Michael Sean Winters

President-elect Obama should nationalize Amtrak rsquo s rail lines and build high-speed rail lines connecting major cities throughout the East Coast and Industrial Midwest Amtrak already receives a federal subsidy because it can rsquo t make a profit There are two major reasons it can rsquo t make

Over the next few days we will throw out some policy ideas for the new Obama administration Readers should send in their own proposals by posting a comment While the financial crisis permits Obama to spend almost unlimited amounts of money in his first year trying to jump start the economy he st

The Rev Jeremiah Wright was back in the pulpit yesterday suffering again from a bad case of a collapsed eschaton Jesus said upon this rock I will build mdash listen to the promise mdash my church he said according to the Chicago Tribune And the gates of hell mdash listen to the promise mdas

Michael Gerson begins his column this morning there is a problem with the Post website so I can t provide a link with a list of those cities attacked by Islamicist fanatics since 9 11 London Madrid Bali and now Mumbai The list is familiar but it is strange to see a former GOP operative recit

Finally the Bush Treasury Department has hit on a good idea According to this morning rsquo s Washington Post the Treasury is planning to intervene in the mortgage market directly purchasing mortgage-backed securities on new loans if the lending banks lower their rates to 4 5 percent Because th

The results of the Georgia Senate run-off were unsurprising Despite GOP worries that Team Obama rsquo s 13 million strong data base of donors and volunteers might be able to tilt the race the world did not turn upside down yesterday But there is a lesson in the results for the President-elect and

Barack Obama rsquo s new national security team is a Best and Brightest group as befits an administration that is pledged to being super-competent and smart the implication being that George W Bush rsquo s foreign policy has been incompetent and ham-handed his ideology over-riding his sensibili

As President-elect Obama begins appointing officials to his administration the leftie blogosphere has been complaining that too many positions have gone to former Clinton officials which they interpret as a shift to the center And they object to it as such But the ideological origins of Obama r

Pope Benedict XVI greeted a group of pilgrims this past weekend with a short discourse on the Feast of Christ the King that has an obvious application to the political circumstance of the Catholic hierarchy in the United States in the wake of President-elect Obama rsquo s decisive win among Catholi

Vice President-elect Joe Biden liked to say that his Catholicism created an entire culture that shaped his views on public policy as well as private and personal obligations Biden is just old enough to remember the Catholic ghetto in which whole neighborhoods were called by the name of the local Ca