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...

Barack Obama's early moves to co-opt former adversaries Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman are, at least potentially, very smart. They also signal a different way of doing business than we've seen over the past 20 years. The Bush, Clinton, and Bush presidencies weren't just four- or eight-year stints running the...

Robert Draper's New York Times piece on the McCain campaign skillfully maps out the strange remove from which McCain and his aides have been operating, a place that few people outside the world of politics could locate in their own experience. It is an imaginary land built entirely of...

It's hard to believe that John McCain's time-out and rush to Washington will have any practical effect on the matter at hand, passing a bailout bill. It could have the opposite effect, by injecting presidential politics and posturing into an intricate, and politically volatile, matter of policy. But influencing the...

The McCain campaign has the political world transfixed on its parade of falsehoods and culture war attacks on Obama. But the overarching theme here is actually outrageousness. By flagrantly, repetitively lying and putting out anti-Obama ads that run 180 degrees counter to reality, the McCain campaign has exploded the etiquette...

In the spring of 2004 I attended a roundtable media discussion with John Kerry at his campaign headquarters. This was not long after Kerry had locked down the Democratic nomination. He was incoherent, droning on in an unorganized fashion about the mistakes of the Bush administration, and various programs he'd...

Scanning various blogs today, I'm amazed at the seething outrage at the McCain campaign's plethora of dishonest tactics, from Sarah Palin's lie about rejecting the Bridge to Nowhere to the ad charging Obama with promoting sex. Josh Marshall, who normally reads political events pretty coolly, has joined Andrew...