Politics

It lasted a week. A week of President Obama starting to sound like the brave leader millions of Americans elected. And then we got to the policy part. Clearly, his opening bid for next year’s budget is designed to prove he’s more of a deficit hawk than Republicans. The administration’s upcoming budget, which the president…

How did a completely bankrupt satellite communications company—that now provides data and voice services to customers worldwide, including relief agencies in earthquake-torn Haiti—become a powerhouse with a market value of $560 million? Syncom Venture Partners came to its rescue, and set a better course. The easy part occurred when the Maryland venture capital firm, which…

It does not take a pollster, partisan or psychic to see a harbinger of things to come in Massachusetts voters’ choice of a Republican to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat. If Barack Obama’s next three years in the White House are anything like his first, he will surely be a one-term president. And for black…

“There is a schizophrenia, as the psychologists or the psychiatrists would call it, going on within all of us. And there are times that all of us know somehow that there is a Mr. Hyde and a Dr. Jekyll in us….There’s a tension at the heart of human nature. And whenever we set out to…

It’s hard to appreciate the full measure of how aggressively the conservative five-justice majority imposed its will in Citizens United, the Supreme Court’s decision declaring limits on corporate political speech unconstitutional, unless you read it alongside another of the court’s decisions released the same day, Wood v. Alabama Department of Corrections.  By now we all know that…

“He’s a sort of new sort of Republican. Old style was a Boston Brahmin liberal Republican.… What followed that was the scrappy Reagan Democrats, ethnic and working class. This is something new now, regular guy, looks like an American…” —Wall Street Journal Columnist Peggy Noonan on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” This is the kind of thing…

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. has rightfully been celebrated as one of the most important political leaders of the 20th century, but he doesn’t get the credit for his significant influence on African-American music. Most music lovers and civil-rights-history buffs know that James Brown, the “Godfather of Soul,” headlined an unforgettable concert in Boston on…

After months of media and suburban coffee-klatch speculation, former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards confessed to fathering a love child with his ex-mistress, Rielle Hunter. In a statement released to NBC’s Today Show, the 56-year-old Edwards said, “It was wrong for me ever to deny she was my daughter and hopefully one day, when she…

Fasten your seat belt. The Supreme Court’s horrendous decision lifting restrictions on corporate campaign spending sets the stage for an escalation of rough and tumble politics the likes of which we haven’t seen since the 19th century. Whatever chance President Barack Obama had of reining in the influence of lobbyists and influence peddlers has vanished. …

When Senator-elect Scott Brown becomes president, odds are some reporter will write a political tell-all called Game Change – Part Deux: The Race of a Lifetime…Again. It’ll be a behind-the-scenes look at Brown’s trailblazing campaign to “transcend” Obama and become the first “post-Obama” president—with firsthand insider accounts from people on the ground who made it…