President Obama makes symbolic gesture honoring memory of the many students lost in the tragic Sewol Ferry incident. He gives a high school in Korea a beautiful Magnolia tree from the South Lawn of the White House where President Andrew Jackson planted a tree in memory of his wife, Rachel, who died two weeks after….

Here are my thoughts on the tense drama escalating in Kiev, Ukraine.  Appeared last night on MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito makes a habit (hope sharing this doesn’t ruin it) of attending most years a special tribute dinner at George and Martha Washington’s Mount Vernon — some times on the lawn; other times in the newly built history center.

An exchange this Sunday between CNN’s Fareed Zakaria & former US Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers impressed me and follows in full below.  It’s a quick read but offers some no-nonsense analysis of what is not stirring in the US economy

Democratic National Committee chairs may have been just as disrespectful and nasty to GOP presidents and they would have been wrong, but RNC Chair Reince Priebus’ nastiness ‘before’ the President’s State of the Union irresponsibly exacerbates the political intolerance and lack of civility rampant in Washington today.

There are some exceptions, but one of the major failings of Washington’s think tank and policy communities is a general unwillingness to embrace the people and ideas that run counter to an institution’s own. They are contributing to the political and intellectual fragmentation dividing and paralyzing this town.

Much to my surprise a few days ago, I received an invitation from Ambassador John Bolton to hook up with him on LinkedIn.

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) gave a provocative, smart foreign policy speech last night at the 20th Anniversary Dinner of the Center for the National Interest, previously known as the Nixon Center. I’ll offer highlights about the speech later, but I wanted to get the speech itself up now.