From the moment that former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle took his name out of the running for HHS Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius has been the name that everyone is talking about. And it’s easy to see the appeal: She is an enormously popular Democratic Governor in a state where Republicans outnumber Democrats two to one. (And has …

The administration announced late this afternoon that Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius has accepted Obama’s nomination to be HHS Secretary. The finalization of her selection comes just in time for Sebelius to participate in the White House summit on health reform early next week.

It’s hard out there for a Wizards player. The team re-signs Gilbert Arenas to a $111 million contract only to see him sit out the season (again) with a knee injury. With a half-dozen other players injured throughout the season, the Wizards win all of 11 games by the All-Star Break. A true basketball fan gets elected president, but the …

Focus on the Family announced today that founder James Dobson is officially stepping down as chair of the organization. It’s a move that’s long been in the works–six years ago, Dobson resigned his position as president and CEO of Focus, and internally the organization has been paving the way for current CEO Jim Daly to take full

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It’s Friday afternoon, and this Brooks Kraft shot from our White House Photo Blog seemed to offer some good possibilities for a caption contest:

The reviews of Bobby Jindal’s rebuttle to Obama’s address to the joint session of Congress have not been exactly, um, raves. And,Politico’s Ben Smith scoops it just keeps getting worse: apparently the story that Jindal told “during Katrina” was, actually, a few days later and didn’t unfold the way he remembered it.

Update:
If you …

Every week Katherine Lanpher talks with TIME business and economics reporters to sort through the headlines, forecasts, news and numbers to help readers/listeners weather these challenging times. This week I did a spot on TIME’s new financial toolkit to talk about Obama’s budgetary ambitions and the challenges he’ll face in …

Remember how much grief Al Gore got for claiming in the first 2000 presidential debate that he had accompanied then-FEMA Director James Lee Witt to a fire disaster scene in Texas? (It turned out that while Gore had indeed been on many disaster visits with Lee, he hadn’t accompanied him on the one in question.) The story helped build a …

CAMP LEJEUNE, N.C.– Moments before Barack Obama announced his new plan for Iraq Friday, the president made a “courtesy call” to his predecessor, George W. Bush, to brief him on the new military strategy, said spokesman Robert Gibbs.

Earlier in the day, Obama also called Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki to brief him on the …

Just a few weeks back when Obama asked Democratic leaders to remove a family-planning provision from the stimulus bill, some people–I’m looking at you, Cecile Richards–declared the move “a betrayal of millions of low-income women” and despaired of ever expanding access to Medicaid-covered family planning services.

Turn with me to …

The good people at public radio’s This American Life, who authored one of the best journalistic explanations of the financial collapse, have another installment coming this weekend, an hour long program called “Bad Bank.”

As a tease today, NPR posted a story about a memo written by an economist at Deutsche Bank explaining why …