In general, I try to avoid writing about stupid campaign coverage because there is so much of it. The vast majority of it is, in fact, stupid on some level. Some of the responsibility falls on Maureen Dowd, whose habit of imbuing impressionistic trivia with cosmic political significance now...

Will the mainstream media cover the John Edwards love child scandal put out there by the National Enquirer? Is it exhibiting a double standard by giving blanket coverage to Larry Craig's bathroom antics, and ignoring Edwards's bathroom bunkering?

Oh, please. Edwards is a politician, which automatically puts...

Why have the media been so reluctant to acknowledge Iraqi PM Maliki's all-but endorsement of Obama's Iraq plans? Only now, after three days of faux-controversy, are they getting it right.

There's the standard left-blogosphere explanation, which I think is pretty accurate: the media grant more credibility to...

Not sure why I bother, but what is it about Maureen Dowd, Barack Obama, and food? Dowd has repeatedly mocked Obama's "abstemious" tastes and how these set him apart from the great, fat, American mainstream:

July 16: He's already in danger of seeming too prissy about food...

...

I'm a little late to the party, but here is an absurd decorousness in the denunciations -- from the Obama and McCain campaigns and across the liberal blogosphere -- of the current New Yorker cover.

The top-line objection is to accuse the New Yorker of poor taste. In the...

The McCain campaign's mounting incoherence -- born of the candidate's attempts to straddle the political center and the right, and of his apparent ignorance of the content of his own proposals -- is a sight to behold.

Just in the past few days, there's been a drumbeat of contradictory messages....

Colombia's audacious rescue of hostages held by the FARC, including American contractors Marc Gonsalves, Thomas Howes and Keith Stansell, adds an extra bang to the July 4 holiday. But we shouldn't forget the alarming backstory leading up to their captivity, which reveals a lot about the failings of...

Say what you will about the chattering classes' inane regard for the alleged genius of Karl Rove -- it's obvious now he was a disaster for the nation and for not one but two political parties. But the one thing he did know how to do was forge devastating political...

In the wake of the Midwest floods, we're about to embark on another long and fitful recovery and rebuilding effort. Given that and the post-Katrina mess in New Orleans -- a morass of programs that either half-work, work too slowly or don't work at all -- should the federal government...

Kudos to John Barry for pushing what, until recently, seemed like a dead letter -- a federal "8/29" commission to investigate what went wrong with the New Orleans levee system during Hurricane Katrina:

The resolution approved by the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East was proposed by authority Secretary John...

The Record, a newspaper in northern New Jersey, is conducting a six-month investigation into possible "liberal bias" in its pages:

We were asking readers and non-readers about the jobs they expected our newspaper to do for them. "Tell me the truth" emerged as the top job, but then...

Why is John McCain running such a fumbling, cautious, and message-free campaign when the message is right at his fingertips?

If I were McCain, upon sealing up the nomination I would have aggressively focused my campaign around domestic issues, building on my brand as a government reformer. Even if you...

Matt Yglesias has a cogent takedown of Fred Hiatt's much remarked-upon piece attacking the notion that "Bush lied" in the runup to the Iraq war. I sort-of agree with Hiatt that the whole "Bush lied" idea is simplistic. But it's all about how you frame the argument. If...

Salon has an excerpt today from Paul Alexander's new book about Karl Rove, focusing on the White House's handling of the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I'm all for delving into the basic mystery of Rove: how did a political consultant whose principal skill was tactical - targeting and...

There are two reasons why I left the newspaper business and, at the moment anyway, have no intention of going back. The first was that many of the people controlling the business today do not care all that much about journalism. The second was that, among those who do care,...

There's been a boomlet of blog posts and articles lately from conservatives and libertarians professing the idea that the small-scale successes in New Orleans' recovery are good evidence not just for the ideals of self reliance and bottom-up initiative (which they certainly are), but for the idea that...

An entertaining, high-stakes fight is underway between the cable blowhards and their corporate overlords: Fox News and Bill O'Reilly vs. NBC and Keith Olbermann. Short take: Olbermann attacks O'Reilly, O'Reilly gets pissy; Roger Ailes demands NBC muzzle Olbermann, NBC declines; O'Reilly starts attacking execs at General Electric (NBC's owner)...

It's good (and also unusual) that the Bush administration has yielded to the scientists and declared the polar bear a threatened species. But it's clear from the press release that the Interior Department has little sympathy for the plight of beleaguered bear populations.

In making the announcement, Kempthorne...

Even as thousands of Burmese continue to die in the swath of wreckage created by Cyclone Nargis, the ruling junta seems determined to keep the international community out -- an act of epic negligence, given that the aid is ready to flow, and international organizations ready to deploy thousands of...

Can you "disappear" a huge natural disaster with the whole world watching? This is the experiment that the government of Burma now seems to be conducting. The generals evidently have two purposes in keeping the country virtually locked down - preventing the population from being exposed to direct contact with...