As Jon Stewart put it, "so when does 'hope' turn into 'change'?" As Arianna points out, we still don't know. To any outside observer it sure looks like Obama has lost his campaign mojo and gotten crushed in the whinging gears of Washington's political apparatus. But I'm not so...

Conservatives are still wandering stunned through the wreckage of the Bush presidency and have absented themselves from the policy debate. GOP politicians are hunkered down waiting for an anti-Obama backlash that may or may not materialize. Instead, as Rick Hertzberg wrote recently, the media personalities are running the show....

The ongoing debate about journalism, bias and objectivity erupted recently with the Washington Post's release of new rules for social media. The rules themselves were mostly commonsensical, but the way they were written and promulgated suggested that Washington Post journalists employ social media such as Twitter and Facebook at...

The George W. Bush presidency brought both the Republican Party and the conservative movement low, and it's distressing to watch the GOP base get whipped into a frenzy by cynical demagogues while its politicians do the only thing they know how to do -- pander to the people making the...

The fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is upon us, and New Orleans continues to slowly rebound, with a smaller footprint than before but abundant community spirit. But, alarmingly, its long-term predicament remains unchanged, and the opportunity the nation had to confront it has been mostly squandered.

I refer, of course,...

Aside from the issue of whether the congressional "town hall" has outlived its usefulness as a way for politicians and the public to interact, there's an important underlying question in those confrontations over health care reform now playing out. Do they represent an incipient 1994- or 1980-style backlash against Obama?...

It may be a cliche to write in the Huffington Post that newspaper content should remain free, and I may tick off my friends at newspapers by doing so. But even as an ex-inkstained wretch myself, I couldn't avoid the contradictions contained in this week's report by the American...

Dick Cheney's campaign of retroactive self-justification, culminating in his AEI speech, is bizarre, and not just for its historical footnote-worthiness, its political thuggery, or its graceless, hectoring tone. What's strangest is that long after the policies he champions were cast aside by his own administration, and the Republican Party...

Did Maureen Dowd commit a firing offense by, she says, inadvertently lifting a paragraph from Talking Points Memo? I don't think so, but what happens hardly reflects well on Dowd or her column.

To recap: Dowd's Sunday column on the debate over torture contained a paragraph taken nearly word-for-word...

The Philadelphia Inquirer's decision to give a monthly column to John Yoo -- author of several "torture memos" offering legal rationales for the Bush administration's abusive interrogations -- is (pick your term): Tone-deaf? Crazy? Morally dubious? Newspapers have made a lot of questionable decisions in recent years, some...

During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama made clear his distaste of the news cycle and its trivial obsessions. Skeptics said this would hurt his chances: that to win, a candidate must dominate the news day-by-day, minute-by-minute, with attacks that keep the opposition off-balance. Yet the Obama campaign managed to win...

Why is the notion of Karl Rove tweeting in defense of Bush administration torture policies so disturbing?

Precautions taken 2 guarantee compliance w/ federal prohibition on torture. U might characterize diligence as overcautious.#TCOT #SGP #HHRS

Yes, I suppose U might be impatient with the amount of legal and...

President Obama's speech outlining his long-term plans for economic recovery is called "A New Foundation," and that metaphor pops up multiple times:

We must lay a new foundation for growth and prosperity - a foundation that will move us from an era of borrow and spend to one where...

I agree with Yglesias that the Republican strategy of the moment, such as it is, is very much a short-term, win-the-news cycle approach: oppose Obama, make a lot of noise, and hope something sticks with the public and sparks a comeback. In fact, it's very much like the John...

It can't be pure coincidence that several of Barack Obama's top nominees have had embarrassing tax problems. The latest offender, Nancy Killefer, Obama's choice for the new job of chief performance officer, withdrew today because she hadn't paid DC unemployment taxes for domestic help. And now Daschle's out...

Barack Obama deserves kudos for his newly-announced policies on the Freedom of Information Act and other transparency-related issues. Of course, it will take some time for presidential directives to work their way down through the vast government bureaucracy, where they will encounter resistance due to habit, laziness, and limited...

It's hard to say anything new or interesting about George W. Bush's farewell address Thursday night. But one thing is worth noting about Bush's self-presentation: several times he refers to "tough decisions" that proved unpopular:

Like all who have held this office before me, I have experienced setbacks. There...

I am no intelligence expert, but have followed the sad bureaucratic history of the CIA out of the corner of my eye for years, just because it's so...awful. The agency has repeatedly been the victim either of its own internal pathologies, which are substantial, or the politics of intelligence gathering,...

Looking over the political coverage of the past week, a casual observer might think s/he was back in the 1990s. There's a big scandal involving the Democratic governor of Illinois trying to sell the president-elect's senate seat. Will it hurt the party? The incoming administration? Caroline Kennedy wants to...

I recently finished a piece for a magazine. In the last days before the January issue went to bed, there was the usual frenzy last-minute updating, fact-checking, sudden forehead-smacking questions coming up, caption-writing, et al. There is, in short, a very high ratio of man-hours to the amount of content...