You know who won, so here are my takeaways from what might be the beginning of the end:

1. Romney Actually Won Big
There is a rumor going around that Romney did not win convincingly. "Five Years Campaigning, Less Than 40%?," blared Huffington Post's quizzical election headline....

Here are my takeaways from this year's Iowa Caucus:

1. Not a Three-Way Finish

The Iowa results seem to suggest a close three-way race – 25-25-21. Yet among self-identified Republicans, the totals were actually 28-27-14, showing that Santorum and Romney lead the...

The Republican presidential race actually begins Tuesday night. It is worth remembering that this is the first time we will hear from the voters—that everything up to this point, while presented as The Campaign, was actually a long, voter-less preseason consisting primarily of candidates, politicos, donors and reporters...

So I love it when Peggy Noonan writes columns like this sweet and vicious contemplation of Newt Gingrich. We learn that Gingrich is detested most by those who worked with him -- a powerful list of Republicans who are now “burning up the phone lines in Washington”...

Is Jon Stewart the most influential liberal in America media?

This has been a popular claim for a while, since Stewart clearly has more political influence than most politicos. In fact, many of his most famous moments turned on his ability to stop joking and get...

The most striking part of the first full-blown debate in the Republican primary was the total rejection of science.

In a surreal scene near the night's end, Gov. Rick Perry likened the people denying global warming science to Galileo. To observe that he has that...

Balance Bias (bal-ance bi-as)
1. The assumption that there is truth and legitimacy to both sides of every dispute.
2. The iron law in political journalism that one side in a debate can never be exclusively right, or have a monopoly on the facts.
 ...

President Obama did not say anything particularly new in his unprecedented deficit address to the nation on Monday night.  The most significant moment came not in an original announcement or last-minute proposal, but in the president's request that Americans actually get up, get involved, and ask Congress to lay off...

"I’ve never won a tough election," concedes Paul Krugman, "but neither has Obama!" 

The Nobel Prize-winning economist is fuming about the White House's "ludicrous" view of what independents want -- a President, apparently, who embraces anti-spending conservatism. 

That's the core thesis in a new...

After New York’s historic gay marriage vote last week, the national political media has begun speculating about the presidential prospects for New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.  Right now, in fact, Cuomo is drawing more national media attention and more Google searches than at any other point in his governorship. (You...

Bill O’Reilly is still picking fights with rappers, but it feels like his heart’s not in it.

On Monday night, O’Reilly hosted Lupe Fiasco, a 29-year-old rapper and singer who recently dubbed President Obama a terrorist. The remark created an opening for O’Reilly to attack hip...

The White House dispatched Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer for a different kind of press conference on Friday in Minneapolis, where he tangled with a prominent writer known only as Angry Mouse. Hundreds of other writers were there, too, since Pfeiffer was headlining a conference for liberal bloggers.

The skepticism...

Liberal activists rallied in Minneapolis on Thursday for Netroots Nation, a blogger conference that is now one of the largest gatherings in progressive politics.  A whopping 2,400 people are here this year, the highest turnout in the conference's six-year history.  The draw is simple: a string of speeches,...

The Federal Election Commission, which regulates campaign spending, does not get much paperwork on candidates' mistresses.

According to the federal prosecutors who indicted John Edwards on Friday, however, the former senator should have been sending his mistress's hotel bills to the FEC.

Protests in Syria were reinvigorated this week, after a wrenching video documenting the alleged torture and killing of a 13-year-old boy went viral online.  The boy was separated from his parents at a protest against the Assad government, which allegedly mutilated, castrated and killed him, then returned the...

Newt Gingrich is a star on political television, a status that was supposed to help his underdog presidential campaign. It's not working out that way.

That's because a new model of video consumption has fundamentally changed the payoff of political TV, as Gingrich learned this Sunday. And the...

"I'm like a shot a Levittown right in your ass, like a B-12 -- boom!"

Those were Jon Stewart's last words to Bill O'Reilly in his guest appearance on Monday night's O'Reilly Factor, in a virtuoso duel where comedy eviscerated farce.

The two highly...

White House poetry night is one of those ceremonial events that you never hear about unless there's a controversy. Or a fake controversy.  But today's conservative kerfuffle over a White House invitation for Common -- a socially conscious, mainstream hip hop artist and sometime actor (most recently in...

By entering the presidential race on Wednesday, Newt Gingrich assumes the role of the most serious joke in the Republican Party.

If you look at the historical precedents for reaching the presidency, Gingrich is simply not positioned to be a serious candidate. He resigned from the last elected...

Does it ever seem like the liberal guests on political talk shows talk less and get interrupted more? 

The halting, dominated liberal pundit is something of a cliche in pop culture, from the fake cable segments on 30 Rock to those subversively accurate Tom Tomorrow cartoons.  Even putting aside Fox...