Spoiler alert: That day was May 7, 2012... but first a quick history lesson.

Okay, I'm one of those folks who obsesses about the late 1960s and early 1970s, but this time it's really important. Because today that is the rallying cry for any presidential scandal, that this...

So we have this never-ending controversy -- more than 10 years in the making -- over whether or not the media botched its job in covering the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion and, if so, whether that was a big deal, It boiled over this weekend when

Ronald Reagan was born on this date 102 years ago today. He died in June 2004 -- but I've written quite a bit about him in the intervening years, especially while and after I wrote a 2009 book about Reagan and his legacy called "Tear Down This Myth."...

President Obama had a press conference yesterday, billed as the last one of his first term. He was asked the predictable questions, mainly about the debt-and-spending battle with Congress, with one off-speed pitch, a query about a lack of White House diversity and also why he doesn't socialize...

"The election season's overheated political rhetoric is adding fuel to the fire," [said Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center.] The more polarized the political scene, the more people at the extremes." Many Americans are enraged by what they see as America's decline, and opportunistic politicians...

Bob Costas is very, very silly man. The pro football world is still reeling from the tragedy in Kansas City, where 25-year-old Chiefs' linebacker Jovan Belcher shot his girlfriend Kasandra Perkins, the mother of their infant child, and then drove to Arrowhead Stadium and shot and

In the literature and music of our children we are told, to everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven. And for America, the time has come at last. This is the time for truth, not falsehood. In a Democratic nation, no one likes to...

The worst thing about Mitt Romney's condescending Ayn Randian rants down in Boca Raton wasn't the part where he makes the novel argument that it's easier to become president when you're a Hispanic (because... we've had so many of these?) or where he claims that it's...

The last time they held the political conventions in Florida was 1972. It was the summer that I turned 13 years old, and I was falling in love for the first time.

With politics, that is.

Forty years ago, Miami Beach -- a half-day's swamp drive across the sweltering Sunshine...

News item from earlier today:

A high-profile surrogate for Mitt Romney's campaign said Tuesday that he wished President Obama "would learn how to be an American" and argued he doesn't understand the U.S. economy because he spent his youth "smoking something."

Former New Hampshire Gov. John...

At 2 a.m. yesterday, the Watergate scandal turned 40. Maybe it was appropriate that most of America slept through the occasion.

I can tell you exactly where it was the night when it all went down, when those burglars were arrested inside the Watergate Hotel. I was asleep...

The news should have been a total shock. A great American athlete, a feared and revered defensive superstar of the National Football League who walked off the field for the last time just over two years ago, was dead.

He was just 43.

And it was an apparent...

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