Doug Ireland

Photo by AP/WideWorld The latest target of a Capitol Hill outing campaign — designed to expose closeted homosexual Republicans who oppose civil rights for gay people — is San Gabriel Valley Congressman David Dreier. The powerful 12-term congressman — chairman of the House Rules Committee, chairman of the California Republican......

Ever since powerful Ohio congressman Wayne Hayes’ downfall in the early ’70s for putting his mistress, Elizabeth Ray, on the congressional payroll as a “secretary” (even though she couldn’t type), it’s been a cardinal rule of political survival that elected officials should never pay their paramour from the public coffers......

Remember how congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle deplored the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib as “un-American”? Last Thursday, however, the House quietly passed a renewed appropriation that keeps open the U.S.’s most infamous torture-teaching institution, known as the School of the Americas (SOA), where the illegal......

Lethal new regulations from President Bush’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, quietly issued with no fanfare last week, complete the right-wing Republicans’ goal of gutting HIV-prevention education in the United States. In place of effective, disease-preventing safe-sex education, little will soon remain except failed programs that......

Was Halliburton, the oil conglomerate once headed by Dick Cheney, involved in a massive $180 million bribery scheme in Nigeria on Cheney’s watch? Hopes that the veil may finally be lifted on yet another odoriferous Halliburton scandal were raised last Friday, when it was announced that the Securities and Exchange......

A book to be released this week in Paris lifts the veil on a sordid tale that even John Grisham would have had trouble inventing, about a Saudi prince-diplomat who smuggles two tons of cocaine into Europe on a jetliner owned by the Saudi royal family — and gets away......

“Old Europe” got its revenge. The Spanish elections eliminated George W. Bush’s most important ally on the European continent, registered a resounding rejection of the White House’s imperial foreign policy, and dramatically shifted the balance of power within the European Union against the Atlanticist alliance that sundered the authority of......

A cartoon in the March 1 New Yorker shows a balding, middle-aged man and his wife gazing at the telly, as the man says: “Gays and lesbians getting married — haven’t they suffered enough?” The line is not only funny, but subversive. It hints at the feminist critique of marriage......

Photo by Debra Dipaolo When Ralph Nader announced his presidential candidacy on Meet the Press, that he’s running wasn’t as surprising as his rationale for doing so. Nader offered as his principal reason his “desire to retire” George Bush. Just how did Nader assert his candidacy would do that? Why,......

In his 2003 autobiography, Al on America, the Rev. Alfred Charles Sharpton Jr. admits, “I have been guilty of letting ungodly things around me.” And that was never more true than with the latest revelations about Sharpton, who has now been exposed as a cat’s-paw for the national Republican Party......