In ways large and small, Americans are reminded almost daily of the wisdom of their rejection of John McCain last November. Now you can add the Iran unrest and the Letterman-Palin flap to the growing list. The same John McCain who in April 2007 sang in jest "bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran" on Monday […]

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 […]

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 […]

Earlier this month, George Washington University professor and New Republic legal analyst Jeffrey Rosen turned to anonymous sources in a blistering - and controversial - attack on Judge Sonia Sotomayor's judicial temperament. Now just days after the raging right predictably made Rosen's smears a centerpiece in the battle against Sotomayor, the mainstream media is following […]

From the beginning, the feigned outrage among social conservatives over Barack Obama's invitation to deliver the commencement address at Notre Dame was a political device, a manufactured controversy designed to create a rift between the President and the American Catholic community which overwhelmingly supports him. As the data showed, there was no conflict between Obama […]

On Wednesday, former beauty pageant contestant Sarah Palin rushed to the defense of another, proclaiming of Carrie Prejean, "I can relate as a liberal target myself." But by insisting "those who disagree with her deny her protection under the nation's First Amendment Rights," Governor Palin once again revealed her ignorance of the United States Constitution. […]

At the end of the day, evaluating the Bush administration's program of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques is like a three-part exam. Was it legal? Was it moral? Was it uniquely effective? If the answer isn't "yes" to each and every one of those three questions, the Bush regime of detainee torture cannot be justified. Sadly […]

That the right-wing blogosphere panned Barack Obama's attempts last night at presidential humor as "lame" and "mean-spirited" comes as no surprise. That conservatives were apoplectic when Wanda Sykes crossed the line in lampooning the Palin family's method failures and likened Rush Limbaugh to a terrorist was even less so. But to conclude that Saturday's White […]

On Monday, the New Republic's prominent legal analyst Jeffrey Rosen published a rumor-filled assessment of Obama Supreme Court short-lister, Sonia Sotomayor. And by Thursday, as ThinkProgress reported, what Glenn Greenwald deemed Rosen's "anonymous smears" and "a model of shoddy journalism" were being parroted throughout the media. But as to why Rosen took a tabloid approach […]

This was not a proud week for the American mental health profession. On Thursday, ABC News documented the essential role of two $1,000 a day psychologists contracted by the CIA to architect its detainee waterboarding program. And on Friday, Harvard-trained psychiatrist turned right-wing water carrier Charles Krauthammer rationalized the Bush torture regime for his readers […]