After extensively documenting why my claim (made during a dust-up with Liz Cheney on This Week) that Halliburton had defrauded American taxpayers of "hundreds of millions of dollars in Iraq" was true, PolitiFact.com turned around and rated the statement "Half True". It was an object lesson in equivocation, and a prime exhibit of the kind of muddled thinking that dominates Washington and allows the powerful to escape accountability -- and our corrupt no-accountability status quo to continue wreaking havoc on our country. It's a favorite trick of those in power: using ambiguity and complexity as a sort of chemical dispersant on the truth. Dilute it enough and it becomes unrecognizable. So it's worth returning to the scene of the crime to do a little CSI exam of the evidence and see what we can conclude from PolitiFact's head-scratching conclusion.
There's a new conventional wisdom forming in Washington, DC: the American dream of financial independence and security is gone. The ideal of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" is dead. Deal with it.
As I watched the fireworks with my kids on the Fourth, I realized I still believe in this system. If the people in charge were really as evil as the cynics and the conspiracy nuts say, Jay Leno would be dead as an unfunny doornail.
Kagan, as is well known by now, clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall, the Supreme Court's first African-American. Apparently, there is no statute of limitations on the kind of attacks Marshall endured in life.
The egregious mistakes made by World Cup field officials are far more insufferable than the incessant vuvuzelas. These kinds of errors, made while the world is watching, can be both embarrassing and dangerous.
When we're looking for love, we often miss seeing extraordinary signs and messages that pop up in our daily life.
History has seldom delivered a more graphic, teachable crisis than the one that Obama inherited. Although we voted our hopes that events could compel Obama to govern as a progressive, we are still waiting, and we are a cheap date.
This week, host Mark Green asked the women: Did Kagan sound like a radical elitist, or a super-smart charmer? Who'll decide if we start leaving Afghanistan in a year -- Obama or Petraeus? And, do we spy in Russia?
Why make such a fuss about the Supreme Court's vote to lift the ban on Monsanto's genetically modified alfalfa? Because more than alfalfa is at stake: Monsanto's GMOs are in almost every processed thing we eat. Details (and recipes!) inside.
Why should Americans and their fellow NATO soldiers die this summer for Kandahar? I frankly don't know...since the dots just don't seem, at least on paper or via media reports, to connect.
Unless the American education system changes course quickly to integrate literacy and digital culture into our current educational paradigm, academic achievement gains will continue to stagnate.
After reading David Kirkpatrick's new book, The Facebook Effect, I have a better understanding of why Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg ignored the advice I gave him at Davos a few years ago.
Though pressure is building from the financial industry to slow reform efforts -- and concerns about fiscal conditions risk drawing public and political energies away from the need to act -- we must seize this moment and implement broad financial reform soon.
My husband Joe and I flew to Iraq to celebrate the Fourth of July with our troops. I can't think of a better way to celebrate Independence Day than spending it with Americans who are bravely serving our country.
Europeans at last week's G20 meeting rejected America's proposal to inject more stimulus spending into their withered national economies. Treating the malady of too much debt with more debt does not make sense -- except to the hopelessly addicted.
Did my July 3 post inadvertently provide a bully pulpit for BP and Coast Guard propaganda? As it turns out, there is plenty of room for concern regarding this apparent marriage of public relations and a government agency.
Feet, forks, and fingers are, indeed, the master levers of medical destiny. This is unlikely to change, no matter what secrets our genomes ultimately reveal.
Barring an open and democratic dialogue about what our military is for in today's world we'll continue to have frustrated Generals and we'll risk more lives.
Right now the left brain really isn't doing the trick. We've known about climate change for 20 years, and so far we've done... nothing.
The American people give lip service to that Rosie the Riveter "We Can Do It!" spirit but have none of the actual desire to drive a rivet, let alone participate in their democracy.
Collusion -- whether in OPEC or the MLB -- allows companies to benefit from anti-competitive behavior such as price fixing while the consumer suffers.
What is wrong with America cannot be measured on a conservative versus liberal spectrum, but must be seen as a political and corporate elite versus the people fight.
On some really big issues, I think the late Senator Byrd got it wrong. But I admired that he refused to compromise with the increasing trivialization and mean-spiritedness of American politics.
History's road is littered with the wreckage of empires that tried to rule the world even as they were collapsing at home. We are failing the fundamental duty to our nation created these 221 years ago.
War is the enemy of democracy. A protracted war is its nemesis. That means not only undermining civil liberties but an erosion of the honest discourse that is the essence of democracy.
"The winter of our discontent" was one of Shakespeare's more memorable lines in Richard III. As far as Wall Street goes, a more appropriate designation for this season might well be our summer of discontent.