Jeff Bezos’ announcement that Amazon hopes to eventually deliver packages to customers using little flying drones has caused a mini-uproar. From journalists to members of Congress, people are telling Bezos, "Wait just a gosh darn minute, mister!"

Among those forwarding legislation to deal with the issue is Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas). In comments on the floor of the House of Representatives, Poe said: "Think of how many drones could soon be flying around the sky. Here a drone, there a drone, everywhere a drone in the United States.… The issue of concern, Mr. Speaker, is surveillance, not the delivery of packages. That includes surveillance of someone's backyard, snooping around with a drone, checking out a person's patio to see if that individual needs new patio furniture from the company."

In the Senate, Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) has proposed a drone privacy bill. "Before drones start delivering packages, we need the FAA to deliver privacy protections for the American...

Before noon Monday 375,000 Americans logged on to HealthCare.gov and discovered that, though the federal website is working far better than at its launch in October, it still runs into problems when demand gets too high. That is both the good news and the bad news for Republicans who are hoping to use Obamacare as their prime attack point in the 2014 congressional elections. 

For the GOP, continuing glitches in the online delivery system for the new national healthcare market reinforce the argument that the Obama administration has tried to do too much, too fast without really understanding the enormity of the job. That is the upside for Republicans. The downside is that there is obviously a demand for the product Obamacare is trying to deliver and, by the time the election rolls around, millions of voters may have forgotten the website bugs. Instead, they may be pleased that healthcare coverage is no longer out of reach for them and they will not want to see it taken away by a...

The Pilgrims did not debate abortion and gay marriage and the right to die at the first Thanksgiving. Nor did they talk with the Native Americans at the table about private property, the environment or the rights of minorities. 

But in the tension between the libertarian impulses that brought the Pilgrims to a new land and the strict religion they brought with them, and also in the wary welcome they received from their native hosts, lay the seeds of all the struggles that would rile the nation to come. We should give thanks that through the endless conflicts Americans have had with each other in nearly 400 years of history on this continent, we have miraculously kept on a course toward a more perfect union.

That’s worth remembering in our current polarized era. We will get through it, and we will be better for it.

Today’s Thanksgiving cartoon was first published in 1989, and it well illustrates how the spats between libertarians and social conservatives were as lively then...

The six-month nuclear deal with Iran is causing much gnashing of teeth in the cloistered offices of neoconservative think tanks. The hawkish intellectuals who spin the geopolitical theories that lead to young Americans being sent to war cannot abide President Obama’s penchant for talking with adversaries and avoiding conflict. 

That preference for peace over war threatens to take away from the neocons their top candidate for a future battlefield -- Iran. After years of sanctions that have crippled the Iranian economy, and after an election that brought a more moderate leader to power in Tehran, the Obama administration decided to seek a diplomatic solution to the challenge of Iran’s drive toward building nuclear weapons. With the deal forged in talks involving the U.S., Russia, France, Britain, China, Germany and Iran, a significant step has been taken toward bringing Iran back into the circle of rational actors on the world stage.

Of course the neocons and many members of...

I am one of those who can easily answer the most singular question of my generation: “Where were you when John F. Kennedy was assassinated?”

On this day exactly 50 years ago, I was a seventh-grader at R.H. Thomson Junior High School in Seattle. I was walking from the band room to another class when I saw a boy running in my direction through the crowded hallway. He was shouting something like, “They got him! They shot that bastard Kennedy!” 

I remember the kid’s face was filled with a menacing glee. At the time, I didn’t think as much about his expression as I did about what he was saying. Was it true? Within a few minutes, the entire student body was called into the lunchroom. The principal somberly announced that the president was dead and that school was called off. 

I rode a bus home, talking about the startling news with the girl who first taught me to dance. Much of the next four days I spent in front of a black-and-white television, watching...

The 50^th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy also marks 50 years of conspiracy theorists trying to sell an array of alternative explanations for JFK’s murder. Over all the long years since Nov. 22, 1963, conspiracy theorists have fingered more than 40 different groups, 80 different assassins and in excess of 200 co-conspirators. 

Of course, not all of those accusations can be true. In fact, given the abundance of contradictory theories about who did the deed, it is far more reasonable to assume none of them is true than it is to believe one might just be right. 

A whole lot of people are uncomfortable with simple explanations for big events. There are regions of the world – Pakistan, for instance, or the American South – where preposterous conspiracy theories are a ubiquitous force in politics and must be reckoned with by anyone trying to govern rationally.

One December day in 2007, I was in Aswan, Egypt, having a drink at the Old Cataract Hotel with...

Toronto’s bombastic, bulbous, booze-swilling, crack-smoking Mayor Rob Ford is a national embarrassment to many Canadians, but the man might be doing his country a small favor.

Wildly entertaining news stories about Ford have streamed out of Canada all month. After vehemently denying that he had ever used crack cocaine, Ford had to fess up to use of the drug after a video in possession of Toronto police showed the mayor smoking a crack pipe. Caught lying, Ford had a wonderful explanation for his denial: At the time the video was shot, he said, he was way too drunk to remember the crack.

Ford subsequently admitted that, during his years as mayor, he has purchased and used other illegal drugs. The mayor downplayed that indiscretion by saying he is just a regular guy and, well, regular guys all have something to hide, so what’s the big deal? The Toronto Sun followed up with an allegation that witnesses had seen Ford celebrating St. Patrick’s Day last year by smoking pot,...

In the long run, Obamacare is likely to be as popular and permanent as Medicare, but, in the short term, it is turning into the worst political crisis of Barack Obama’s presidency.

On Thursday, the contrite president announced that Americans whose healthcare insurance policies have been canceled due to requirements of the Affordable Care Act would have another year to keep those policies. This new guarantee is meant to make up for his ill-considered promise that no one would lose their old policies if they wanted to keep what they had. 

The problem with Obama’s new promise, though, is that he cannot force insurers to restore policies they have already terminated. And rather than doing the president any favors, those insurers are attacking him for trying to change the rules in the middle of the game.

Obama has a mess on his hands and -- judging by his almost daily apologies for the screwed-up launch of the national healthcare exchange website, as well as for his...

Typhoon Haiyan, the monster storm that set a Hiroshima-level standard for natural devastation when it hit the Philippines on Friday, was so big that its spiral image laid over a map of the United States stretches nearly from sea to shining sea. With winds hitting sustained peaks of 195 mph and gusts up to 235 mph, it may well be the most powerful storm ever recorded.

And it is probably just the herald of many monster storms to come. As NBC News Science Editor Alan Boyle reports, “Experts say Typhoon Haiyan was about as strong as it could theoretically get when it swept through the Philippines, killing thousands of people and driving hundreds of thousands from their homes. But intensity limits have been rising over decades past — and climate models suggest they will keep rising over the decades to come, with the potential for bigger and more devastating storms.”

The ominous effects of climate change are becoming more and more obvious with each new natural disaster. For...

If a bunch of men with guns showed up outside a restaurant, it might make anyone inside a wee bit nervous. If you happened to be one of four members of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense who had gathered for lunch at that restaurant and you looked out the window and saw a group of 40 rifle-toting people staring back at you, you could be forgiven for freaking out.

That is what happened at the Blue Mesa Grill in Arlington, Texas, on Saturday. The folks with the guns were a contingent representing Open Carry Texas. They were completely within their rights to be displaying their "long guns" because in the Lone Star State carrying a rifle or shotgun in public is legal. Open Carry Texas wants more, though. They want the freedom to carry any kind of gun in the open anywhere they want.

Open Carry Texas has contingents in other states pushing the same agenda, and there have been several encounters between them and their nemesis, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense – a national gun control...