When Pope John Paul II visited Damascus in May 2001, Bashar used his welcoming speech to denounce the Jews, saying, “They tried to kill the principles of all religions with the same mentality in which they betrayed Jesus Christ and the same way they tried to betray and kill the Prophet Muhammad.”   read more

Leon E. Panetta has been many things during his long career. Congressman. President’s right-hand man. Think tank founder. Professor. But none of his roles has ever taken him deep into the realm of intelligence work, which is why many inside and ou...   read more

In 1964, my father, Irving Wallace, wrote a novel, The Man, about the first black president. For this, my father received both accolades and death threats. On the final page of The Man one of the characters, addressing his friend the president, Do...   read more

As Barack Obama takes the oath of office during a time of economic crisis, it is worth looking back at what Franklin D. Roosevelt told the American people on the day he took over the presidency 76 years ago at a time of even greater economic peril...   read more

Like billions of people around the world, I was prepared for the emotional moment in which the United States, after 220 years, inaugurated its first African-American president. But there was one powerful event two days before that caught me by sur...   read more

Joe Biden is a prime example of perseverance. Having endured personal tragedy, survived a near-death episode, and overcome more than a few political mistakes, Biden’s four-decade career as a US senator has now brought him to the White House as vic...   read more

Despite previous assurances that the only prisoners left at Guantánamo were hardcore terrorists, the Bush administration, in its last three months, released 24 of the 269 Guantánamo detainees. One, a 29-year-old Afghani named Haji Bismullah, was f...   read more

In honor of the conclusion of the Bush 43 presidency, ThinkProgress.org compiled their list of the 43 worst Bush appointees. The usual suspects dominate the top of the list: Dick Cheney (#1), Karl Rove (#2). Alberto Gonzalez (#3), Donald Rumsfeld ...   read more

The vast majority of Americans who go to work at the Department of Labor do so because they want to protect the rights and safety of workers. So it was a bitter blow for Labor Department employees to have to spend eight years taking orders from El...   read more

The federal programs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac own or guarantee 58% of all single family home loans in the United States. In November the government announced that the two institutions would be used to modify loans for hundreds of thousands of bo...   read more

Dawn E. Johnsen is an outspoken critic of the Bush administration’s use of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC)—a key part of the Department of Justice that she once led on an interim basis during the Clinton presidency and has been asked to lead aga...   read more

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Michigan), the head of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, estimates that the U.S. government loses $100 billion a year in lost taxes because 83 of the nation’s largest 100 corporations maintain subsidiaries in ...   read more

The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on January 12 in a case in which a gold mining company, Coeur Alaska, wants the right to dump mining wastewater into Lower Slate Lake, near Juneau, killing all the fish and other aquatic life. Coeur was repre...   read more

A recent study of surveillance cameras in San Francisco found that cameras in public places led to a significant decrease in pickpocketing, purse snatchings, and theft from automobiles and buildings. However, the cameras appear to have little noti...   read more

In times of economic difficulty, many people find solace in entertainment. In the sports world, Barack Obama stirred interest with his explicit support for creating a playoff system for college football’s Division I. He told “60 Minutes,” I’m goin...   read more

Elena Kagan, the first woman to serve as solicitor general, brings with her a reputation for defending civil liberties while also asserting the power of the presidency. Her nomination stirred mild controversy because the solicitor general represen...   read more

Gary Gensler, Barack Obama’s choice to chair the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, is a longtime player on Wall Street and in Democratic circles in Maryland and Washington, DC, who has donated substantially to his party. The Commodity Futures ...   read more