It was more than 39 years ago when Elvis Presley ushered him into the Oval Office to meet President Nixon, but it seems like only yesterday to Sonny West as he thinks about what might have been if the King was still around to celebrate his 75th birthday on Jan....

At a time when we're being bombarded with media coverage of the noxious political atmosphere (see White House vs. Fox News), health care reform (see Obamacare vs. the insurance industry), rampant corporate greed (see AIG, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs etc.), the war in Iraq and Afghanistan (see Rahm Emanuel...

Norman, Oklahoma - While we ink-stained wretches and Jurassic journalists agonize over the uncertain future of journalism in the age of the Internet, Joe Foote and the University of Oklahoma are trying to make sure that it survives and thrives in the 21st century.

Foote, the down-to-earth dean of OU's...

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was in my office at The Hill, a newspaper that covers Congress, when my friend David McCullough called me to say that an airplane had just crashed into the World Trade Tower in New York. He was staying at the Hay-Adams Hotel,...

In the summer of 2001, when I was editor of The Hill, the congressional newspaper I helped start in 1994 and headed until 2005, I was talking about the Vietnam War with some of our young reporters, who were all in their 20's and had little recollection of it.

Honolulu - Watching the spectacular Fourth of July fireworks light up the evening sky over Honolulu a few hours after touring Pearl Harbor naturally evokes memories of the Japanese surprise attack that triggered World War Two sixty-eight years ago.

Ironically, those memories coincide with concern about another Asian country's...

OMG! Did you read The New Republic's cover story on Arianna Huffington? Isaac Chotiner devastatingly deconstructs her in a mere 6,200 well-chosen words in his stunningly insightful review of her latest book with its overlong title, Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and...

Just out of curiosity and not as a matter of personal interest, do you think there's any truth to reports in the news media that President Obama is unhappy with his vice president because of his outspoken nature and penchant for sticking his foot in his mouth?
J. Biden,...

I don't know anything about Burma, aka Myanmar but my friend, Dr. Werner Peters, a prominent German author and political scientist who once was once an aide to two influential Democrats, the late Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota and former Rep. Lee Hamilton of Indiana, doe as he is a...

Hey, enough already about his first 100 days. What about my first 100 days?

After all, who was it who capitalized on his 36 years in the Senate to sell Obama's $787 billion stimulus package on the Hill, and who he put in charge of overseeing how it is distributed?

In honor of Shakespeare's birthday, here is what the Bard might have written if he were around today:

On Barack Obama:

"Give my my robe, put on my crown; I have
Immortal longings in me."
-Antony and Cleopatra

On Obama's plan for withdrawing from Iraq:

"Let us...

This week's dual anniversaries of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colo., prompt me to offer some thoughts about these iconic examples of irrational violence in America's heartland, both of which I have some tangential links to.

I often visited the site...

Vail, Colo. - He looks like the classic Westerner, right out of the pages of an outdoor magazine. Tall, lean and handsome with a shock of grey hair, he's dressed in a navy blazer, open neck shirt, creased blue jeans with silver belt buckle and cowboy boots. It's Gary Cooper-goes-to-Washington...

When David Cook, the avuncular senior editor and Washington bureau chief of The Christian Science Monitor, introduces House Republican Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia to a roomful of reporters at the St. Regis Hotel in downtown Washington Thursday morning, it will mark a milestone, albeit a sad one, for one...

Former Sen. Eugene McCarthy changed the course of history when he challenged President Johnson's conduct of the Vietnam War in 1968. But few people know that he came close to doing the same thing in another part of the world four years earlier.

In an intriguing and little-known episode...

The Republican Party, America's second oldest political party and a force in American politics and government since the time of Abraham Lincoln, died on March 1. It was 155 years old.

Death apparently resulted from injuries suffered during a violent mugging by 67 millions voters last November, when Illinois...

Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), may have became the longest-serving member of the House of Representatives on Wednesday, but he isn't the only member of Congress making history.

When Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) voted Monday on the motion to close debate on the Senate's $838 billion economic stimulus bill, it marked...

Dear President-elect Obama:

I am writing to ask a favor, even though I have to admit I didn't vote for you, not because I didn't want you to be President, but because I am a cat.

Actually, my name is Sasha, the same as your younger daughter, and I live...

Funny how what goes around comes around in the world of politics and journalism.

Thirteen years ago, on Dec. 5, 1995, I sat transfixed while Rep. Enid Greene Waldholtz held a marathon emotional news conference in her Salt Lake City district office, as she discussed the soap opera scandal...

Norman, Oklahoma - Jim Lehrer has two words of advice for mainstream journalists who worry that they're headed for extinction in the brave new world of the Internet.

The words are "Calm down."

Lehrer, the executive editor and anchor for the PBS News Hour program that bears his name,...