First I read Mike Allen’s Politico Playbook, in which Laura Bush’s chief of staff revealed that the elaborate reception at the White House for Pope Benedict XVI was “a sign of the President and Mrs. Bush’s respect and love and friendship with the Holy Father.”

I cringed.

Then I heard Ed Henry on CNN inform viewers that President …

Someone in Al Qaeda did not attach the coversheet to his TPS report:

“I was very upset by what you did…I obtained 75,000 rupees for you and your family’s trip to Egypt. I learned that you did not submit the voucher to the accountant, and that you made reservations for 40,000 rupees and kept the remainder claiming you have a right to

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Since I posted Hillary Clinton’s attack on Barack Obama last night, I figured it only fair to post Obama’s response, which takes the surprising route of replaying Clinton’s initial attack to defuse it.

We see Clinton attack Obama, get jeered for it, and then we are told she is just more of “the same old Washington politics.” Obama …

Over his long political career, the presumptive GOP nominee for president has only occasionally tried to disguise his relative disinterest in matters economic. His long record as the scourge of pork-barrel spenders notwithstanding, McCain has for the most part held standard-issue GOP positions on subjects ranging from trade to taxes to …

Actual email from actual White House press office… Note: Irony is the weapon of the powerless. So we hope.

From: [spokesperson] @who.eop.gov
Sent: Mon Apr 14 19:13:21 2008
Subject: Speaker Pelosi really knows how to bring people together…

In fact, she has single-handedly managed to unite editorial rooms all across the nation

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Premise 1: Hillary Clinton is willing to do what she says she is going to do–take her campaign to a convention fight.

Premise 2: To win at the convention she has to effectively destroy Barack Obama’s perceived electability among superdelegates.

Premise 3: Clinton is still in it to win it.

Conclusion A: The Democratic race is about to …

• “I mean, he’s young and I think people would take us more seriously with Iraq and everything…Personally, I think we’re either going to have a woman president or we’re going to have a black president, which are both amazing. Right now it’s time for change, and I think both of them are great. But [Obama] is cool. I just think

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The advent of the Internet and reported blogs has brought a raft of “fact-checking” journalism, the sort where reporters like me try to explain exactly why Surrogate X or Party Leader Y is misrepresenting the record of Candidate Z. And this is all well and good. As I have often argued on this blog, it is important for democracies to …

John McCain is basing his next “tour” on nostalgia for the Great Depression?

During the Great Depression, with many millions of Americans out of work and the country suffering the worst economic crisis in our history, there rose from small towns, rural communities, inner cities, a generation of Americans who fought to save the world

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Not horserace so much as spaghetti, really. Check out the chart here. In less than a thousand words, there’s this version: “[T]he margins reported by the four pollsters are scattered from well below to well above the trend line, making their effect on the overall estimate less powerful than it would be if they all agreed on the level of …