Obama Ponders Outreach to Elements of the Taliban - New York Times (3/8/09): Mr. Obama rode to the White House partly on his savvy use of new technology, and he has a staff-written blog on his presidential Web site. Even so, he said he did not find blogs to be reliable, citing the economy as one exa...

(1) First came Bushworld attempts to suppress public scrutiny of questionable decisions taken in the name of national security, most of which involved violence to the constitution and/or other laws of the land. Then came multiple instances of the Obama administration’s full-throated support of...

It’s getting so that this kind of thing hardly qualifies as news any more: The Justice Department is defending a provision in a 2008 surveillance law that provides legal immunity to telecommunications companies that cooperated with the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance progr...

A lawyer for Guantanamo detainees is alleging that abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay has worsened sharply since President Barack Obama took office: Abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay has worsened sharply since President Barack Obama took office as prison guards “get their kicks in” ...

Think Progress gets all triumphant with regards to this bit from Obama’s speech: [W]e have lived through an era where too often, short-term gains were prized over long-term prosperity; where we failed to look beyond the next payment, the next quarter, or the next election. A surplus became an ...

At some point you just throw up your hands and go: “Who the hell is Barack Obama, and why does he keep taking these weird stands that don’t seem to make any damn sense at all?” It will be interesting, no doubt, to see what the proponents of the Grandmaster-of-Three-Dimensional-Ches...

There was all that nonsense during the campaign about Barack Obama’s citizenship. Nonsense that centered around whether or not he has a valid U.S. birth certificate. Nonsense that everybody thought had been pretty much put to rest: According to the Associated Press, state officials in Hawaii c...

Last year, the Justice Department’s ethics watchdog unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility had launched an investigation into the conduct of senior lawyers who approved waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics. Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff reported over the weekend that...

Bipartisanship Isn’t So Easy, Obama Discovers - New York Times (2/14/09): On the day before the big vote, President Obama took a freshman Republican member of Congress aboard Air Force One to visit Illinois. Before an audience in Representative Aaron Schock’s district, Mr. Obama praised him as â...

Yesterday, Sarabeth caught me by surprise with this: Everyone simply assumes that the tax cuts were inserted to attract Republican votes. But there’s really no evidence of that, is there? None whatsoever. We assume they were inserted for that reason, because we assume that no one on the Democr...