The defining moment of The Fighting Soul, Ari Rabin-Havt’s telling of the 2020 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, comes but four pages into the preface,.with Sanders in an ambulance, having just suffered what will be determined to have been a heart attack. As the then deputy campaign manager is thinking, “There…

So we hear that former President George W. Bush finally came around to denouncing “the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq.” This unexpected and belated outburst of truth-telling and self-criticism was, of course, unintentional — just one of those verbal gaffes that…

The California Legislature has done it again — deep-sixed the single-payer health insurance bill for yet another session. All the big players in the California Democratic Party — and the party itself — claim they’re for it, and yet it somehow never happens. Lately the California Nurses Association has finally…

Mark Twain famously wrote that “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.” Unfortunately, today’s wars seem to lack even that infinitesimal saving grace. Could one American in ten actually name the five countries the U.S. bombed last year? Or the seven we bombed annually from 2011–2018? Not bloody likely…

by John Judis When a friend forwarded an op-ed entitled, “Biden Has a Once-in-a-Century Chance to Fix Capitalism,” I quickly fessed up that I wasn’t even going to read it through. With the alteration of a few verbs and nouns, I figured I’d seen it all before. My question back to him was…

As a frequent observer of foreign elections, I’m an even more frequent recipient of quips to the effect that “They should send observers over here.” It started in earnest following Florida’s 2000 presidential election hanging chad fiasco and has never really let up. And each time I explain to the…

The San Francisco School Board and the public’s trust A recent arrival to my email inbox urged support for members of the San Francisco School Board currently facing threat of recall. The Board has been the object of substantial, mostly unwelcome national attention over the past few years. Having previously voted to remove a WPA-era mural of George Washington…

The first public notice of Joe Biden’s era of the war he inherited as commander-in-chief came nine days into his presidency. The New York Times headline read, “U.S. Airstrike Kills Top ISIS Leader in Iraq.” Mind you, this notice was nothing major, the headline appearing on page nine — on…

The January 6 failure of the Capitol police to block the entry of a mob bent on reversing the result of the presidential election altered many perceptions. Some Americans were seeing QAnoners in the light of day for the first time. Some scattered newly woke Republicans even decided they now…