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It has taken nearly all of House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman’s energies and patience the last five months to finally get to the point this week where he thinks he has enough support from conservative Dems on his own committee to pass sweeping climate change legislation. Enter Colin Peterson, the chairman of the …

Yesterday I wrote that all three other accounts of the September 2002 CIA briefings on EITs (Goss, Shelby, Graham) seemed to support Speaker Pelosi’s statement that they were not informed that the practices had already been used. I stand corrected. Apparently Senator Richard Shelby’s office put out a clarification to his original …

It went down. Oh yeah, it did. Big time.

The president spoke for a long time in a big room. And then the former vice president spoke for a long time in a smaller room across town. We’ll be talking about it for hours, or at least until something else happens. The two men, Grandpa Cheney and Kid Obama, totally disagreed. But we already …

Here’s a story I wrote for TIME.com on the Republican proposal unveiled yesterday.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, speaking to reporters this morning at a breakfast sponsored by the Kaiser Family Foundation, sounded extraordinarily optimistic about the prospects for bipartisan support of the health care reform bill that his committee will begin writing in mid-June. “Very high. Very, very high,” he said, …

I think the Obama and Cheney speeches this morning pretty much speak for themselves. From the very first–the notion that those who oppose his policies saw 9/11 as a “one-off”–Cheney proceeded to mischaracterize, oversimplify and distort the views of those who saw his policies as extreme and unconstitutional, to say nothing of the …

Obama, in his national security speech this morning, dispensed with one of the stupidest fear-mongering arguments made in the Gitmo debate that Joe has rightly deemed “political nonsense”:

Let me begin by disposing of one argument as plainly as I can: we are not going to release anyone if it would endanger our national security, nor

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Toward a middle ground in the disputes between lawyers and soldiers.

1. Nancy Gibbs and I are out with a new cover story on Michelle Obama. (Subscribe to the magazine, already. $1.99 for 6 weeks.) Our full 50-minute interview with Michelle can be read here. There is also another great Callie Shell photo essay here.

2. David Axelrod thinks all this Cheney noise only underscores the reasons NOT to pursue …

First L’Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican newspaper, ran an article giving Obama’s first 100 days a tentative thumbs-up. Then, as conservative Catholics in the U.S. were wringing their hands about the horror of Barack Obama’s scheduled appearance at Notre Dame, the newspaper–and the Vatican in general–was conspicuously silent. …

Over at TPM, Brian Beutler is reporting that part of the problem has been the Obama Administration’s failure to get its act together on this issue. I think there’s something to that. Yesterday, Jane Harman made a similar point in an interview with me, saying that Obama should have addressed all the various asymmetrical warfare …

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has had a tough week — much of it her own making. But in looking at the substance of the accusations, it increasingly looks like she was right. Porter Goss was careful to parse his words in the conditional future tense when talking about what, exactly, he and Pelosi were briefed on in September 2002:

Today,

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The usual neoconservative malingerers have been hammering me about a quote I gave to Politico, regarding Charles Krauthammer’s limitations as a columnist.

Obviously, I didn’t mean to imply second-class status for disabled people. On the contrary, the distance and perspective that comes with physical deficits often leads to …