The New York Observer » Joe Conason

Need To Reduce The National Debt? Just Ask Clinton.

As America approaches the deadline for increasing the statutory national debt--or risking a catastrophic default on our obligations to creditors and citizens--there is no shortage of stupid ideas to restore fiscal order.

Near the top of the list is the balanced budget constitutional amendment, a durable fake pulled out of mothballs by Republicans and Read More

El-Baradei A Bad Guy? Don’t Listen To The American Right

To his fellow Egyptians and to most observers across the world, Mohammed el-Baradei looks like a hero--an international diplomat who might well have lived out his days in the comforts of Geneva and New York, but returned home to provide leadership despite serious personal peril. But to leading figures on the American right, Mr. El-Baradei Read More

Solid State: Forget the Haters—Obama Delivered

Complaints about President Obama's State of the Union address on both sides of the political divide (which was obscured but not obliterated by the evening's novel seating arrangements) seemed to miss its point and purpose. Like every successful speech of its kind, Mr. Obama's message resonated on more than one level. So while he conceded Read More

Fudging the Facts on Health Care and Deficits

Facts always matter, but never more so than when politicians deal with issues of real consequence like health care and budget deficits.

Data sets and out-year projections may make everybody's eyes glaze over, but without accurate information the end result of legislation is disaster. Today there is no way to avoid fiscal ruin and social Read More

How We Enable Crimes of Insanity

The deranged expression on the face of Jared Lee Loughner in the mug shot released by the police--taken within hours after he allegedly killed six innocent people and wounded 14 more, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords--suggests that we may never fully understand whatever illness afflicts him. The law requires us to assess his mental state and Read More

The GOP Is Holding the Economy Hostage, and It’s Time to Call Their Bluff

In their ideological zeal, the new Republicans on Capitol Hill seem eager to gamble everything -- the financial reputation of the United States, the international status of the dollar, even the chance of a worldwide depression -- on a showdown over the national debt ceiling. What has been mostly a routine if unpleasant debate in Read More

What’s Holding Up The Zadroga Bill?

To understand the depths of shame and cynicism in the partisan stalling of health legislation for 9/11 first responders, it is only necessary to recall how eagerly Republican politicians once rushed to identify themselves with New York City's finest and bravest. Nothing was easier, during the months and years that followed the terror attacks of Read More

On Earmarks

It isn't the earmarks, stupid.

Bullying Republican Senate leaders into a "voluntary" ban on earmarks may represent a political triumph for the Tea Party movement, but as a measure to reduce the federal deficit it is a meaningless substitute for real action. The facts about earmarks--and the deficit, for that matter--are so simple that even the Read More

A Note on Health Care Reform

Overstating the importance of a midterm election is understandably tempting for politicians and pundits, especially when the partisan turnover reaches historic proportions, as it indisputably did on November 2. It is a temptation to which Republicans and conservatives seem particularly vulnerable. When their party won the first Bush midterm in 2002, Karl Rove crowed that Read More

The Tea Party and the Midterms

The urge to punish politicians is understandable no matter who is in power, because they inevitably disappoint the fond hopes of their admirers and raise the hackles of their detractors -- and yet that same urge is almost never satisfied for long. In the case of the midterm spanking administered to Democrats, the likelihood that Read More

The Rise of Sewer Money

In New York there is a traditional name for the kind of anonymous cash now cascading into the American electoral process. It's called sewer money.

Political observers in the Empire State know that sewer money is generally nonpartisan, but in the national midterm contest, the largest amount by far is going toward the election of Read More

Thugs on the Right

What do the Tea Party ideologues mean when they speak of liberty and freedom and the Constitution that they supposedly revere? Sometimes they are described as libertarians, but the behavior of their leading candidates betrays an authoritarian streak just beneath all the sonorous rhetoric.

The latest example is Joe Miller, the Republican Senate candidate from Read More

A Generation of Termites

When American politicians talk about the legacy we are leaving to the next generation, their usual theme is financial deficits, as if there were no other kind. Figured on a per-capita basis, the real and imputed debt that today's children will assume some day as taxpayers can seem daunting. But what our political leaders rarely Read More

The Ideologies Behind the Ideologues

Let nobody accuse the Tea Party enthusiasts of lacking intellectual sophistication, no matter what their favorite candidates might say about evolution, civil rights, masturbation or alcohol prohibition.

According to The Times, the movement's reading list includes works of political economy by such right-wing thinkers as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek and Frederic Bastiat. (And Read More

Lies of the Tea Party

For Americans still suffering from persistent unemployment, falling incomes and rising inequality, politicians of either party probably generate little enthusiasm. Yet although political ennui is understandable, the disaffection and demoralization of Democrats has created a dangerous political vacuum that is being filled with misleading data, urban legends and outright lies. Indeed, the entire Tea Party Read More