BY FROMA HARROP As the debate rages over letting some of the Bush tax cuts expire, Republicans have raised their starve-the-beast theory from its coffin. They insist that government [the “beast”] can be shrunk by cutting taxes: The less money government has, the less government there can be. Time has not been kind to this […]

BY EDWIN E. VINEYARD As the airwaves have been filled here in Oklahoma with commercials from mostly Republican candidates, some of us have become not...

BY ALEXANDER COCKBURN Amid all the bellowing about the release on compassionate grounds of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, convicted in the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 in 1988, with 281 dead, all current commentary and congressional hearings ignore the hippo in the room, which is that Megrahi is innocent, framed by the U.S. and British […]

BY JOE CONASON Back in the bad old days of the Cold War – when mutual nuclear annihilation was a policy option – a culture of secrecy arose in Washington. What wise observers understood even then was that while governments tried to keep secrets from each other, their chief concern was to keep secrets from […]

Editor’s Note: Froma Harrop is on vacation. This is an updated version of a column that first appeared Dec. 28, 2003. BY FROMA HARROP The most wrong assumption in the sci-fi movie classic “2001: A Space Odyssey” was that technology would liberate humans from a life of hassle. Made 42 years ago, Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece […]