You've probably heard all the good ones about GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum by now. The one about his "Google problem." The one about the "man-on-dog sex" (prompting the greatest journalistic response ever, when the reporter told Santorum that he was "sort of freaking me out.")...

This is really weird -- but Glenn Beck and I are upset about the same thing this week. Less surprisingly, we got to the same place by very different routes, and in the case of the deposed former king of all right-wing media, Beck conveniently overlooks his own critical role...

It started with a bridge. It always starts with a bridge. Take a look around to Selma, Alabama. In 1965, John Lewis and his young revolutionary cohorts didn't march with the lawyer-drafted language for a voting rights law in their pocket. Yes, the civil rights movement of the Deep South...

I attended my first revolution this week. I have to confess I was a little nervous as I walked closer to Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, the epicenter for this once unimaginable American Autumn. For one thing, I'd been tweeting and blogging about Occupy Wall Street since the second day...

You could make the argument that the Tea Party movement is the most potent force in American politics today. After all, the evidence is everywhere -- especially in Washington, where Republican lawmakers pushed the previously-unheard-of, tea-flavored notion that disaster aid for hurricane victims can only be paid for...

Talk about irony. The summer of 2011 will be remembered as a moment that Glenn Beck left the national stage -- or moved to its fringe, anyway -- and Texas Gov. Rick Perry stepped up front and center, becoming the instant frontrunner in a muddled GOP primary field...

For more than three decades, as global press baron Rupert Murdoch amassed more and more power over both the journalism and the politics of the Western world -- usually to the detriment of both -- the question lingered in the air. What, if anything, could possibly bring down the empire...

Recently I've been thinking a lot about Barack Obama, Donald Trump... and Christopher Abreu.

OK, Trump and Obama you probably know about. But who's Christopher Abreu? He's a senior at the University of Pennsylvania, about to graduate this spring with honors. But last week, he wrote

It seems like yesterday that Glenn Beck was the king of all right-wing media -- maybe because it was yesterday, practically. It was just last summer, after all, that Beck graced -- OK, maybe that's not the right word -- the cover of the New York Times Magazine...

In 2009 the star attraction at the conservative gabfest CPAC was Rush Limbaugh, and in 2010 it was Glenn Beck. This year's scene-stealer couldn't make it in person. That would be Ronald Reagan:

A smiling life-size wax figure of President Ronald Reagan watched over Friday's banquet, continuous loops...

First of all: A necessary disclosure that most long-time readers of my Philadelphia Daily News blog Attytood already know, which is that more than three decades ago, I went to high school with Keith Olbermann; in fact he was the first editor, on our...

When I arrived in Arizona last March, my bones were still practically numb from the snowiest winter in the modern history of my native Northeast. There was radiant sunshine that made the Valley of the Sun feel like a warm soaking bath, bordered on my far horizon by New-Age red...

You've probably heard it a million times: Elections have consequences. Do they ever! In 2008, the coalition that elected Barack Obama and a sizable Democratic majority had little doubt that one consequence would be a dramatic shift on climate change --, that after eight years of denial from...

I said then, and I will repeat now, that no single speech can eradicate years of mistrust. But I believed then, and I believe today, that we do have a choice. We can choose to be defined by our differences, and give in to a future of suspicion and mistrust....

For me -- and I think for a lot of people -- the moment that "sanity" left the building in American discourse came in late 2002 and early 2003, when it became clear that Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Paul Halfwits, and their minions were dead set on invading Iraq....

We are going to protect our young, we are going to protect the next generation of Americans, so the Mama Grizzlies are growling, we are rising up on our hind legs and saying no, we are going to change course, we need that real hope, we need that real change.

It's 11 p.m. on a Tuesday night in the intensive care unit at Bryn Mawr Hospital outside of Philadelphia. The lights are out in the hallway, and it's relatively quiet -- relatively. The one patient who repeatedly screamed out "Help me!" every hour on the hour has been moved upstairs,...

Suddenly, the political world is all a-twitter about Karl Rove's Tea Party problem, or is it the Tea Party's Karl Rove problem? In the space of a few days, the man who was "Bush's Brain" in a corrupt White House and is now a $50 million bagman for...

As individuals, you could not paint the members of the so-called Tea Party Movement with a broad brush, nor would you want to. As a journalist, I traveled from Arizona to Massachusetts, talking to the rank-and-file of the right-wing backlash against the Obama presidency in order to understand what was...

Last March, the week that the health care reform was signed into law, I plopped down on a sofa and watched Fox News Channel's Glenn Beck for an hour with two of his biggest fans. I was nearing the end of an unlikely, months-long odyssey -- at least for someone...