By host Tom Ashbrook:
It seemed like a good idea at the time. Just a few years back, when housing prices were soaring and interest rates were at historic lows, millions of Americans grabbed adjustable rate mortgages with super bargain basement rates. For many, it was the only way to jump on the American [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
There was absolute rage at Israel and the United States across the Middle East this weekend, as Israeli bombs killed scores of civilians — many of them children — in Qana, Lebanon.
The strain on the faces of George Bush and Condoleeza Rice were evident. The strain on American relations with old [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Fourteen years ago, Cesar Millan crawled across the border from Mexico with nothing but the clothes on his back and a childhood spent among animals –especially dogs – on a Mexican farm.
Today, Cesar Millan is an American media phenom — dog-trainer to the stars (Oprah Winfrey, Scarlett Johansson, Nicholas Cage, Hillary Duff) [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
The theme of this week has been more war. In Lebanon, where the destruction is profound and Israeli forces are up against a tenacious foe, war is widely-celebrated in the Arab world. So it is in Israel, where Hezbollah rockets continue to rain, and in Rome and beyond, where Condoleeza [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
“A rising tide lifts all boats,” President John F. Kennedy famously said. But for the last thirty years in the US economy, that has not been true. In 1970, the average American in the bottom 90 percent made the equivalent of about $27,000.
By 2002, after years of work and sweat and [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
When science and politics collide, the truth becomes hostage in a hurry to all kinds of shenanigans. Last week, as snowflake babies swirled and President Bush prepared to veto expanded federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, the president’s top political adviser, Karl Rove, sat down with the Denver Post to [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
America is far and away the richest country in the world. For much of the 20th century, that wealth was widely and joyfully shared. But lately, the sharing has changed. The bottom half of the country’s households now have just 2.5 percent of the country’s wealth. The top [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
When President Bush doesn’t like a law passed by the Congress of the United States, he doesn’t veto it. He just states that he won’t follow it. Except for one veto, last week’s stem cell research bill, this president’s preferred path is the so-called “signing statement.” He takes a law, and essentially [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
For thirty years now, America’s great engine of economic growth has funneled that growth predominantly to the pockets of the richest Americans.
Take for example the year 2004. After decades of soaring, the real income of the richest one percent of Americans rose again by 12.5 percent. The other ninety-nine percent [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
It’s hard to watch the violence in the Middle East these last two weeks — the terrified children, the blasted bridges and streets and family sedans, the destruction in Lebanon and the rockets raining on northern Israel.
Today, Israeli vice premier Shimon Peres appealed to the Lebanese people: “As soon as the [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Americans love a winner, and dream of being winners. That is the American dream. But there’s another dream, too — of a thriving democracy of citizens with shared interests and equal opportunity, a land without aristocracy, a land of common dreams.
For the last thirty years, that dream has come under [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
When Bill Kristol, neoconservative editor of The Weekly Standard, looks out on the bombing in Lebanon and rockets in Haifa, he doesn’t just see Israel’s war. He sees America’s. It’s “our war,” he says, and “we should take it right on to Iran, with military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.”
When [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
J.O. Cole was the richest man in Indiana. His grandson, Cole Porter, was, for decades, the most celebrated, sophisticated songwriter in America — an elegant, risque, high-spirited trust-fund playboy hero of high culture and low.
Porter’s songs were Broadway box-office dynamite for years, and are still hummed and whistled and sung around [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
It’s a big, bloody week in the news, and Newt Gingrich is all about seeing things in big terms – bloody if necessary. Gingrich looks at the Mideast this week and sees the very survival of Israel at stake. He looks more broadly around the planet and says he sees [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Arthur Sena lived in a hole near the railroad tracks in Denver. Rodney Littlebear spent fifteen years on the streets, in and out of jail, homeless shelters and emergency rooms in Seattle. Chronically homeless alcoholic ex-Marine Murray Barr cost the city of Reno maybe a million dollars over ten years in [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
As chaos descends on Lebanon this week, the neoconservative cry in Washington is “on to Iran!” Israel is fighting for its security. The neo-con cry is that it’s “our war,” and a regime in Tehran behind it must be taken on. Joe Klein, columnist for Time magazine, sees things [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Imagine coming of age as a young American in the country’s booming era of poisonous, hyper-polarized politics. The trip from high-minded civics class to acid political reality is short and brutal. Some embrace it, jumping straight in as shock troops of the right or left — dukes-up college Republicans or [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
If you live within a country mile of a corn field, you’ve already heard the roar over ethanol. Across the Midwest and well beyond, a great corn-fed ethanol gold rush is on.
Farmers and towns and states are betting big on an ethanol boom as oil prices soar on the Middle East [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
When the music rolled each week for “I Love Lucy” in the 1950s, it was a truly national American event. Nearly 75 percent of the country’s TV households gathered at the TV screen for Lucille Ball and Ricky Ricardo — a true mass market.
Today, television’s number-one, top-rated TV show — CSI: [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
There was a time when war for Israel meant facing Egypt and Jordan and worrying about Saudi Arabia and beyond. But not this time, or not yet.
In the face of kidnappings and Hezbollah rockets, Israeli warplanes have pounded Lebanon for the last week. The audience for these attacks sits in Syria [...]