Government & Politics

Macroeconomist Dean Baker sees opportunity in the current economic crisis. In a recent editorial for The Guardian, Baker recommended that President-elect Barack Obama boost the economy by spending on national health insurance.

After 44 years as a newspaper man, former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. makes his debut as a fiction writer. His new novel, Rules Of The Game, features an investigative reporter on the beat of a hotly contested presidential election.

The seventh season of 24 premieres this Sunday. Critic David Bianculli assesses the four-hour, two-night return of counterterrorist Jack Bauer — who's got some new allies, and some new enemies.

NBC's newly appointed chief White House correspondent talks with Dave Davies about his new book, How Barack Obama Won: A State-by-State Guide to the Historic 2008 Presidential Election.

In his 2008 book, Torture Team, British lawyer Philippe Sands accuses the Bush administration of condoning harsh interrogation techniques.

A pioneering political leader in the fight against apartheid, for 13 years Suzman was the sole representative in South Africa's all-white Parliament to reject race discrimination. She died Thursday at 91.

The year in television started with a bust — or to be more precise, a writer's strike — but Fresh Air's TV critic says there were plenty of TiVo-worthy programs in 2008. Prominent among them: AMC's Mad Men.

Filmmaker Ari Folman was a 19-year-old Israeli soldier serving in Beirut at the time of the 1982 massacre of Palestinian refuges. Though he has no memory of the time, he revisits the mission in his new film, Waltz With Bashir, a surreal, animated documentary of the terror.

Activist Paul Weyrich, who died Dec. 18, helped turn social conservatives into a powerful force in the Republican party.

After appearing in supporting roles in more than 50 films, actor Richard Jenkins takes the lead in The Visitor, Tom McCarthy's film about a solitary economics professor whose world opens up when he discovers an apartment he rented in New York is already occupied.

In 1977, historian James Reston Jr. helped prepare journalist David Frost for a series of interviews with Richard Nixon that resulted in the former president's tacit acknowledgment of his involvement in the Watergate scandal. Reston later chronicled the exchange in his book The Conviction of Richard Nixon.

Frank Schaeffer's parents were best-selling authors who were instrumental in linking the evangelical community with the anti-abortion movement. But after helping to organize religious fundamentalists politically, Schaeffer had a crisis of faith and a change of heart.

In the film of his play Frost/Nixon, screenwriter Peter Morgan elevates the televised 1977 interviews that Richard Nixon did with British host David Frost into a momentous event.

CNN's chief international correspondent, Christiane Amanpour has covered every major international and humanitarian crisis since the Gulf War. Her new documentary, Scream Bloody Murder, is about genocide — and the people who are working to end mass killing worldwide.

Beliefnet.com founder and Editor-in-Chief Steven Waldman discusses the role of religion and the state of the religious right in post-election politics. Will the coalition of religious groups that united in support of Barack Obama fracture over specific issues?

Conservative Christian Richard Cizik preaches the message of environmentalism from a pro-life perspective. Cizik is the vice president for governmental affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals, a powerful lobbying organization that represents 45,000 churches.

Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid discusses the Bush Administration's policies concerning Afghanistan and Pakistan and speculates about the changes President-elect Barack Obama may bring to the area.

A two-hour self-contained 24 movie on Fox follows Jack Bauer to Africa, where he's hiding out from his own government and working at a charity boys' school. But as reviewer David Bianculli reports, wherever Bauer is, trouble surely follows.

The name of former anti-war activist William Ayers was brought up twice in an attempt to discredit Barack Obama during the recent presidential campaign — first by Hillary Clinton, and then by the McCain campaign.