Marc Cooper

Photo by Kate O’Connor WEST DES MOINES, IOWA — When the Democratic caucus of the 116th Precinct convened Monday night in the Rex Mathes Elementary School auditorium, a long line of eager parka-bundled participants snaked into the freezing streets of this modest, middle-class neighborhood. Just as the insurgent Howard Dead......

As President Bush meets with Mexican leader Vicente Fox this week at the Summit of the Americas, you can be sure that in those private huddles he’s getting his ear chewed. Simply put, Bush’s much-hyped immigration-reform plan announced this month falls way short of what Fox has spent more than......

What most irks me about George W. Bush is how deeply his administration polarizes the public. The president’s policies make him so easy to demonize that American politics nowadays rarely transcends a simple-minded division between Bush lovers and Bush haters. But now comes a bracing reminder from the country’s leading......

Four years ago, I had the opportunity of conducting a 40-minute radio interview with former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. I found him fascinating. A formidable intellectual wrestler, agile and combative, he was also remarkably self-reflective, ready to re-assess anything and everything about his life and career, brimming with......

A curious piece of writing and reasoning published by the lefty AlterNet.org flashed across my screen less than 24 hours after Saddam Hussein’s rat hole was unearthed. Mocking the capture of the former dictator as “the final scenes of a John Wayne Western,” Detroit-based writer David B. Livingstone lamented that......

It was a moment that fueled a war and helped touch off a decade-long bloodbath in Central America. The conflagration that followed cost tens of thousands of lives and touched millions of homes, one whose flames — mightily fanned from Washington, D.C. — once flickered, at least politically, from the......

Photo by J. Emilio Flores From nearly any hilltop in Tijuana you can peer down toward “la linea,” the U.S.-Mexican border, and easily see the U.S. government’s multibillion-dollar handiwork of the last 10 years. Of the 2,000-mile-long border, only 3.5 percent of it, about 70 miles’ worth, is fortified against......

Governor Arnold should have no problem peeling off the few handfuls of legislative Democrats he needs to fulfill his promise to rather immediately repeal the law granting driver’s licenses to the undocumented. Some key Democrats are already letting their constituents know they are about to reverse their vote of a......

Photo by Debra DiPaolo It's lucky for George W. Bush that he wasn’t born in an earlier time and somehow stumbled into America’s Constitutional Convention. A man with his views, so depreciative of democratic rule, would have certainly been quickly exiled from the freshly liberated United States by the gaggle......

It’s the Islamic world that celebrates the just-initiated holy month of Ramadan — but it’s George W. Bush who better start praying. Maybe we all should. The conservative spin machine and its White House engineers can whine and sputter all they want about the supposed lack of good news from......