That President Obama had a very good week seems beyond dispute. His groundbreaking speech in Cairo Thursday was praised worldwide. Meanwhile, NBC's Brian Williams aired a fawning two-hour look inside the Obama White House that the Daily Show rightly compared to an episode of MTV's Real World. But when Newsweek's Evan Thomas described Obama's stratospheric […]

When the New York Times in December 2005 revealed President Bush's program of illegal domestic surveillance by the NSA, reaction from the White House and its Republican allies was swift - and furious. "These politically motivated leaks," Pete Hoekstra declared, "must stop." But now desperate to defend at any cost Bush's regime of detainee torture, […]

If Barack Obama's speech in Egypt is being criticized by both Osama Bin Laden and Mitt Romney, the President must be doing something right. After all, as Mitt's rich history of jaw-dropping mistakes and demeaning statements about Islam suggests, Governor Romney is perhaps the person least qualified to pontificate on American outreach to the Muslim […]

Former Vice President Dick Cheney's acknowledgement yesterday that there was "never any evidence" that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks on the United States was doubly surprising. The first shock was that for one of the few times during his legacy reclamation project, Cheney told the truth. And second, the leading members of Team […]

During his appearance Monday at the National Press Club, former Vice President Dick Cheney again stated his support for same-sex marriage. Understandably supporting the rights of his own daughter Mary, Cheney proclaimed, "Freedom means freedom for everyone," adding, "I think people ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish." Which […]

Coming just weeks after DHS issued its supposedly controversial warning over the growing right-wing terror threat in the United States, the assassination of Dr. George Tiller has reignited the now white-hot debate regarding anti-abortion terrorism. While the American Prospect's Adam Serwer concluded, "the murder of George Tiller is undoubtedly terrorism," Michelle Malkin predictably rolled her […]

As I've noted before, the distance between the incendiary rhetoric of the Republican Party and anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-government and above all anti-abortion extremism is a growing ever shorter. With Sunday's murder of Kansas abortion provider George Tiller, that disturbing dynamic deserves deeper examination. After all, while even arch-conservative Attorney General John Ashcroft once deemed such […]

That Republicans are apoplectic about President Obama's "date night" in New York is pathetically predictable. That the GOP and its conservative water carriers remain silent about George W. Bush's record-breaking presidential vacation time is less surprising still. To be sure, some will quibble with Obama's decision to fulfill his pledge to his wife that they […]

On Friday, the New York Times profiled a group of Harvard Business School students who have taken an "MBA oath" to act responsibly and "serve the greater good." The ethical pledge of "responsible value creation" can't come too soon for America's future business leaders. After all, a February 2009 Marist poll found that in the […]

Back in 1995, Newt Gingrich famously concluded menstruation rendered women unfit for combat roles in the military. Now just two days after Gingrich branded Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor "racist," convicted Watergate felon and right-wing radio host G. Gordon Liddy agreed that both of Newt's arguments disqualify Sotomayor. Period. After echoing Tom Tancredo's slander that […]