The American Prospect

...Shannon Brownlee's Overtreated provides a welcome antidote to the narrow view that simply finding enough money to buy health insurance for all the uninsured would solve our health-care crisis. She reminds us that entrepreneurial medicine often drives physicians and other providers to do too much to patients, which can be bad for their health as well as for everyone's wallet. Doctors order costly imaging studies like MRIs and CAT scans when a careful history and physical exam would… more

Who would have predicted that the defining difference in the Democratic presidential campaign would involve not Iraq but reform of the political process, particularly the role of lobbyists? At the candidates’ joint appearance at the YearlyKos convention of netroots activists in August, the question of taking money from lobbyists earned Barack Obama and John Edwards -- who don’t -- their biggest cheers, and Hillary Clinton -- who does -- her biggest boos. Since then, the fight has only escalated.

Most Democratic… more

"The Age of Imperialism is ended," Sumner Welles, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s under secretary of state, declared in 1942. Welles would have been shocked to learn that six decades later a number of American foreign policy thinkers would matter-of-factly describe the United States as an empire. "The fact of American empire is hardly debated these days," Thomas Donnelly, a neoconservative foreign policy analyst, wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2002. Donald Rumsfeld’s Defense Department asked selected historians what lessons Americans could learn… more

The Democrats are a potential majority party in need of a major idea with potential. The major idea that built a Republican majority starting with Ronald Reagan's election was simple: cutting income taxes, with or without cuts in spending. The Republicans reduced income tax rates and then they cut big holes in those rates by creating new or enlarged tax credits available only to Americans who pay income tax.

Meanwhile payroll taxes have risen for working Americans who,… more

When Congress returns from its August recess, it will take up the battle over a modest expansion of the program that provides health insurance for children. The Senate Finance Committee will begin its fight over changing the tax treatment of hedge-fund and private-equity firm profits. In both cases, Democrats are on the side of right: expanding health insurance for kids and closing tax loopholes for tycoons.

But more striking is that the Democrats are trying to keep the… more

I’ve always resisted the idea that there is "an inherent cyclical rhythm in our national affairs," as the late Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. put it. Schlesinger suggested that American history moves in 30-year cycles between liberalism and conservatism, between public and private concerns. But it’s hard not to notice that it was exactly 30 years ago that the conservative era dawned, with the introduction of the then-audacious Kemp-Roth tax-cut proposal, in 1977, followed by California’s tax-limiting Proposition 13 the next… more

The most confusing political phenomenon of recent times is "big-government conservatism." The lines on every graph show the same pattern: Government -- whether measured by spending, the deficit, the number of employees, or earmarked appropriations -- expanded through the Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Bush Senior administrations; declined steadily under Clinton; then shot rapidly northward after Republicans took control of the White House in 2001.

For conservatives, the story of big-government conservatism has become a chapter in their own self-satisfied mythology.… more

To: The New President From: The National Security Adviser Date: January 21, 2009

On May 1, 2003, President George W. Bush stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln under a banner reading "Mission Accomplished" and triumphantly proclaimed the beginning of a new era in America’s relations with the Middle East. As Bush and his advisers worked to define this new era, they rejected the regional strategy launched by another American president on the deck of another… more

It has barely been noticed, but there has been a change for the better in the Bush administration’s thinking -- or at least talking -- about the Middle East. For the first time in six years, Washington is putting Israeli-Palestinian negotiations near the top of its agenda. For the first time, it wants those negotiations to address the fundamental political issues that divide the two sides and has begun to evoke the need to lay out what the administration calls… more

Democratic presidential primary contests often follow a familiar pattern: There is one candidate (usually the one I find myself supporting) with a high-minded pitch for "a new kind of politics" -- what the Los Angeles Times columnist Ron Brownstein recently called the "wine track" candidate -- and there is a "beer track" candidate who says things like "It’s your fight, too!" (Dick Gephardt, 1988) or "The presidency [isn’t] an academic exercise; [it] has to be a day-to-day fight for the… more