The "Dead or Alive" Bush administration has been remarkably silent in the wake of the decision by a military tribunal to, essentially, let Osama bin Laden's former driver go. And with good reason: the verdict and the resulting sentence were a stinging rebuke to the administration.

Yes, Salim Ahmed Hamdan...

This endless Democratic primary season may or may not be good for the party, but it has certainly not been good for the media. Pages of newsprint and hours of airtime have been wasted parsing election results, exit polls, non-exit polls and the comments of the candidate's surrogates and pseudo-surrogates....

It was bad enough that Sen. Clinton signed on to the plain-as-day-pander to suspend the 18 cent-per-gallon federal gas tax for the summer months, but her continued allegiance to an idea that has been universally (except for her and Sen. McCain) derided offers a couple disturbing insights.

In the face...

Nearly four years ago, as we were preparing to board a plane to go to Addis Ababa to meet our new daughter, I wrote to my family about the mixed feelings I was having.

It wasn't about having her come into our family, in that there was no hesitation. It...

Sunday morning, the crack of dawn.

Waiting in the airport in Las Vegas for a flight back to Los Angeles after a Saturday morning spent observing the caucuses for the Obama campaign. The radio on the way to McCarran said that while Clinton won the vote count, Obama grabbed one...

How's this for ceding the moral high ground?

Ahmed Raza Kasuri, a senior legal advisor to Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and a guy who helped write that country's (now suspended) constitution, defends the suspension of rights in his country by saying - that's right - they learned it from us.

When The Clash released Sandinista in 1981, Rolling Stone music critic John Piccarella said the band "ha[s] the potential to organize a rock & roll audience into an optimistic political body, or at least to provide the right information."

When the album came out I was one of those...

At his press conference yesterday, the president was asked about efforts to find "common ground" with congress. He complained that while he and congress have found common ground on FISA (with that sort of common ground, who needs checks and balances?) and trade, he hadn't seen any legislation yet.

...

So I'm driving my son to an after-school program yesterday, moving slowly along the freeway and listening to the news on the radio, when the newscaster started talking about "the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq."

Now, he's a pretty perceptive seven-and-a-half year-old, and he pipes up, "There's a war in...

How badly broken is the foster system in Los Angeles?

So badly that a County Department of Children and Family Services social worker ordered to take an ailing infant to see a doctor last month instead clocked out, saying she'd already put in an 11-hour shift without a...