Barack Obama has made an original contribution to the debate over gun control.

Sometimes being a "maverick" isn't as glorious as one thinks it will be.

It's interesting that Bill Clinton is not called the first African-American president.

There is one way in which we can help the Cuban people, and that is by immediately and unilaterally ending the embargo that has been in place for all these years.

Americans complain about the lack of true leaders and of today's poll-driven politicians. But if American is a democracy, isn't that exactly how it is supposed to work?

George W Bush, lambasted as the destroyer of peace in the Middle East, may preside over the most welcome development there since the Second World War.

In many ways, Martin Luther King was a good man - certainly a highly intelligent man. Well read, well spoken, influential well beyond his life. But equal to all the Presidents of the nation?

The conservatives have rightly complained about the fiasco that was the CNN/YouTube debate, to say nothing of Chris Matthews' execrable moderating. Now the shoe is on the other foot, and it doesn't fit any better on that side.

The recent, less-than-informed coverage of the death of Benazir Bhutto reminds us of Neville Chamberlain's infamous comment about Czechsolovakia as " a faraway country about which we know nothing."

By taking this preposterous action, the CIA has provided a signal service.