With little sign that the departing Bush administration will press Israel to halt the ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, diplomats and political leaders throughout the Middle East and Europe are scrambling to find ways to bring an end to the violence. ...more

January 5, 2009

In the first year of his presidency George W. Bush was forced to confront the crisis of global terrorism. He responded by aggrandizing his power as president under the theory of a "unitary executive." The controversial and thoroughly repudiated policies that resulted, including warrantless surveillance of Americans' phone conversations, torture, and disregard for the basic constitutional rights of detainees, represented the most sweeping assertion of unchecked executive power in generations. ...more

January 3, 2009

The Bush administration's effort to free federal agencies from the Endangered Species Act is bad environmental policy and a waste of tax dollars. ...more

January 2, 2009

Easier auto loans for more people. The struggling financing arm of General Motors Corp., rescued by $5 billion in federal aid on Monday, plans to use some of the money to make cars and trucks more affordable to a larger pool of customers. ...more

December 31, 2008

Times have changed. In 1996, President Bill Clinton, under siege from the right, declared that "the era of big government is over." ...more

December 30, 2008

Costly Election Here's an example of why Buddy Johnson came back for more budget money. At the poll where I work there are about 3,000 voters on the roll. We had 6,000 ballots. ...more

December 26, 2008

$50 billion to $60 billion Original Bush administration estimate of the cost of the Iraq war ...more

December 26, 2008

President-elect Barack Obama's administration needs to monitor war spending much more closely than the current White House has, according to a new study that criticized President Bush's approach to funding the Iraq and Afghanistan wars - a bill that is projected to approach nearly $1 trillion next year. ...more

December 26, 2008

President George W. Bush took the rare step today of revoking a pardon he had granted only a day before, after learning of political contributions to Republicans by the man's father and other information. ...more

December 24, 2008

Taken together, two reports from the Department of Labor suggested that immigrants were needed to fill the coming worker shortage. The Report on the American Workforce predicted that by 2008 there would be 155 million workers in the United States. The other, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, projected there would be 161 million jobs. ...more

December 20, 2008