We may have bested them in the Revolutionary War, but are we more like the English than we care to admit? It was a bit of a shock to be greeted by wall-to-wall breathless coverage of William and Kate when I flipped on my TV Friday morning, though the build-up should have prepared me. I [...]

I’ve got a solution to a main issue in the National Football League lockout. It’s a simple idea but the owners and players could struggle for ten years and hire some of the highest priced legal talent around, as they’ve done, and never come up with it. At issue is some $2.4 billion that the [...]

Paul Ryan, the GOP budget guru, argues tirelessly that Medicare costs are unsustainable and must be reined in. Not all of his objections to Medicare are fiscal. A piece Ryan wrote last year for the New York Times shows a deep dislike for government-run health care in general and for Medicare in particular. To Ryan, [...]


If you’re a fan of Hans Christian Andersen and his fable of the Emperor’s New Clothes, you’ll feel right at home with the Iowa Republican caucuses this time around. It’s all a fairy tale in which the likes of expert bankruptcy tycoon Donald Trump and Rep. Dingaling, aka Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), are viewed as [...]

Recently I attended a sales pitch for health insurance sold by United Health Care, the country’s largest private health insurer. I went to the session in response to an ad by AARP touting the meeting. The ad mentioned, in small type, that “UnitedHealthCare pays a royalty fee to AARP for use of the AARP intellectual [...]

Two years ago last week, President Obama announced that he would send more, not fewer, troops to Afghanistan. He also raised an awfully good question. “Many people in the United States — and many in partner countries that have sacrificed so much — have a simple question: What is our purpose in Afghanistan? After so [...]