Alex Altman

Former President Bill Clinton’s endorsement of Andrew Romanoff in Colorado’s Aug. 10 Democratic Senate primary sent shock waves through the media this afternoon. Clinton’s decision to buck the White House — which is backing sitting Sen. Michael Bennet — and support Romanoff’s underdog bid is the sort of juicy morsel pundits feast …

A few month ago I posted a piece I wrote about a controversial proposal to construct a federal anti-terrorism training center on a rural patch of Maryland’s Eastern Shore. At the time, opponents of the project–which was to receive at least $70 million in stimulus funding and provide hundreds of jobs–seemed locked in an uphill battle. …

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that Second Amendment rights apply to cities and states as well as federal law, and can be invoked to challenge local restrictions on gun ownership. The vote in McDonald v. Chicago was 5-4, with Justice Kennedy joining the Court’s conservative wing. Justice Alito penned the majority opinion, which …

Janet Malcolm’s “The Journalist and the Murderer” begins with a famous maxim I suspect every reporter has mulled at some point. “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible,” she writes. It’s a provocative thesis, but I don’t buy it. There are …

President Barack Obama meets with his national security team on Afghanistan and Pakistan in the Situation Room of the White House, June 23, 2010. Seated at the table are, from left, General David Petraeus, head of US Central Command, Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, …

A few weeks Dale Peterson, a candidate for agriculture commissioner in Alabama, set a new bar in the race for 2010’s best campaign spot. To a score of patriotic music, the candidate–astride his horse–cradled a rifle, railed against “illegals” and called his opponent a “dummy.” Peterson’s bid was thwarted, but now he’s back with a new …

As Bryan noted, one of the fruits of President Obama’s meeting with BP officials today is the announcement that the company will sink $20 billion into an escrow account that will be used to pay out costs associated with the Deepwater Horizon disaster. BP will fund the account in installments over the next three and a half years. Here are …

“We care about the small people.”

–Carl-Henric Svanberg, BP’s chairman, promising that the British energy giant would meet its obligations to the residents of the Gulf Coast.

We all know much of politics is theater–the art of convincing constituents that you’ve correctly diagnosed a problem, that you share their interests and feel their pain. This has been truer than usual in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The federal government lacks the technical expertise to cap a leak spewing a mile …

In the dead-tree edition out tomorrow, Michael has a piece about Nikki Haley and the fusillade of attacks that helped propel her candidacy in South Carolina’s Republican gubernatorial primary. Yet for all the fireworks on the GOP side, the Democratic primary was the true shocker, as a question mark named Alvin Greene defeated a …

Bryan Walsh’s magazine cover story this week takes another look at the Gulf of Mexico disaster, assessing the state of the spill and unpacking its causes and ramifications. Many industry insiders and people familiar with BP’s corporate practices have echoed a strikingly similar thought: that this tragedy was far more likely to befall BP …