Washington – On January 21, 2017, Donald John Trump raised his right hand and, with just the hint of a smile of self-vindication, took an oath “to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God.” “We the People,” the Constitution begins, and its foundation stone is the right of […]
Over the last three decades, we’ve lost something precious and essential in the American concept of capitalism – the idea that shared prosperity is good business and smart economics because it generates long-term economic growth and competitiveness for the nation as a whole. High economic inequality is a drag on economic growth, economic studies show. […]
Washington – The most lethal damage to American society embedded in the Republican tax plan now being rushed through Congress is that it will metastasize the cancerous economic inequality that has been eating away at the health and fabric of American democracy over four decades – an issue some Democrats plan to take to voters […]
What does Putin want? What’s his end game? What’s next? Putin’s interference in elections in the U.S. and western Europe is his way of striking back at the U.S. for pushing NATO up against Russia’s borders, building a power base in Russia’s backyard and stationing anti-missile defenses in eastern Europe, says Hedrick Smith, former New […]
Washington – Fired up by stunning election victories in Alabama and Virginia, Democrats are now dreaming of a wave election in 2018 and regaining a majority in the House of Representatives. But even in their victories, there’s a warning that Democrats could be stymied by an old nemesis – the firewall of Republican gerrymandering. Typically, […]
Washington – The key takeaway from the super-heated battle for Georgia’s 6th Congressional district, where Republican veteran Karen Handel beat Democratic neophyte Jon Ossoff, is that partisan gerrymandering is king. It swings elections more powerfully and reliably than a flood of MegaMoney. Democrats and their supposedly “independent” Super-PACS turned this special election into the most […]
Our political world is feeling the after-shocks of Campaign 2016. The question now is whether President Trump and the GOP in Congress will deliver on Candidate Trump’s promises of a better deal for working middle class Americans or whether Trump’s new allegiance to the elite and the ideological conflicts within the Republican Party will do the […]
Washington – Trouble ahead on taxes and other priorities for President Trump and Speaker Paul Ryan from the Republican right-wing Freedom Caucus which successfully “Gerry-rolled” the supposed Powers-That-Be on health care. The president has warned the gang of GOP right-wing rebels that he’ll be gunning for them in 2018, if they don’t toe the party […]
In his short White House tenure, Donald J. Trump has set some kind of record for histrionic temper tantrums against the media — whether CNN, The Washington Post, The New York Times or, most recently, MSNBC for revealing his 2005 tax return. He’s actually pursuing a well-worn path of American presidents blaming the press for […]
Washington – Okay, let’s keep score. He’s thrown down the gauntlet. After taking the oath of office, President Trump used his Inaugural address to tar his presidential predecessors and most of Congress, whose members sat around him, as failures – “politicians who are all talk and no action.” So that’s Trump’s standard – action, not […]
Hedrick Smith, who conceived this website and is its principal writer and architect, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times reporter and Emmy award-winning documentary producer for PBS and PBS FRONTLINE. more »
And if you’d like to give
us feedback,
click here.
