Unlike President Obama, I am going to be straight with you: The jobs are not coming back. A high unemployment rate (not even including the under-employed) will be with us for at least a decade to come. It will take that long before investment in research and development and a...

A combination of ignorance and righteousness is just as much a danger to American society as the corruption of power in business and government. But for the last half century it is only the latter that has garnered the attention of investigative journalism, in both legacy and new media. The...

The roots of the "Obama is a Muslim" delusion/lie here: in the grain of truth to the story, which inadvertently the official Barack Obama hagiography has nourished; in the character of American Christianity, which began to change in (yet another) Great Awakening forty years ago; in the failures of American...

Just as much as conservative, right wing Americans, lefty pundits cluster like moths around false but glistering untruths about President Obama. One such untruth that has had some currency among liberals this summer is that "Obama is out of touch with the middle class." This misperception is particularly confounding because...

SAN DIEGO. Hope and change, part of the universal human condition, have arrived on the doorstep of the Republican Party in California. I spent this past weekend listening to and talking with Republicans at the state party convention in San Diego, trying to get a bearing. We know who Republicans...

Sunday, July 18 was going to be wrap day for the Las Vegas Tea Party Convention, with speakers from Newt Gingrich to Sharron Angle, the Tea Party Express candidate who triumphed over a gaggle of Republicans for the privilege of taking on Nevada Senator Harry Reid in November. Instead, yesterday...

Like many writers, I am madly in love with Twitter. At the same time, I approach my beloved only with extreme caution since the T-whale, like all social media, is quite the temptress. And I have a jumble of insider knowledge, pointed but cruel observation and sheer bubble-headed fatuousness that...

Journalism is an act of seduction. Many times I've done the seducing, in writing big stories and small; I've also been the seduced, slammed with the gut-wrenching morning-after upon reading stories written about me. So I know just how both Michael Hastings and Stanley McChrystal (& staff) are doing right...

The most telling inflection point (to use buzzword currency) at the 2010 Personal Democracy Forum conference in New York was the way attendees engaged with John Perry Barlow and began to build upon his suggestion that the renaissance of the city-state may be the saving of...

"Executive producers. They're all assholes to me." A couple of camera guys are shooting the breeze in the White House press briefing room while we all wait to be herded into the Rose Garden for the Calderon-Obama press conference. Who are we? The White House press corps, their Mexican counterparts...

At the California Democratic Party 2010 State Convention, Jerry Brown tossed a bone to the press when he called for a series of debates with Republicans Meg Whitman and Steve Poizner, trailing behind Whitman nearly 50 points in recent polls. Some reporters snapped, some...

"Do you have a Plan B?" I asked the Afghan women diplomats. "For yourself and your families?" After all, they had assumed some risk--even in Kabul--by answering the call to serve in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Suddenly everybody wanted to speak. Voices that had been soft and hesitant...

What did I see and hear this past weekend at SXSW? Coming and going? From different altitudes and perspectives? Canaries. And I don't mean the twitter species, even though swarms of SXSW (myself included) obsessively tweeted. No, I saw and heard canaries of the coal mine variety. The word on...

The biggest obstacle Meg Whitman faces in her run for the governorship of California is not Jerry Brown. And certainly not Steve Poizner, her Republican primary opponent who trails her in the polls. Her hurdle is the urban state press, as well as the gray-beards among...

In February, 2008, while I was covering the Texas Democratic primary for HuffPost's OffTheBus, I voluntarily passed on an opportunity to write about former president Bill Clinton's longtime mistress. With considerable amusement, therefore, I anticipate reading Game Change, Mark Halperin's and John Heilemann's salacious new book about the 2008 presidential...

With the Senate still in snowy session, President Obama and his family could not leave for Hawaii until Christmas Eve. Aboard Air Force One, Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton, en gaggle, told the traveling press "not to anticipate any possible announcements or news-making events." Wasn't this just asking for trouble?...

President Obama yesterday in Oslo delivered the memorable speech of his first year in office, eleven months marked by overexposure in appearances and speeches, as well as a public rhetoric that has become too familiar. Now one great speech a year is no small accomplishment. And surely the president was...

"I was really depressed when I learned he [Obama] was going to say it's all about al Qaeda," Marvin Weinbaum said. Weinbaum is a scholar-in-residence at the Middle East Institute and an Afghanistan expert who visited the White House during the months President Obama was crafting his new AfPak policy....

President Obama did not enlighten me about his Afghanistan-Pakistan plan last night. Nor from the expressions on their faces were the captive audience of the West Point cadets given much guidance beyond the inevitable conclusion that many of them will eventually be landing at Bagram Air Base. These fine-looking young...

Barack Obama owns Afghanistan. If our President said it once he said it a hundred times in 2008 on the campaign trail: "We have to win in Afghanistan." He did not hedge. He did not say "do better" or "shape a clearer policy." We have to win in Afghanistan. Did...