Ordinarily I try to avoid criticizing journalists and the media; not because they don't deserve ridicule or should be immune from the same accountability they dish out with such ease, but because circular firing squads are mostly unproductive affairs.

However, in honor of Washington Post blogger and champion of...

With this week's release of Oz, The Great and Powerful, Disney continues its relentless campaign to blaze a trail of death through our most beloved fairy tales like Sherman through the South (see "Tim Burton's 2010 Alice in Wonderland corpse" for details). I freely admit that I have yet to...

You often hear pundits and politicians mention in an off-hand manner that America is a center-right, conservative country. Newsweek's Jon Meacham, for example, prophesized in late 2008 that "America remains a center-right nation--a fact that a President Obama would forget at his own peril." Historically this ideological characterization...

Most pundits found Tuesday's foreign policy love-fest to be tedious. Balderdash. In October of an election year, two political rivals agreeing on anything at all is riveting television. I don't care if they're compromising on "Angry Birds" legislation; I'll be on my couch, watching.

Granted, the president wasn't exactly...

Progressives have spent the last week crouching in the windowsill in tears, threatening the crowd below that they're going to end it. It's a little like Kate and Leo on the back of the Titanic: everyone knows they're not going to jump; the waters of politics are cold...

You hear it all the time: "Campaigns aren't won by candidates; they're won by conditions and circumstances."

Every four years, economists plug median income numbers, GDP growth, employment rates, 401K trajectories, inflation statistics and American Idol ratings into giant models to predict presidential election outcomes -- a tradition going back...

Last week, physicists at Geneva's Large Hadron Collidor announced that they had discovered the legendary "Higgs Boson" subatomic particle -- a unit of matter that had previously existed only in scientists' wet dreams, and is meant to provide the key to holding life together in our universe.

... or, at...

We're still months away from most Americans paying any attention to the campaign. Since Newt Gingrich ended his wacky zoo tour, disappointing bereaved vampire bats everywhere, the summer contest has been fairly dull. It will likely be decided by a number of factors the president has little control over, like...

There's an old Italian saying: Quando dio, ole castigarci ci manda, quello che desideriamo. Or, to somebody who's neither Venetian nor da Vinci: "When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers." At least, that's what I'm told. I know more words in Elvish than in Italian.

The...

Good lord, people hate Washington. With trust in government at all-time lows, politicians are attacking my hometown like it's Mordor. If you haven't heard, the District's the center of all things wicked, a modern Gomorrah responsible for debt, financial ruin, and Metta World Peace's elbow, and it's taking fire from...

Rick Santorum suspended his campaign Monday, prompting college and condom enthusiasts everywhere to dance in the streets. And because I firmly believe that Newt Gingrich, like Tinkerbell, will vanish the moment we cease to acknowledge his existence, it is now safe to say that the grueling, violent, and thoroughly entertaining...

'Why is this president different from all other presidents? Because this president doesn't support Israel.'

Such an exchange might come up at Passover seders this evening, and if your Jewish family is anything like mine, a common ritual is to draw parallels between the Israelites' exodus from Egypt and Jewish...

Here's some heartening news for those of you keeping score at home: We're only halfway through the GOP presidential primaries.

Wait, don't jump!

Some good may yet come from the GOP's death-march. The race has thus far been so destructive that it's managed to do the impossible: Americans are...

As the Supreme Court debated the fate of the Affordable Care Act this week, anxiety spread throughout the leftward legions. Progressives, liberal elites, those who reject labels but still love Downton Abbey -- we've all become antsy. And here's a spoiler alert: The situation is actually worse than people think....

"The AMC Javelin's got everything we look for in a car!"
--Richard Dreyfuss in 1968 car commercial

This week, when asked to pick a Secret Service codename, Mitt Romney settled on an inanimate object: Javelin. Mitt's aides insisted that the new moniker referred not to an Olympic...

By now, most have been introduced to the GOP's new 2012 strategy of playing racquetball with women's rights. First, various states, including not-so-lunar Virginia, passed paleolithic legislation curbing abortion access. Then Rick Santorum squandered a golden opportunity in Michigan by trashing contraception (Rick can really pick a target. After taking...

Politics has seen the first two years of the "Tens" decade pose one fundamental question: Can government still function in the age of hyper-polarization? Rush Limbaugh and Bill Maher; MSNBC and Fox News; the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street -- innumerable forces unique to the 21st century have constructed...