While Stephen Colbert was roasting Cardinal Timothy Dolan at Thursday's Al Smith Dinner in New York, the organization Dolan heads was quietly confessing that it got burned by the Republican Party's hostage-taking of the federal government and U.S. debt ceiling. In the opening paragraph its press release, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (UCCSB) "welcomed […]

During his short time in the Holy See, Pope Francis has had two clear messages for his faithful in the United States. Decrying those who "seek selfish profit," Francis in May pleaded with "those in public office to make every effort to give new impetus to employment." And just last month, the Bishop of Rome […]

If you ever wondered what a 21st century nullification crisis would look like, look no further than Missouri. One hundred and forty eight years after the end of the Civil War, the New York Times reports, "the Republican-controlled Missouri legislature is expected to enact a statute next month nullifying all federal gun laws in the […]

These are heady days for red state propagandists. After years of leading the nation in poverty, low incomes, poor working conditions, dismal educational performance, awful health care systems, shocking teen birth rates, sky-high divorce rates, bloody gun violence and just about every other measure of social dysfunction, Republican-dominated states finally have some good news to […]

The brutal murders this week of Australian student Christopher Lane and World War II hero Delbert Benton have rightly prompted national soul-searching and national shame. But as predictable as the sunset and the force of gravity, the horrors in Oklahoma and Washington also triggered right-wing lectures about race, crime and politics. Just as in the […]

In recent weeks, pollsters and pundits have been wrestling with a seeming contradiction at the heart of the country's abortion debate. On the one hand, the United States is a pro-choice nation, with consistent majorities of Americans voicing the belief for two decades that abortion should be legal in some or all cases. On the […]

The conservative campaign to brand Barack Obama "Race-Baiter in Chief" over his remarks on the Trayvon Martin tragedy continued uninterrupted over the weekend. Joining ranks with Sean Hannity, who said the young Obama resembled Martin because "he smoked pot and he did a little blow," were former Bush press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Dana Perino. […]

This week, millions of Americans struggled to understand how an unarmed 17 year old African-American kid stalked by an overzealous community watch volunteer came to be blamed for his own murder. Millions more wondered what all the fuss was about. And like many Americans across the country, I naturally expected our President--who also happens to […]

This fall, CNN will exhume the rotting corpse of its Crossfire program originally killed by Jon Stewart. Three weeks ago, the network offered Piers Morgan's viewers a sneak peak of Crossfire's new four-person panel with Newt Gingrich--a man who believes marriage is an institution between one man and three women in rapid, overlapping succession--blasting the […]

For most Americans now living, those long-ago events were as unthinkable as they were forgotten. In Little Rock, Arkansas (1957), Oxford, Mississippi (1962), and Tuscaloosa, Alabama (1963), Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy dispatched federal troops to enforce the law of the land in the face of local segregationist officials proclaiming "states' rights" as their rallying cry. […]