Political Commentary

If the republic were the Titanic and the government’s end-of-year shutdown over health care the iceberg, Congress would be the first-class passengers already in the lifeboats — with their doctors aboard, their gold-tier coverage guaranteed, and the rest of the country left to drown in the frozen waters. What began …

The government shutdown has been dragging on for two weeks. It’s been a dystopian stretch for America’s military and veteran community. The stoppage, led by President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress, has frozen military pay, leaving active-duty military families wondering how they will pay their mortgages, feed their kids, …

The following is adapted from Master Plan: The Hidden Plot to Legalize Corruption in America, the new book from David Sirota’s investigative newsroom, The Lever. Click here for a discount and a free e-book version. On the 20th anniversary of the creation of the Roberts Supreme Court, one point of …

For countless generations my people, the Secwépemc and St’at’imc, narrated the creation of the world and the way things are through tales of our trickster ancestor, Coyote. Coyote was sent to Earth by Creator to set things in order. While he did much good — filling the rivers with salmon, …

Last December, the former al Qaeda leader, Ahmed al-Shara, made history as he led a loose coalition of rebels into downtown Damascus. The Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad, promptly fled in a helicopter. In January, al-Shara appointed himself the country’s new president. Lately, he’s been having earnest sit downs with David …

Thirty-six years ago, the American journalist Bill McKibben wrote The End of Nature, the first mass-market book about climate change. The book warned, from the perspective of a lover of nature, about the dangers posed by a warming planet: “Changes in our world which can affect us can happen in …

There’s a new centrist Democratic think tank in Washington, D.C., and its leaders think progressive groups have too much influence on the Democratic Party politicians who instinctively ignore the left. The nation’s capital already has plenty of organizations designed to marginalize the largely powerless left. The Searchlight Institute intends to …

Back in 1940, Charlie Chaplin made a movie called The Great Dictator, a comedy about fascism. In it, he plays a Hitler-like character named Adenoid Hynkel, the authoritarian leader of an imaginary country called Tomainia. As parodies go, this one was relatively direct: There was a Goebbels character, a Göring …

Political violence in America is nothing new. The assassinations of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy changed the course of the nation. Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan were both targeted by deranged gunmen who heard voices in their heads. More recently, the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, the targeted killing …

Donald Trump inflicted plenty of damage on the United States over the course of his first four years in office, but the most enduring blow may have been his radicalization of the Supreme Court. He appointed not one, not two, but three conservative justices, all of whom were hand-selected by …