Politics & Current Affairs

The passage of the health care reform bill has understandably gotten most of the attention this week. We’re going to hear a lot more about it through the fall elections. […]

Forget Rahm Emanuel, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has “earned the badge of the toughest nut in F***nutsville” and is one of history’s most skilled vote-getters, writes Richard Adams.

In a break with diplomatic custom, President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netinyahu held closed-door talks yesterday in an attempt to smooth US-Israeli relations.

Set against last weekend’s Washington jamboree organised by pro Israeli AIPAC, one of the most powerful lobbying groups in the United States, the meeting of senior officials of the United […]

The Washington Post’s Michael Gerson says that Barack Obama shows that an American president can be a combination of “strong” and “wrong”.

The votes were cast and near-universal health care reform passed by the House. So, the Democrats won a clear victory, right? Not according to Republicans who are also triumphant.

China has condemned Google Inc. which today stopped censoring its China-based search engine and began redirecting users from Google.cn to an uncensored version in Hong Kong.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged around the world that education is good. The higher a people’s schooling, goes the mantra, the better its economic progress, political prospects and gender equality. […]

“This is what change looks like,” remarked US President Barack Obama moments after the final House vote passed his universal health care legislation in an historic victory.

For much of the weekend pre-health care House Vote, Republican Bart Stupak was hammering out an executive order making it clear that no federal money would be spent on abortion.

Obama has sealed his reputation as a president of great historical import as the successful driving force behind universal healthcare for Americans, writes TNR’s Jonathan Chait.

Forget jubilancy over Obama’s heath care victory, as tens of thousands rally on Capitol Hill shouting about the next major subject on the political agenda: Immigration.

The New York Times’ Alexandra Lange writes despairingly of New York’s two million potholes and ponders longingly on a German model where citizens sponsor pothole repairs.

Former US President Bill Clinton took a diplomatic route this weekend and poked fun at Democrats, Republicans and himself at the Gridiron Club’s annual dinner.

Nicolas Sarkozy’s political party is expected to take heavy losses at regional polls on Sunday signalling the French President’s luck may have run out since his post-crash popularity.

Tea Party supporters don’t know what they’re talking about. That’s what Bruce Bartlett argues in his latest Forbes column. He and David Frum—both Bartlett and Frum worked in the Bush […]

Now that the taboo against the use of reconciliation to pass legislation has been broken, will a student loan bill be next to take the path of least resistance through the Congress?

The Senate just passed a bill drastically reducing the penalty for possessing crack cocaine. The bill would increase the amount of crack requiring a five-year mandatory minimum sentence from 5 […]

America must open up its borders to end the burden of a complicated immigration system and which the government has no way of successfully tracking, The Washington Post writes.

The numbers are in. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) finally released its much-anticipated estimate of how much of the amended version of the health care bill would cost today.  And […]

Michael Goldfarb of Global Post explains why the general negativity of political ineptitude and global financial meltdown seem different when you look at them from Australia.

President Barack Obama took the personal approach when addressing members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus to inspire health-care form skeptics into action.

World Wrestling Entertainment boss Linda McMahon took a ten-point lead in the Republican race for the Senate after a notorious YouTube campaign where she takes to the boxing ring.

One of the major obstacles to passing the health care reform bill has been a group of anti-abortion representatives led by Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI). Stupak’s group say they would […]

Republicans running for the House this year think that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is the villain driving health-care reform, not President Barack Obama, writes Politico.

“Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia,” by Francis Wheen, reflects that politicians may be paranoid now, but it’s nothing compared to what happened in the ‘70s.

With the US military unhappy with the quality of CIA intelligence in Afghanistan it has been outsourcing its intelligence services to contractors. The Washington Post investigates.

The law ignominiously known as the “miscarriage bill” was signed by a Utah governor last week in a move which renders women little more than incubators, writes Melissa McEwan.

Three of California’s wealthiest coastal cities howled loudly last year when they were sued by a civil rights group over their treatment of the homeless. But progress has since been made.

A Blueprint for Reform, The Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the next big idea for the nation’s school systems that the Obama Administration wants Congress to implement, […]