It is rather curious, given the American conservative movement’s long and dramatic history of anti-Communism and anti-Russian saber-rattling, that many leading voices on the right are speaking about Russian President Vladimir Putin with varying degrees of admiration. 

For some, it is just a matter of comparing Putin’s toughness with President Obama’s alleged weakness. Without suggesting any love for Putin, Republicans in Congress have asserted that Russia’s incursion into Ukraine would not have happened had Obama not been such a wimp in his dealings with Moscow.

This line has been pushed especially hard by the foreign policy Tweedledee and Tweedledum of the Senate GOP caucus, John McCain and Lindsey Graham. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio echoed that sentiment at the CPAC conference in Washington on Thursday. 

“We cannot ignore that the flawed foreign policy of the last few years has brought us to this stage, because we have a president who believed but by the...

Russia seems to have learned little in the 160 years since the Crimean War. Launching ships and sending armies to grab land may work in the short term, but there are always negative consequences that bring big regrets later.

In 1853, Russia's man in charge was Czar Nicholas I, who hoped to take advantage of the weakening Ottoman Empire and expand Russian power and influence around the Black Sea and beyond. In 1853, using the pretext of protecting Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman-controlled Holy Land, Russia went to war and quickly destroyed the Ottoman fleet. Not a bad start.

However, by the time the war ended three years later, things had not worked out so well. France and Britain had won the conflict, and the weakness of Russia’s serf-dominated armies was exposed. Nicholas was dead and the czarist system began a decline that would lead to the monarchy’s 1917 demise. War debts were so high that the new czar, Alexander II, decided to sell Alaska to the United States...

Sunday night, a happy cohort of entertainment folks will have their careers sprinkled with fairy dust at the 86thAcademy Awards. And, as happens every year, too many of them will clutch their Oscars and bore an audience of many millions with totally lame acceptance speeches.

You would think that such a distinguished group of creative people could do better, but many of them will spend their precious moment in the spotlight simply checking off a baffling list of names. If it were merely a matter of thanking their parents and their high school drama teachers, that might be OK, especially if they share some poignant bit of personal history in the process. But few will stop with that.

They will thank the studio and their publicist and their agent and their personal assistant and the caterer and the key grip and, as the music from the pit orchestra kicks in, they will rush to name a dozen more. Why is this the default speech at awards ceremonies? Where would we be if politicians did the...

Watching the dramatic events in Ukraine unfold, I have harbored the hope that one or two of the thousands of people protesting in Kiev's Independence Square might have been encouraged to act on their dreams of liberty by words I spoke during a week in the city in September 2012. 

I was in Ukraine as a guest of the U.S. State Department. Like hundreds of artists, authors, actors and journalists the United States has sent abroad over many decades, my job was simply to talk about the why and how of my job. I had jumped at the chance to go someplace I had never been and figured whatever message I had to deliver would come to me once I got there.

The staff at the U.S. Embassy set up a fairly exhausting series of engagements for me. Two or three times each day, I would speak to journalists, librarians, the general public and many students of various ages. A gallery display of my cartoons was also mounted alongside an exhibit detailing the history of political cartooning in the United States....

This week marks five years since passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act -- President Obama’s economic stimulus plan -- and it has been either a great success or an abject failure, depending on who is doing the assessment.

Folks at the White House, not surprisingly, are speaking in the affirmative. In a freshly issued report, Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors insists that the stimulus scheme kept the nation from dropping into a second Great Depression and laid the groundwork for recovery from the economic mess left behind by the George W. Bush administration.

Though the road back has been steep and progress slow, Obama’s team notes that the United States is in much better shape than France, Britain and other economic leaders, with only Germany matching the U.S.' progress.

Among the tangible benefits of the stimulus, the White House lists 2,700 bridges upgraded, 40,000 miles of roads repaired, 700 drinking water systems brought up to federal clean-...

Especially when it comes to economic policy, too many politicians are motivated by myths more than by facts. A prime example: the myth of the job creators.

Republicans, such as Speaker of the House John Boehner, talk of job creators in reverent, worshipful terms. In their vision of how the world works, it is these brave titans of capitalism who, with no help from anyone else, build the companies that create jobs for American workers. To Boehner and his party, anything that inhibits job creators in their endeavors — taxes, environmental laws, financial regulations — is a job killer.

This is economic theory at its most simplistic and has been proven erroneous, over and over again. A dramatic example: The financial debacle of 2008 that killed millions of jobs was, in large part, the result of bankers and financiers being liberated from federal regulations that had once served as a check on free-market excesses. Nevertheless, conservative members of Congress cling to the myth...

With the American South locked in a deep freeze, you can be sure that plenty of the folks suffering through the snow and ice storms are interpreting the big chill as more proof that global warming is a hoax. “Warming?” they scoff. “How can the planet be warming when it’s so darn cold?”

People in other parts of the world seem to have no great difficulty understanding the science but, in the good old USA where quite a few people consider science just another political opinion, it is going to take a lot longer to get most people to accept the cold facts about a warmer world.

Put very simply, here is what the predominant science says: Average global temperatures have been rising in recent decades. Some of the warming could be part of a natural cycle but, almost certainly, increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere caused by the burning of fossil fuels are a pivotal factor in intensifying the phenomenon. The starkest evidence of the temperature jump is the rapid...

The Sochi Winter Olympic Games are the latest incarnation of Russia’s Potemkin villages.

In case your recall of Russian history and myth is as mushy as the snow on Sochi’s Rosa Khutor alpine runs, I will remind you that Grigory Potemkin was Catherine the Great's lover. The tzarina appointed him governor of newly conquered lands in southern Ukraine and Crimea and, in 1787, came for a visit with her court and several foreign ambassadors. As the story goes, Potemkin wanted to make things look better than they really were in that war-ravaged region, so he built a portable village that was barged to different sites along the Dnieper River as Catherine made her tour. Allegedly, he even had his own soldiers dress up as happy peasants.

Many historians now believe that the tale is more fiction than fact, but it is not the only example of Russians trying to fool foreigners into thinking things are better than they are. In the 1920s and ‘30s, socialists from Britain and United...

Ready or not, the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi have begun and, if reports from the scene are accurate, Russia is not nearly ready for its big debut on the world stage.

Journalists and travelers to the Games have been sending stories, photos and tweets about new hotels that are open for business only in the sense that they will take your money. Muddy construction sites surround the unfinished lodgings. Front desks are unmanned. Doorknobs are missing. Light bulbs are scarce. Water from faucets comes out brown and with warnings to avoid using it for drinking or washing. Toilets can’t flush away toilet paper. Furnishings are so spare and stark they make a Motel 6 look like the Ritz. 

Poverty cannot be an excuse for this. Russia has set a record for spending on an Olympics. The Vancouver games four years ago cost Canada $7.4 billion. By the time it is all over, the Sochi Games are expected to cost nearly 10 times that amount. Of course, the Canadians mounted their games in a big city...

The severe drought in California and much of the West is a reminder that civilized life is a paper-thin veneer that overlays the deep upheavals of nature. Humans carry on blithely, holding fast to the illusion that the natural world can be tamed and exploited with no unavoidable consequences. Then we get slammed by a hurricane, a flood, a tornado, a wildfire, a drought or a freezing polar vortex that lets us know how wrong we are. 

Yet, after each disaster, we forget again -- which is the reason so few of us give any sustained attention to the climate change peril. It is similar to the way we think about death. We know it’s coming, but we would drive ourselves crazy if we thought about it all the time. As a result, we revert to living in the moment or counting on promises of heaven. 

With climate change, either we suspect it is too late to do anything about it or we just deny it is real. And even the vast majority of climate scientists who know it is a real phenomenon are quick...