Remember the wind-powered rotating skyscrapers of Dubai? Well, the building boom in the Emirates is over, thanks to the financial crisis. Most of the huge and expensive construction projects have been cancelled or are on hold. Not only that, foreign laborers are being laid off at an astounding rate ...

Like the shy smart kid in school who knows the answers but keeps quiet for fear of being taunted, Candidate Obama instinctively knew the best answers to improving our nation's broken school system, but avoided calling them out for fear of antagonizing the powerful education establishment, especially...

In these days of economic distress, it’s nice when technology companies add innovative features to the products at the bottom of their price ranges. So it’s notable that Apple’s cheapest iPod, the oft-forgotten Shuffle model, is getting smarter. In fact, the latest iPod Shuffle, an...

We have all heard about how our new president, Barack H. Obama, snubbed British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, head of the government of our most important ally since the Treaty of Ghent in 1814. But before Obama dissed Brown by refusing to allow him a full press conference or state dinner -- and reci...

The Mite House Paglia, in Salon, tells Obama he'd better shape up fast -- and that goes for Doogie Hou$er and the rest of the goofyboys on his staff: Free Barack! Yes, free the president from his flacks, fixers and goons -- his posse of smirky smart alecks and provincial rubes, who were shrewd enoug...

Part Four of a six-part series Attracting the largest army of supporters ever seen in a modern American election is one thing, but even more impressive is that the Obama campaign managed to put them to work — as online recruiters, as cash machines, but also as organizers, block-walkers and pro...

Andrew Rotherham: The President's speech today includes a lot of interesting tidbits, a shout-out for performance pay, a call to lift charter school caps, and even a very pro-Broad Prize signal embedded in the data section. I've been lukewarm on some of the stimulus, more on that later, but this is ...

Jenny Rosenstrach | Features Director I know how some people (i.e. mothers) are going to react to the article in today's New York Times about Michelle Obama's committment to spread the message of healthy eating at the White House and beyond, defined as preparing wholesome, mostly organic, unprocesse...

The Continuing Assault On Reason by digby A few years back Al Gore wrote a book called "The Assault on Reason." I'm sure many of you read it. We were in the middle of that bizarroworld period after 9/11, when post-modern "conservatives" were openly admitting to creating their own reality: The aide s...

Deepak Chopra writes: When Michael Steele, the hapless chairman of the Republican Party, lost his bearings and called Rush Limbaugh's style ugly and incendiary, everyone knew it was the truth. But it was a perfect example of an inconvenient truth. The right wing has long used ugly, incendiary speech...