By host Tom Ashbrook:
If you hadn’t noticed, you’re not looking. We live in the era of pervasive cosmetic surgery. Everybody nipped and tucked and botoxed and lipo-sucked to a fare-the-well.
Look around at the “trout pout” lips and “wind tunnel” facelifts, the Kabuki zone of expressionless brows, the gravity-defying fronts and rears and rows [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
There was a big noise out of London yesterday on the global environment and the economy as part of a study commissioned by Tony Blair.
A massive report from the head of Britain’s economic service and former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern is saying the world is headed for economic meltdown equal [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
In the run-up to the war in Iraq, essayist Max Boot was in full lather to sound the neo-conservative battle cry. Big powers, he argued, had to show their stuff, militarily, to stay on top.
Three years and nearly three thousand US soldiers dead later, Max Boot is bleak on Iraq. [...]

Election Day looms, and there’s debate and excitement about fresh new faces and, maybe, an upset in Congress.
But beneath all that, there lurks a fear. Fear that in tight races across the country outcomes could be determined not by votes but by problems — with new technology, with registration, with voter ID.
This hour On Point: [...]

The midterm elections are eight days away now, and if “Video the Vote.org” has its way — you might be caught on tape while heading to cast your vote.
Video the Vote is recruiting citizen volunteers to videotape the polls on November 7th to document and make a record of Election Day.
The citizen video campaign is [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
“I don’t want to be coy.” said Barack Obama last Sunday when he was asked about a run for the White House. “I have thought about the possibility.”
And with those six words, the lid blew off the run of “Obama-mania” that has been mounting ever since a bright-eyed Barack Obama wowed [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Ladies and gentlemen, we are in the pre-election boil, with everything at stake, and it showed this week. Policy, pronouncements, campaign ads and tempers are popping off in all directions – some old, some new, some ugly.
Under fire from miserable poll numbers, “stay the course” took a hike in Washington. In [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Here’s the low-down. We’ve got a crime novel, a corpse, and a couple of questions. “The slug they dug out of him was a .22. A woman’s gun?” asks the hard-boiled private eye. “Or was I being a sexist oinker?” And in one line, we are in the world of [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
There are two big headlines out of China about Wal-Mart. First, the retail giant is on a billion-dollar expansion spree that will make it the biggest food and department store network in all of China. Astounding, but typical. Wal-Mart now selling turtle blood in Beijing.
The second headline? Not [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Christopher Houston Carson was five feet four inches tall, slight of build, and — as mountain man pulp fiction hero “Kit” Carson — a giant in America’s 19th century romance with Manifest Destiny.
As Kit Carson set out on the Santa Fe trail in 1826, so was America heading west. As he [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Karl Rove says “no way.” The GOP is hanging tough, and is going to hang on to Congress, says Rove. But almost everyone else, outside the media tent thrown up to beat the drum on the White House lawn yesterday, is talking about the “wave.”
For fifty years, once or twice [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
American democracy was never a perfect heaven, but big-picture political scientist Alan Wolfe is afraid it’s now on a road to the perfect hell. Uninformed, emotional voters, manipulative, button-pushing politicians, few checks, no balances, and at stake, the very idea of democracy as Americans have known it — pluralistic, consensual, steady.
In his [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Casey Parks grew up poor in Mississippi. Skipped meals, pawn shop, repo man taking the cars. She never saw France or London. But now she’s seen Africa — and she’s here to tell you her childhood poverty was nothing next to what she’s seen.
Casey Parks is 23 now [...]

Last Sunday the government of Sudan ousted Jan Pronk — the U.N.’s top envoy in a country under intense international scrutiny for the mass death and violence in its Darfur region. The expulsion came as the killing in Darfur — labeled genocide by the US government — has reportedly spiked again, with an estimated [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Conservative editor, blogger and activist Andrew Sullivan crossed the pond from his native UK years ago to embrace America with the conservatism of Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
Then American conservatism took a trip of its own, to the Christian Right, and left Andrew Sullivan — gay, Catholic, old-time conservative — [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
George Bush says there is no change in his determination to win but all around the Iraq war now is talk of change. As Baghdad bleeds, and US military leaders concede they have not been able to stop the bleeding, the definition of victory is getting a makeover.
Iraq as model democracy for [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
Big business is big news in America right now. The Dow is over 12,000 points. Former New York Stock Exchange chief Dick Grasso has been ordered to pay back maybe a hundred million dollars in super-pay.
For decades, one of the biggest of the big newsmakers in American finance and high-wire deals has [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
On the homestretch to midterm elections, the top US military spokesman in Iraq says the much-touted American-Iraqi security crackdown in the capitol has failed. Death tolls — Iraqi and American — are spiraling. A “jihadi Tet offensive,” Tom Friedman calls it.
In North Asia, the noose on North Korea’s nukes looks [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
American-born Mideast scholar Rashid Khalidi comes from one of Jerusalem’s most prominent Palestinian families — a family of historians. Like millions of Americans, he looks out on the unending Israeli-Palestinian conflict with anguish and dismay.
Now, Khalidi has picked up the tools of his trade — history — to ask why the [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
For months, as Republicans have slid in the polls, Democrat hopes for taking back Congress have focused on the House, where first 15, then 20, and now maybe 35 Republican seats appear vulnerable.
But in recent weeks, even the GOP majority in the US Senate looks up for grabs. Six seats would [...]