NEW YORK - In the wake of the foiled terror attack on Northwest Airlines flight 253 in December of 2009, federal officials imposed new restrictions on travelers, including requiring them to remain in their seats for the last hour of a flight without any personal items on their laps.

I stopped publicly answering reader mail quite some time ago -- I generally only did it years ago to make fun of right-wingers sending me hate mail -- but I got a note from Michael Rapaport of Brooklyn, New York who had some interesting comments on me and much of...

Even through my utter euphoria at Barack Obama being elected president, I knew there would be times in the coming years when I would disagree with certain decisions and policy stances taken by our new Democratic president. That's a natural thing -- I just didn't think one of those moments...

President-elect Barack Obama talked in his Saturday radio/web address about the bold national-infrastructure initiative he will send to the new Congress as soon as it convenes next month. It's a plan that the new president believes will boost the economy, provide millions of new jobs during the current recession, while...

There's a giant gray area in how the United States Senate operates and, as someone who covers that body, I'm aware of that and try not to react too quickly when I see something I don't like. Maybe my proximity has made me too sympathetic, but I'm aware that there's...

When I made my Senate-race predictions at the end of October, I guessed that Georgia would be heading to a mandatory run-off election on December 2nd -- if neither Republican Saxby Chambliss or Democratic challenger Jim Martin...

The United States Senate is a relatively small legislative body where members typically enjoy long tenure and develop deep political bonds and personal friendships. So I understand that it must be incredibly difficult for Senate Democrats to do what they must and deny Senator Joe Lieberman further chairmanship of the...

You thought we were done for the year, didn't you?

We saw Barack Obama run the McCain-Palin slime gauntlet for months, while watching him called a terrorist and a socialist on a daily basis and witnessed a bottomless pit of ads for Congressional races in...

Being from a distinctly lower middle-class family in central Nebraska, I grew up in a house where we never wanted for food or shelter, but where there was no money for luxuries and where members of my immediate and...

In part one of my Senate predictions yesterday, I described the races that are almost a foregone conclusion, which took us to Democrats retaining the 51 seats currently in their caucus and looking to the 13 contests we...

Every two years, roughly one-third of the United States Senate comes up for reelection and in 2008 the number of seats up for grabs goes to 35 because of appointed Republican Senators in Wyoming and Mississippi who must now...

When I heard last week that Barack Obama would be leaving the campaign trail on Thursday and Friday to visit his gravely ill grandmother in Hawaii, I have to admit that my first thoughts were not of Obama and...

While the McCain-Palin campaign has officially begun their 30-day, swift-boating plan for Barack Obama by saying he likes to "pal around with terrorists," I'm somewhat sure they'll stop just short of Photoshopping Obama attending an al Qaeda planning meeting...

Imagine you're on your way home from a family vacation or business trip and some border agent or Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screener stops you or a family member at airport security and insists that you turn on your...

One of the goofiest things that happened during the 2004 presidential election was when a national poll asked Americans whether they would rather have a beer with George W. Bush or the Democratic candidate, John Kerry. A majority of those polled indicated they would like to hoist a Heineken with...

Flying under the radar in a week filled with Wall-Street turmoil was an excellent speech given on the Senate floor by Claire McCaskill (D-MO) in which she pummeled John McCain and the Republican party for their stupefying hypocrisy on...

While Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) and a panel of distinguished legal and historical experts pondered what Feingold called "the wreckage that this President will leave" on Constitutional issues, Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) took umbrage primarily with the title of...

Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI), Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee's Constitution Subcommittee, opened a hearing today entitled "Restoring the Rule of Law" by blasting the long-term damage George W. Bush has done to the Constituion, saying both the new...

It can be difficult to pick which one of Republican presidential candidate John McCain's television ads against Barack Obama contains the most lies and distortions, but I wrote about one yesterday that I think comes close. It's been running in key states for about a month...

We already know beyond any doubt that John McCain long ago abandoned any semblance of the honorable campaign he vowed to run against Barack Obama. But the faux maverick has reached the point where he can't even manage to run a 30-second television ad without a single lie included.

Take...