Clarification Appended: June 30, 2011 Here's some good news for consumers who feel themselves trampled by soulless banking and credit giants: on July 21, a new consumer-protection agency will open its doors in Washington, with the mission of making everything from mortgage documents to credit statements fairer and easier to understand and generally giving the little guy more power against the financial corporate juggernauts. Here's the bad news: it's not clear that President Obama will be able to appoint ...

Here are a few things the framers did not know about: World War II. DNA. Sexting. Airplanes. The atom. Television. Medicare. Collateralized debt obligations. The germ theory of disease. Miniskirts. The internal combustion engine. Computers. Antibiotics. Lady Gaga. People on the right and left constantly ask what the framers would say about some event that is happening today. What would the framers say about whether the drones over Libya constitute a violation of Article I, Section 8, which ...

Question: "Under what international law do we have a right to attempt to destabilize the constitutionally elected government of another country?" Answer: "l am not going to pass judgment on whether it is permitted or authorized under international law. It is a recognized fact that historically as well as presently, such actions are taken in the best interest of the countries involved." That blunt response by President Gerald Ford at his press conference last week was either remarkably ...

Sirri Sureyya Onder is neither a Kurd nor a politician. Yet, when the popular filmmaker and writer was approached by Turkey's Kurdish party to run for an Istanbul parliamentary seat in Sunday's elections, he felt he could not refuse. "This parliament has an opportunity to make history," he said, between campaign stops at coffeehouses in Zeytinburnu, a working-class district near Istanbul's airport populated by Kurds who migrated here over the past three decades years to flee fighting ...

Democrats are in a grumpy mood, and with good reason. A big special-election victory in upstate New York quickly sagged into a disastrous media frenzy over Democratic Congressman–Internet lothario Anthony Weiner's spectacular success in becoming the Twittersphere's most obvious twit. To make matters worse, a brand-new Washington Post/ABC News poll shows President Obama actually losing to Mitt Romney among registered voters, in a tight 49 contest. The race is close because next year both Obama and the Republican ...

After the radical Students for a Democratic Society split into angry factions at the organization's convention last June, the question was whether any of them could mount an effective "fall offensive." The answer is no. By last week, S.D.S. had fallen on extremely hard times. Items:> At Fordham University, 400 students turned out for a mass rally called by the Committee to Abolish S.D.S. Angered by the violent tactics that S.D.S. had used to protest ROTC at Fordham, the students called on the university's president, Father Michael ...

The late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat used to be called "the great survivor." Syria's President Bashar al-Assad may be succeeding to the title. Many observers had expected Barack Obama to use a much-anticipated speech on the Middle East to call for Assad to step down, much as Washington has demanded that Muammar Gaddafi relinquish power in Libya. The signs were not good: the day before, the U.S. had slapped sanctions on Assad himself as well as ...

Aside from trying out for the Olympic decathlon, there may be no more enervating enterprise in the U.S. than campaigning in the presidential primaries. Never before has the ordeal been more punishing than it is this year for the eleven major Democratic candidates, who have no fewer than 24 pre-convention primaries to contend with. It is enough to make strong men weep, and finally one did. The tears were all the more conspicuous because they were shed by the leading ...

Burma has been rendered in journalism, activism and art as a country of plain dichotomies: good vs. evil, liberty vs. suppression, the saintly Aung San Suu Kyi vs. the brutal monolith of the military junta. By its very premise, Burma Soldier, which airs this evening on HBO, muddies this picture. The documentary's subject, Myo Myint, is a former soldier who gave his adolescent years to the regime but came in adulthood to join the democratic opposition against it. ...

From Egypt's Tahrir Square to Tunisia's central Bourguiba Avenue to the plazas of Syria's ancient cities, public squares have been at the center of the Arab Spring. But the centrality of these spaces to the narrative of the uprisings in the Middle East has largely been overshadowed by the role that social networking played in fomenting rebellion. For all the praise that has rightly been lavished upon the Arab world's youthful revolutionaries, one must not forget the ...