As Donald Trump's bragging about the economy reached a crescendo last fall, former Obama White House communications director Jen Psaki provided a helpful reality check for the American people. "A buffoon could have kept the recovery going," Psaki explained, "and in fact one has so far." That Trump had inherited an Obama boom, an expansion […]

To say that the slogan "America First" has a checkered past in the United States is an understatement of epic proportions. Launched in the spring of 1940 on the eve of Hitler's conquest of France, Belgium and Holland, the America First Committee was an isolationist crusade which grew to 800,000 members who sought the keep […]

Years from now, Americans will look back at the Iranian hostage crisis that wasn't. One day after 10 American sailors were captured by Iranian patrols after their boats inadvertently drifted into Tehran's territorial waters, our servicemen and their equipment are back in U.S. hands. But the diplomatic thaw and rapid action by Secretary of State […]

Conservatives on Monday were predictably orgasmic in response to the Washington Post report that Obama campaign adviser David Plouffe earned $100,000 in speaking fees from a firm which did business with Tehran. As it turns out, the Republicans accusing the President of being "soft on Iran" are suffering from a bad case of premature condemnation. […]

Mitt Romney likes to talk tough about China. In an op-ed last month, Romney charged that "President Obama came into office as a near supplicant to Beijing," adding, "his administration demurred from raising issues of human rights." Unfortunately for the former Massachusetts Governor, that tough talk was immediately tempered by word that his financial advisers […]

In the election of 1928, the Republican Party of Herbert Hoover promised voters "a chicken in every pot and a car in every backyard." (We all know how that turned out.) Now, Mitt Romney is pledging that "If I'm President" every college graduate will be guaranteed a job, Iran will have no nuclear weapons and […]

In 1996, President Clinton responded to provocative Chinese missile tests near Taiwan with what PBS described as "the largest show of naval force since the Vietnam War." But the American goal of preserving Taiwanese independence through a policy of "strategic ambiguity" may soon be untenable. With the announcements of a new Chinese stealth fighter and […]

As the Senate Judiciary Committee prepares to debate the renewal of FISA revisions made in August, President Bush and his Republican allies in Congress are endorsing a unique double-standard when it comes to immunity for telecommunications firms. Within the United States, they argue, service providers such as AT&T and Verizon must cooperate with U.S. government […]

In Washington Tuesday, members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee savaged Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and General Counsel Michael Callahan for the company's involvement in the 2005 jailing of a Chinese dissident. But if their bipartisan criticism of Yahoo's behavior - cooperating with a Chinese government "subpoena-like document" to supply information about journalist accused of […]

On the same day that former Surgeon General Richard Carmona told Congress about the politicization of his office by the White House, a bizarre story from China served as a reminder of other past Bush wrong-doing at the FDA. The Beijing government punished the former head of the Chinese Food and Drug Administration for approving […]