Michael Crowley

This afternoon Barack Obama welcomed the new British prime minister, David Cameron, to the White House, in a meeting the two men billed in a largely news-free press availability afterwards as a reaffirmation of the venerable US-UK “special relationship.” Neither man bit on questions about a possible investigation into BP’s role in the …

No one (that I saw) seemed to pick up on this over the weekend, but New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg– whose name perennially circulates as a potential White House contender, to varying degrees of credulity–recently told an audience that he’s not thinking about the White House:

“Every one of my positions cuts out half the

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It is sometimes said – most recently by the Senate Democratic leader, Harry Reid — that Barack Obama needs to be more confrontational with the Republicans (and particularly filibuster-happy Senate Republicans) determined to thwart his congressional agenda. When it comes to the fierce fight over unemployment insurance extensions, Obama …

Yesterday I wrote about the sharp conservatism of Mitt Romney’s attack on Barack Obama’s START treaty with the Russians. Romney approaches the treaty’s fine print with the attitude of a Cold War hawk, i.e. that the Russians are nefarious enemies who should be treated with extreme mistrust. To Romney, every ambiguity in the treaty’s fine …

Yesterday Mitt Romney blasted Barack Obama via a Washington Post op-ed denouncing Obama’s nuclear Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with Russia as the president’s “worst foreign policy mistake yet.” Romney complains that the Russians “badly out-negotiated” Obama and came out with a decided strategic advantage in the treaty, …

You couldn’t have made this up:

Up to four would-be tycoons can compete at exploring for oil, building platforms and laying pipelines to their home countries.

But BP Offshore Oil Strike players must also avoid the dreaded ‘hazard cards’, which state: ‘Blow-out! Rig damaged. Oil slick clean-up costs. Pay

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You don’t have to be a hard-core hoops fan to know that NBA star LeBron James, one of the most famous athletes in the world, is currently a free agent deciding where he’ll take his astounding game next. Teams in several major cities–including New York, Miami and Chicago–are courting James with massive salary offers and local sales …

A police investigation into your private life is almost never good news. But in this case, it might be what Al Gore needs. If his firm denials are true, he’s been pinned in a miserable spot, with an accuser whose story is all over the Internet and the tabloids–but with no impartial third party capable of exonerating him. (Update: As a …

Senate hearings are now underway to confirm David Petraeus as the new top American commander in Afghanistan. (See Mark Thompson’s curtain-raiser here.) Here are three questions I’d love to see the general address:

—Was Marjah a mistake? The main event in the war this year was the offensive to flush the Taliban from the Marjah …

It’s one of the most important debates–perhaps the most important–underway in Washington right now: How much should the government spend to stimulate the sputtering U.S. economy, even at the expense of driving up our alarmingly large deficit? Senate Republicans, having had more than enough of federal spending, this week used a …