George W. Bush is more concerned with heart than any cardiologist. As predictable as the weekly Tom DeLay indictment, there was Bush at his Tuesday press conference stressing his deep knowledge of the Heart of Harriet Miers. (Sounds like the name of an old-time radio soap opera).

...

Business schools may design entire new courses around the Cheney-esque lesson of Harriet Miers' nomination: If you want a job, head the search committee.

Beyond this obvious moral, what are we to make of Miers? The relevant question is not whether she would be the most liberal jurist since...

Sick puppy that I am, I was thrilled to discover that a high-minded presidential commission, led by Jimmy Carter and James Baker, cares about the schedule of presidential primaries for 2008. Just reading that prior sentence may tell you more than you need to know about my passions which,...

Add the Stephen Hadley snafu to the long annals of failed Bush diplomatic initiatives. Last Saturday national security advisor Hadley and deputy White House chief of staff Joe Hagin left the presidential bubble in Crawford to hold a surprise 45-minute roadside meeting with Cindy Sheehan. Did the two senior White...

When social psychologist Leon Festinger developed his landmark theory of "cognitive dissonance" in the 1950s, he had to hang out for months with a UFO cult awaiting the end of the world to find real-life examples. Festinger’s When Prophesy Fails recounts the mental contortions that these the-end-is-nigh true...

Joining the political fad to name legislation after the first names of innocent victims, I want to propose the “Matt and Judy Law.” No, this is not a federal shield law, though that too would be a worthy tribute to the courage of Judy Miller and Matt Cooper. What...

Wednesday afternoon a federal judge told Matt Cooper of Time and Judy Miller of the New York Times that he would send them to jail in a week for contempt. Unless their attorneys miraculously succeed with desperation legal arguments, these two brave reporters will be punished for the age-old...

With Americans in turmoil over the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson framed his 1968 State of the Union Address around this rhetorical question, "Why, then, this restlessness?" Three months later, that same restlessness forced LBJ to abandon his dreams of another term in the White House.

There is no better gauge...

This is another week when an overwrought Senate will loudly dither over the endless saga of John Bolton's nomination to the UN ambassadorship once graced by the likes of Adlai Stevenson and Pat Moynihan. Judging from the signs and portents (okay, I've been reading newspapers not entrails), Senate Republicans on...

Despite the mockery of groups like Billionaires for Bush, not all ten-digit-arians are loyal Republicans. In fact, no billionaire makes the president feel as bilious as George Soros, the ardent funder of defoliate-Bush campaign groups and the inspiration of many statewide medical marijuana initiatives. When it comes to White...

Richard Nixon understood a fundamental truth of governing: No political promise tops a pledge to defeat death. In his 1971 State of the Union Address -- a speech that ironically may well have been the high-water mark of big-government liberalism -- Nixon put the federal government at the forefront...

The HuffPost is just two weeks old and it has already claimed its first casualty – me. For the last five days I have been afflicted with that dread malady known as Bloggers Block, a disease even more crippling than the fearsome Pundit Paralysis. Arianna, please understand that it is...

TV networks have ratings-driven “sweeps weeks.” Upmarket newspapers, in contrast, go for “sleep weeks” when the guilt-ridden find themselves nodding off in the midst of a 97-part series on a Very Important Subject. For readers of a certain, dare I say it, social class, Sunday brought with it the daunting...

In a delicately phrased, non-adversarial posting, John Fund smartly saluted this collective blog for reaching beyond the predictable, mostly liberal, verities of the Bos-Wash corridor. He notes that the Northeastern Zip codes of the omnipresent “Metroliner pundits” leave them ill-equipped sometimes “to understand why the rest of the country...

Department of Shameless Place Dropping: I was at Fenway Park Wednesday basking in the sun-dappled sport of afternoon baseball when Washington went amok over a Junior Birdman-piloted Cessna invading the president’s security cordon. Seen from afar, this entire Code Red extravaganza is a reminder that we live in Hair-Trigger America...

I did it again this morning -- not buying a newspaper.

This renunciation is akin to Tom DeLay forsaking golf junkets. Here I am a recovering newspaper columnist, a print-and-paper junkie, a fellow at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard's Kennedy School ostensibly concocting cosmic thoughts about the future of journalism,...

Twenty years ago, during my decade as a news-magazine writer, I attended a whither-the-future-of-the-magazine Newsweek conference in Puerto Rico. What I remember from that confab (aside from my colleague from the Washington bureau who brazenly tried to filch my complimentary Newsweek bathrobe) was that then-editor Rick Smith talked about the...