By this point, there really should be no doubt in anyone's mind that torture was widely used during the last administration -- and that nothing like that should ever happen again.

The new, comprehensive report out today from an august, bipartisan commission goes a long way toward making that abundantly,...

Consider two possible American futures. In both, because one cannot imagine it any other way, ubiquitous high-speed connectivity to the Internet is essential in order to fully engage in society, the economy, and the public sphere.

In one possible future -- call it utopian -- such access is available to...

Contrary to popular belief, President Barack Obama didn't stop the United States from torturing. He just stopped it from torturing on his watch.

Yes, Obama issued an executive order on his second full day as president that defined acceptable interrogation techniques going forward -- definitively breaking with the...

Fred Kaplan writes for Slate that President Obama has called it quits in Afghanistan, to which I say darn right and about time.

But how many dead and wounded soldiers ago did he realize it was hopeless?

In the spring of 2009, Obama announced his decision to send...

For several weeks now, like a lot of people who care about torture, I have been expressing my unhappiness that the plot of the movie Zero Dark Thirty shows information elicited through torture playing an essential role in the tracking down of Osama bin Laden.

People often ask me...

I finally saw Zero Dark Thirty last night, which according to my film critic friends means that only now am I actually allowed to opine on it. (I don't agree, having Tweeted up a storm about its evidently pro-torture ethos already.)

Since a lot has been said by now, here...

Post-mortems of contemporary election coverage typically include regrets about horserace journalism, he-said-she-said stenography, and the lack of enlightening stories about the issues.

But according to longtime political observers Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, campaign coverage in 2012 was a particularly calamitous failure, almost entirely missing...

Access to justice is a core American value. But a new survey of the rule of law across the globe finds that the U.S. ranks surprisingly low relative to its high-income peers in terms of access to legal counsel in civil disputes and equal protection under criminal law.

The "Rule...

WASHINGTON -- The best way to make sure that the next secretary of the Treasury is not overly beholden to Wall Street might be to hire a woman.

There are several female candidates in the running to take over the job expected to be vacated fairly soon by Tim Geithner....

President Obama will be sitting down for a private screening of the extraordinary new movie Lincoln on Thursday night, and he will undoubtedly be mesmerized. But whether he internalizes its lesson is another story, and one yet to be written.

The movie, directed by Steven Spielberg, starring Daniel...

WASHINGTON -- Federal prosecutors and financial regulators on Wednesday reasserted their intention to enforce the law that bans the bribery of foreign officials by U.S. companies, despite a clamorous campaign by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups to relax the rules.

The chamber had argued...

WASHINGTON -- Republicans and deficit hawks are raising unnecessary alarm over the so-called "fiscal cliff" to pressure President Barack Obama into a "grand bargain" he shouldn't make, progressive economists and scholars said Tuesday at a symposium.

"My professional and personal message at this moment is: Don’t panic,"...

On first hearing, voter ID laws sound like an obvious and innocent idea. After all, don't you need ID for everything else these days? So it's not surprising that 80 percent of Minnesotans polled last year said they favored a proposed state ballot measure that would have required...

Mitt Romney really was all ready to go if he'd won the election on Tuesday.

For a while on Wednesday, a draft version of his transition website was visible to the public on a server belonging to the company that designed it, a Utah software shop called SolutionStream. The site,...

WASHINGTON -- Now President Barack Obama has some promises to keep.

His 2012 campaign wasn't nearly as full of measurable commitments as his first one in 2008, but there were still plenty -- some of which are due in a matter of weeks, not months or years.

The most immediate...

President Barack Obama set a new goal for himself during his acceptance speech early Wednesday morning.

As he spoke in Chicago, he thanked everyone who cast a ballot "whether you voted for the first time, or waited in line for a very long time" -- then he quickly added, in...

Poll watchers from groups ostensibly targeting voter fraud are headed primarily to minority voting precincts on Election Day, lending support to the argument that their real goal is to suppress the African-American and Latino vote.

A partial list of precincts targeted by a Pittsburgh Tea Party group working on behalf...

If Election Day goes anything like the past 17 days of early voting in North Carolina, here's what you can expect at your local precincts on Tuesday:

• Belligerent citizens demanding the right to personally inspect the voting process and yelling "shut up" at the top of their lungs when election...

Four years ago, on the day Barack Obama was elected President of the United States, the world seemed full of possibilities -- particularly for the people who spend their careers trying to make the world a better place.

Advocates for economic fairness, gay rights, civil liberties, the environment and campaign...

WASHINGTON -- Customized mass-mail campaigns from groups on the left and the right are using peer pressure to get out the vote by comparing recipients' voting records with those of their neighbors.

A first wave of mailers from a conservative group has spawned complaints about invasion of privacy and intimidation.