We can of course take it on faith that Barack Obama is a Muslim socialist bent on destroying America. That faith rests, after all, on the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, who couldn't possibly be rich con men selling made-up hysteria, because really, what evidence is...

In five seconds, you will be creating better-looking documents: Five, four, three, two --

Stop centering your text!

-- One. There, now your documents look better.

Centered text looks OK for some special uses, such as page titles or formal invitations, but not much else. Here's why:

After fighting the stimulus that spared our economy from disaster, the Party of No has threatened new ones in the form of the debt ceiling crisis, the second debt ceiling crisis, and now the sequester crisis.

It has the approval numbers to show for it. At what point...

Remember the old normal?

In the the old normal, the one most of us grew up in, lying was a deal-breaker. Lie repeatedly on a job application? You don't get the job. Lie after you're hired? You're fired.

So how is it possible that Mitt Romney can even be considered...

What could be worse for Mitt Romney's prospects than the "rolling calamity" that is the story of his campaign? Apparently nothing -- not even changing the subject to his long-concealed tax returns.

And changing the subject is of course the point. With the surprise release of...

This has been going on for weeks now. Mitt Romney screws up -- say, by picking Ayn Rand fan Paul Ryan as his running mate. I write about it.

Then, Romney screws up again -- but so soon after the earlier screw-up, that what I just wrote is...

Chris Matthews broke a cardinal rule of phony-balance journalism on Morning Joe Monday: He stated an obvious but awkward truth -- in this case, that Mitt Romney is a race-baiter. (Watch the video below.)

Birther jokes. The false claim that the president has ended the work requirement for...

Washington, D.C. -- Following a weekend during which a Republican Senate candidate asserted that only rape victims who wanted it will get pregnant, news surfaced that a Republican Congressional delegation to Israel took part in a skinny-dip in the Sea of Galilee, and Mitt...

What we love says a lot about who we are. That's why, in getting to know someone, we're quick to ask about their favorite books, music, food and the like.

So what does it say about reputed brainiac Paul Ryan that he loves* the work of Ayn Rand, the inventor...

As I said last time, Mitt Romney, in trying to avoid picking a Sarah Palin as his running mate, has done exactly that with Paul Ryan.

Like Palin did for John McCain, Ryan represents a transparent plea for credibility with the Republican base. And while Ryan is obviously...

Of all the obvious blunders Republican leaders didn't want Mitt Romney to make, it was choosing a Sarah Palin as his candidate for vice president. The possibility scared even Dick Cheney.

But that's exactly what Romney has done.

What, you say? Paul Ryan, like him or not, is...

Last time, I talked about why Mitt Romney didn't care if, as has happened so many times, he was caught lying and flip-flopping. Since then, we've seen his five-network sprint trying to explain Bain Capital, indicating maybe he's starting to care now. Here, I'll...

Mitt Romney knows we know he's lying. Even the Wall Street Journal editorial page has noticed. The thing is, Romney doesn't care. He doesn't think he has to.

That's because Romney's campaign is the purest example ever seen -- a reductio ad absurdum, really -- of...

If you do a search for advice on leadership, you'll find a lot of lists:

• "Top 10 Things All Leaders Must Know"
• "Leadership Advice from 5 Top Executives"
• "The 7 Deadly Sins of Leadership," etc, etc.

I almost always find these lists worth reading. But at the same time, I find that...

One day the smart, pragmatic business people supporting Mitt Romney will wake up and ask themselves why it has to cost this much to sell him to the American people.

It should be an obvious question. When you have to spend a fortune on advertising -- especially on

From physicists at the University of New South Wales and Purdue University, via the New York Times, comes news of dramatic progress:

The group of physicists... said they had laid the groundwork for a futuristic quantum computer... built from devices called qubits that exploit the quirky properties of...

In the wake of the latest celebrity casualty, here comes the conventional wisdom that "the pressures of fame" drive stars to substance abuse.

I'm sure that the pressures are intense. But at best they only tell half the story. We don't talk enough about the other half:...

On Facebook Sunday, I came across a video shared by a friend whose musical taste I respect, so I gave it a click, and had that wonderful experience of discovering something great and unexpected. It's three members of a female Swedish choral group named Erato singing -- beautifully --

In their struggle to preserve balance in covering U.S. politics, mainstream reporters have long since gotten used to tying themselves in knots. How else to maintain even-handedness while the right offers creationism against evolution, energy company propaganda against climate science, and trickle-down economics vs. actual economics?

Now, though, growing Republican...

The New York Times says President Obama's re-election team is debating the best way to win the all important independent vote. I hope they'll bear in mind that "independent" doesn't mean "generic" and "bipartisan" doesn't mean "bland."

I believe the president has been right to pursue bipartisan solutions,...