Nancy Gibbs argues that Sarah Palin’s daughter is indeed a good spokeswoman about the realities of teen parenthood:

One of the few things that just about all sides agree upon in this health care debate is that we need more primary care providers — lots more. And an already serious shortage will only get worse if we succeed in expanding coverage to some or all of the 47 million Americans who now lack [...]

Hope everyone’s enjoying some delicious folded hands-shaped cookies to celebrate the holiday today. The annual observance was started by Harry Truman and signed into existence by presidential proclamation by every president since. Obama signed his proclamation earlier today (full text after the jump). But that hasn’t stopped news outlets from implying that he’s a little, [...]

The President’s FY2010 budget was released this morning (you can search through all 1376 pages here) and among the proposed changes it includes is the elimination of Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE) funding. Under the Bush administration, CBAE grants went to programs that teach kids the only way to prevent pregnancy and avoid sexually-transmitted infections is [...]

It seems that Barack Obama is trying to find a Solomonic path out of the Democrats’ embarrassing, ham-handed attempt to snuff the school voucher program in Washington DC. The President wants to grandfather the program for the 1,716 children who are currently using the vouchers to attend private schools. But if the program is working [...]

On the coming health care battle.

Here’s this week’s cover story by Michael Grunwald on the state of the Grand Ole Party. An interesting tidbit: Joe the Plumber is leaving the Party in disgust. An excerpt: So are the Republicans going extinct? And can the death march be stopped? The Washington critiques of the Republican Party as powerless, leaderless and rudderless [...]

Here’s a little-known fact about the West Wing, which I mention in my new Time.com story about the U.S. Government’s impressive strides into the world of social networking: Most White House officials still can’t access Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc., from their work computers. (Social networks are generally blocked from the computers for security and Presidential [...]

Andrew Sullivan has been having a back-and-forth with the neos over at the Commentary blog about Israel’s nukes. Israel has them, obviously. Sullivan believes, rightly, that if Israel has them, its rivals in the region–Iran, for example–might want some nukes of their own as a deterrent. In one of the sillier bits of prose I’ve [...]