Opinion

New York - During his Labor Day address, President Obama announced a $50 billion proposal to rebuild American roads and rails Full Story »

WASHINGTON, DC - Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are rendezvousing in Alaska this Saturday to commemorate 9/11. The event will likely share some similarities to Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally in DC. But with one important difference: Full Story »

On Friday, at a town hall in small town Oklahoma, conservative Sen. Tom Coburn said Newt Gingrich is "the last person I'd vote for, for president." Gingrich is "a super-smart man but he doesn't know anything about commitment to marriage." Gingrich lacks, in Coburn's view, "the character traits necessary to be a great president." Full Story »

Ma Ying-jeou is the president of Taiwan. He was interviewed for the Global Viewpoint Network by Pacific Perspectives columnist Tom Plate last week. Full Story »

The Nation -- "Transformational politics is the work we do today to ensure that the deal we can get on gun control or immigration reform in a year—or five years, or twenty years—will be better than the deal we can get today. Transformational politics requires us to challenge the way people think about issues, opening their minds to better possibilities." Full Story »

WASHINGTON, DC - On Wednesday night, as part of a two-show special in honor of American troops, The Colbert Report brought on Vice President Joe Biden. Talking about his experience as a father with a son in Iraq, he offered some ideas for how every American could honor U.S. troops and their families (offer to babysit for the spouse currently at home, for example). After Colbert offered him a chance to give President Bush the credit some say the White House has been slow to give, Biden also made a strong declaration: Full Story »

WASHINGTON, DC - The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has narrowly sided with the CIA in a high-profile case on the agency's controversial program of extraordinary renditions. The program, begun by the Bush administration and continued under Obama, has seen the CIA apprehend suspected terrorists and then, rather then turning them in to local enforcement or sending them to the U.S., ship them to a third country to be interrogated under torture. In this case, the American Civil Liberties Union, representing five such detainees, sued not the CIA but Jeppesen Dataplan Inc, a Boeing subsidiary they say illegaly transmitted detainees on behalf of the CIA program. Here are the details, the implications, and what people have to say about the case. Full Story »

WASHINGTON, DC - Imam Feisal Rauf, the leader of the group planning the Cordoba Center, called the "Ground Zero Mosque" by critics, addressed the controversy over his work in a guest column today in the New York Times. Rauf has just returned from a trip abroad doing public outreach on behalf of the U.S. State Department, work he also did under the Bush administration. Here is an excerpt from his column and, below that, several of the reactions from bloggers. Most of the bloggers who responded to his column are critical of his project. Full Story »

WASHINGTON, DC - How would you like to see the New York City newspaper war explained through animation and a torrent of Mandarin? Taipei-based Next Media Animation has been offering up some pretty choice clips recently. Two weeks ago there was an edgy satirical take on backlash to the Cordoba House initiative. Today, the company explains the New York Times-Wall Street Journal war over New York customers. Full Story »

Creators Syndicate - Americans, says Time magazine, are too dumb to appreciate the wonders of President Barack Obama's $787 billion "stimulus" package. Full Story »

WASHINGTON -- Here in the nation's capital city, something remarkable has happened: Students in the public schools, long regarded as among the nation's worst, have shown dramatic improvement on standardized tests over the last few years. Here's something even more remarkable: Local voters seem indifferent, if not outright hostile, to the reforms that have produced those academic gains. Full Story »

WASHINGTON -- While many Americans are busily exercising their self-righteousness over Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States is facing a problem of great magnitude close to home. Full Story »

In mid-August in the northern Afghanistan province of Kunduz, the Taliban carried out a horrific sentence against two young Afghan lovers who had eloped against their families’ wishes. The punishment was death by stoning. Deemed by Islamic extremists to be justified under sharia law, the process involves partially burying the accused, after which a male crowd hurls stones at the victims’ exposed heads until they die. Full Story »

A year ago, the practice of mass rape by militias in eastern Congo made headlines in the United States as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton visited the region to speak out against rape as a weapon of war. Full Story »

Read Harry Shearer's other articles on HuffingtonPost.com Full Story »

Read Larry Flynt's other articles on HuffingtonPost.com Full Story »

WASHINGTON, DC - So this is what the exploding logo was all about. Today, one of the world's fastest search engines just got a little faster. Google unveiled its newest update to Web search, Google Instant. Now, when users begin typing a keyword search, the results instantly appear below. Marissa Mayer, the company's VP of search products, says the new update is all about saving users' time. "Our testing has shown that Google Instant saves the average searcher two to five seconds per search," Mayer says. "That may not seem like a lot at first, but it adds up. With Google Instant, we estimate that we’ll save our users 11 hours with each passing second!" Reactions from around the Web: Full Story »

WASHINGTON, DC - Should the government let the bottom fall out of the housing market? It sounds catastrophic, but on Sunday, The New York Times reported that the argument in favor of this move is gaining popularity. The Washington Indpendent's Annie Lowrey summed the idea up succinctly as this: Full Story »