The House of Representatives eliminated the filibuster way back in the 19th century, and somehow it managed to survive.
We live in a diverse nation, but it isn't that diverse. If any one state showed results so dramatically different from the results in each of the other 50 states, the likeliest explanation would be that someone had tampered with the polls.
To argue that universal health care would wreck the U.S. lead in cancer survival, you'd have to argue that universal health care would wreck the entire U.S. economy.
President Obama seems to think that you win by demonstrating that you're a more reasonable person than your opponents. It didn't work too badly, I'll grant, as an electoral strategy in the 2012 election.
If the Pentagon truly confined itself to providing defense, then presumably we wouldn't need a whole separate government agency to provide 'Homeland Security.'
Capitalism can't deliver decent health care.
The Clinton administration cared a lot about the middle class and the poor. But it also cared a lot - too much, in retrospect - about the rich.
Sometime, while I wasn't paying attention, trickle-down economics got respectable.
The liberation of Iraq, which is already hard to justify from the perspective of American interests, at least had the virtue of freeing Iraqis from a brutal dictator. Despite all the anarchy and violence, life has gotten better for most Iraqis.
The central con of the political coalition assembled by Ronald Reagan and maintained by his successors was that government was a common enemy.
Economic inequality is less troubling if you live in a country where any child, no matter how humble his or her origins, can grow up to be president.
Presidential election results in 2008 and 2012 clarified that talk radio was not, in fact, running the country.
The chief purpose of a union is to maximize the income of its members.
The $100 bill may be America's most successful export.
The argument most commonly made in the filibuster's favor is crudely partisan: 'Our side may be in the majority now, but someday it will be in the minority, and when that happens we'll want to block the other side's extremist agenda.'
Republican presidents talk about freedom. Democratic presidents talk about equality.
Income inequality has gotten worse under President Barack Obama.
In removing the friction involved in paying bills, electronic billing has substantially increased the friction involved in not paying them.
We live in an era of mind-blowing scientific discovery, virtually none of which ever makes the front page, even as every trivial twist and turn in the rococo political drama has a secure place as the lead story.
Steve Jobs was the greatest manufacturer of consumer products of his age. His marketing vision put him on par with Henry Ford, and his grasp of the aesthetic component to industrial design far surpassed Ford's.
If the 1992 and 2000 elections were any guide, third-party candidates are death on the mainstream parties with which they're most naturally aligned.
Universities are basically socialist institutions.
GOP candidates routinely sign a pledge never, ever to raise taxes. Democratic candidates aren't even asked to sign a parallel pledge never, ever to cut entitlements.
Cable television and the Internet have created an unending demand for information, and there simply isn't enough truth to go around.
The Kurds were the only people in Iraq who were completely unguarded in expressing their gratitude to the United States for setting them free.
President Obama has his faults, but overall, I think, is a good president.
The problem with wanting the tax code to be 'simpler, fairer,' and 'pro-growth' is that it's impossible to achieve all three at the same time.
The United States is a country where practically everybody considers himself middle class.
What type of 'person' is the for-profit corporation? A spoiled brat - all rights and no responsibilities, a traditional conservative argument would say.
One of my lifelong hobbies has been to collect 'aptronyms' - the newspaper columnist Franklin P. Adams's term for people whose names were curiously appropriate to, or provided ironic comment on, their occupations.
Federal law prohibits anyone convicted of a felony from owning a gun. Seems like kind of a good idea, no?
It's no surprise that Mitt Romney bent himself into a pretzel to disavow the portions of Obamacare that derive from his own reform in Massachusetts.
The embourgeoisement of China's proletariat may be the inevitable result of its industrialization, but 'inevitable' isn't the same as 'speedy.'
Whenever a Kurd wants to measure the depth of some foreign leader's commitment to Kurdish autonomy, he listens for one particular word. That word is 'federal.' Anyone who will say he favors Kurdish federalism can be counted a friend of the Kurds.
When Grover Norquist launched his project to name anything and everything after Ronald Reagan, I humbly proposed that the deficit be re-christened 'the Reagan.'
I recognize that Republicans see a moral difference between a dollar taken away from a millionaire in government benefits and a dollar taken away from a millionaire in taxes.