Today's magic number must be 26 -- as in 26 percent.

Because as if you ever needed proof that 26 percent of America -- that would be one out of every four people you see walking down the street, plus someone else's right ankle -- is totally bat-guano out-of-their-freakin'-minds crazy,...

Philadelphia's been a punchline for as long as I can remember -- long before most of us were around, even. After all, it was way back in 1940, in a movie with Mae West called My Little Chickadee, that W.C. Fields famously stood on the gallows and told his...

There's been a lot of hoopla about secret hidden-camera videos of low-level employees of the anti-poverty group ACORN lately -- some of them quite embarrassing. I haven't seen any video yet from "real reporters" James O'Keefe or Hannah Giles of an ACORN employee who works in the agency's Charlotte,...

When I was college a long time ago, I read a book called Subliminal Seduction, which chronicled how Madison Avenue tricked your sub-consciousness into craving vodka (as if a trick were needed there) by placing sexy silhouettes inside ice cubes. For some reason that reminds me a lot of...

I have to start with a confession -- I did not grow up in a Walter Cronkite household. I'm not sure why -- I was just a kid and didn't have control of the remote...I mean, knob...back then. One fact that's been buried in many of the obits that

Robert McNamara died today at age 93. As Secretary of Defense for Presidents John F. Kennedy and more notably Lyndon Johnson in the mid-1960s, it was McNamara who oversaw America's tragic military buildup in Vietnam. That made McNamara -- right up until today's news -- a vivid anti-icon...

It was called the "Third Album," by the Jackson Five -- but it was the very first album I ever owned. I'm pretty sure it was a Christmas present in 1970, when I was 11 years old and was ready for ownership of some of the static-ridden tunes I'd...

We came together. We promised ourselves that we would never forget. On September 12th, and for a short time after that, we really promised ourselves that we would focus on the things that were important -- our family, our friends, the eternal principles that allowed America to become the world's...

Reporting, though, is only part of the equation: The motto around the Politico newsroom is to "win the morning, win the afternoon"--by which editors mean that Politico's stories need to be the most talked-about and cited in that day's news cycle.

-- The New Republic, "The Scoop Factory," Feb....

It's so true that freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose -- and so our brush here with terminal illness is occasionally truly liberating for America's newsrooms. This week, in fact, it seems that journalists are rushing to admit something -- openly in one case, tacitly in another...

Not that long ago, I wrote about the bond between the Daily News and its unique readership here in Philadelphia, which surveys have shown tend to be much more blue-collar and more African-American , among other things, than the typical American newspaper customer. The numbers and the anecdotal evidence...

The former president is certainly a suitable subject for public debate. His supporters credit him with forcing down the Iron Curtain, so it is odd that some of them have helped create the Soviet-style chill embedded in the idea that we, as a nation, will not allow critical portrayals of...

The most talked-about journalism of this week wasn't produced in the New York Times, CNN, Newsweek or NPR. It was Jon Stewart's epic, eight-minute takedown on Wednesday night's Daily Show of CNBC's clueless, in-the-tank reporting of inflatable bubbles and blowhard CEOs as the U.S. and world economies slowly slid...

Except for that election thing last November (oh yeah, and that primary thing earlier last year) I guess President Barack Obama just can't win. For the first month of his presidency, his critics said that by telling the truth about the devastated U.S. economy, he was spreading way too much...

Are you frustrated that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and their minions plotted torture tactics, illegal wiretapping,, political manipulation of the Justice Department and other alledgedly unlawful acts inside the White House - and seem to have gotten away with it? You should be. Are you looking for someone...

Roughly this time a year ago, inspired by the insanity that was the 2008 presidential race, I started working on Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future. With a target publication date right before the Gipper's 98th birthday (or Reagan...

Jan. 20, 2009, was such a transformative day in American politics that it was easy to forget it also marked a 20th anniversary as well. The inauguration of President Barack Obama also meant it was two decades to the exact day since Ronald Reagan last sat in the Oval Office....

After Ronald Reagan won his first election and took the oath of office as California's governor on Jan. 2, 1967, he sent a powerful signal about the mixture of politics and Hollywood-style fantasy that he was starting to invent -- by hiring the Walt Disney Company to produce his...