Apparently, they haven’t taken it away from him yet. This morning’s second pool report tells us: President-elect Obama left Regents Park apartments at 9:06 am. He was wearing a dark jacket and pants and a White Sox baseball cap. He carried a folded copy of The New York Times in his left hand and what [...]

Our cover this week features a superb story by Amanda Ripley on the fascinating, controversial 37-year-old woman who has been brought in to save the troubled public school system in the nation’s capital.: Rhee has promised to make Washington the highest-performing urban school district in the nation, a prospect that, if realized, could transform the [...]

Amidst all the bad news from India, there is good news this morning from Baghdad, where the Iraqi parliament has approved the Status of Forces Agreement, which represents the beginning of the end of the U.S. military presence there. All troops are to be withdrawn by 2012, but more significantly, all U.S. troops will be [...]

Matt Yglesias thinks that the Obama transition has a different book from Doris Goodwin’s Team of Rivals as its blueprint. Maybe so, but Obama sure does talk a lot about Lincoln (and Goodwin). In any case, after one of the best run campaigns I’ve covered, this is now one of the best-run transitions. Especially notable [...]

Building on my post below about the new Obama national security team, Aaron David Miller has a smart column in the Washington Post today about another area in which the Obama foreign policy is likely to differ from that of Bush–and also from what McCain was proposing. He believes that the first step toward a [...]

You have to laugh about the denizens of the political right who are shocked at Barack Obama’s moderation: who were they expecting for Secretary of Defense, Louis Farrakhan? Jeremiah Wright at State? Much of this is a result of the right drinking its own koolaid: the mythology of Obama being some sort of crypto-lefty, “associated” [...]

Happy Thanksgiving to All! This one, from Time.com’s Thanksgiving Essentials photo essay, seems like it is just begging for a caption. Commenters?

At Barack Obama’s news conference this morning, he declared: “At this defining moment for our nation, the old ways of thinking and acting just won’t do. We are called to seek fresh thinking and bold new ideas.” So it was striking to see that the person standing next to him was 81-year-old Paul Volcker, a [...]

Back in 2003, three rich families–Soros, Lewis, Sandler–decided to spend a few million dollars to create a new think tank in Washington. (They also recruited their friends.) It wasn’t a lot of money. With a budget of $10 million or so when it started, the annual budget of the Center for American Progress now hovers [...]