisis over the "fiscal cliff" and the sequester, it's amazing how much airtime and print space have been devoted to the deficit with the word "Iraq" barely getting a mention. Clearly a triumph of forgetting.

(1 comments) SHARE        Friday, May 25, 2012
JPMorgan, the Volcker Rule, and the Extreme Brevity of Financial Memory It's clear the solution to the destructive effects of the financial euphoria-driven boom and bust cycle will not be found in Washington. The banks will always win on that front -- they own the lobbyists, and the lobbyists have a stranglehold on the legislative process. When piecemeal rules are written, the banks will hide behind complexity and loopholes.

(2 comments) SHARE        Thursday, February 24, 2011
The Incredible Shrinking Budget Debate: Why the Only Choice We're Being Offered Is Between Bad and Worse We are now locked in the great budget battle of 2011. Who will win, the president or House Republicans? It's impossible to say yet, but I do know who is going to lose: us. In fact, we've already lost.

SHARE        Saturday, April 7, 2012
Time to Take Afghanistan Off the Campaign 2012 Back Burner Surely we can all agree that the first rule of military action should be: do no harm to your own national security. But right now we are doing a lot of harm, losing hearts and minds every day and making our country ultimately less safe as a result.

(2 comments) SHARE        Tuesday, July 26, 2011
The Debt Ceiling Impasse: The Myth of Grand Bargains and Win-Win Unicorns After the champagne has been uncorked and lots of backs have been slapped in DC, the lives of regular Americans will not be better -- indeed, they will almost certainly be worse. President Obama likes to say, as he did during his Twitter forum in early July, that "everything is on the table." But that was never true, because jobs and growth never even made it close to the table.

(2 comments) SHARE        Wednesday, May 11, 2011
If "America Can Do Whatever We Set Our Mind To," How Come Our Leaders Won't Set Their Minds on Jobs? Our leaders, who are supposed to be doing big things, seem instead to have made their peace with "the new normal." Take the Fed: it could be doing a lot more to create jobs, but instead it's guarding against the phantom bogeyman of inflation.

SHARE        Friday, October 25, 2013
A More Perfect Union: Being Gay in America In the preamble of the Constitution, we are told that we are constantly moving toward a more perfect union. And while people in every age think they're living in a time of transition, ours truly is an age of transition when it comes to the rights of gay Americans. It's in the zeitgeist -- in the courts, in pop culture, in the business world and in people's voices online and offline.

SHARE        Wednesday, April 27, 2011
By Accepting the Conventional Wisdom on the Deficit, Obama Is Ignoring the Lessons of 2008 What the millions of voters who turned out and elected Obama the first time around -- and who have it in their power to stay home and deny him re-election the second time around -- are actually "energized" by is the prospect of jobs. And by the sort of leadership they thought they were voting for.

(1 comments) SHARE        Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Campaign 2012: The Disconnect Widens Unfortunately, as the unreal reality show finishes up in New Hampshire and heads down to South Carolina, the disconnect widens, the cynicism grows, and the resignation spreads.

SHARE        Wednesday, July 20, 2011
From DSK to BSkyB: Media Takeaways From the Latest Round of Scandals Now that the revelations and resignations are coming faster and reaching higher, there's a distinct end-of-empire feel to things. Britain has the dubious distinction not only of being the country most associated with loss of empire, but of managing to keep losing it over and over again in new and ever more inventive ways.

SHARE        Friday, January 6, 2012
HuffPost's Latest e-Book: OCCUPY: Why It Started. Who's Behind It. What's Next In 2011, with the credibility of our political system in tatters, something happened. People said "enough," and decided to take matters into their own hands. Time captured the moment by making the protester person of the year for 2011.

SHARE        Monday, March 14, 2011
Biz Stone and the Power of Giving Back Engagement and empathy are especially important during hard times. We can choose to isolate ourselves and refuse to see what's going on around us, or we can choose to connect and engage. When we choose to reach out, the beneficiary isn't just the person or community we're helping, but ourselves as well.

SHARE        Monday, December 31, 2012
So Long, 2012: New Year's Resolutions I'd Like to Hear Through the years, I've discovered something about New Year's resolutions: while it's not so easy to keep them, it's very easy to make them for other people. And a lot more fun, too. So here are some New Year's resolutions I'd like to hear assorted public figures make and keep...

SHARE        Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Boehner Speech Preview: Will He (Republican) Party Like It's 1995? with poverty higher than it was 16 years ago, with greater income inequality, and with the middle class struggling to hold on, what will Speaker Boehner make his number one priority? According to the Washington Post, it's "cutting spending," followed by repealing the healthcare law, and "helping get our economy moving."