If you’re a fan of the movie Apollo 13 — starring Tom Hanks, Gary Sinise, Ed Harris, et. al. — you’ll likely recall the scene where one of the characters (either Harris’ or Sinise’s character, I can’t remember which) pulls a NASA team together, hurls an array of stuff across a table, tells them that this stuff is what’s aboard Apollo 13 and what they have to work with, to keep the three astronauts alive while they figure out how to get them home safely....

The list of things I don’t understand is already rather lengthy. And now it’s one item longer: I don’t understand the position of the dissenting minority in yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling on Miranda rights. To recap … The latest case concerned Van Chester Thompkins, a Michigan man accused of shooting another man to death in 2000 outside a mall. Arrested a year later, Mr. Thompkins was read his Miranda rights but refused to sign a form acknowledging that he understood...

The blogger who defies categorization unleashes on the establishment columnist. I won’t try to summarize Sullivan’s case. I couldn’t do his eloquent invective justice. I will add two thoughts, however. 1. Yes, there’s an obvious and substantial difference between Katrina and Deepwater Horizon. The first was a natural disaster that required a relief effort tailor-made for government intervention. The second is a man-made debacle, requiring specialized expertise to fix;...

The value of writing about writer’s block is that, sometimes, it makes the block disappear. At least temporarily. Thus, within hours of my earlier post regading a very persistent and frustrating case of writer’s block, this story caught my attention … The International Committee of the Red Cross is defending its practice of providing medical training and basic medical supplies to the Taliban in Afghanistan — saying it is in line with the ICRC’s mandate not to discriminate...

It’s certainly not the end of the world, but it is remarkably frustrating when a public affairs blogger is unable to find the energy or passion to write about public affairs. It’s even worse when this funk lasts for weeks at a time. I’m in just such a place. A prime example: The refuses-to-die hooplah over the White House offering Joe Sestak a job to potentially clear the road for Sen. Arlen Specter in the now-concluded Pennsylvania primary. Does that job offer “appear...

CONTINUED FROM YESTERDAY Shortly after my initial rants, I saw a news alert that Rand Paul had issued a more definitive (and coherent) comment on this matter. Unfortunatley, I could not find the time to immediately revisit the subject. Out of fairness, I will now. Finally, Mr. Paul is saying all the right things, and without equivocation. Of course, questions will persist: Does he really believes any of this? Or is he only speaking the words to salvage a newborn political career? I don’t...

Another one bites the dust, raising anew questions about whether or not measured voices can ever be turned into ratings winners.

Following up on my fascination with the Arkansas primary — perhaps the reddest blue state in America — I was pleased that Sen. Lincoln survived to fight another day. Her estimated 45 percent of the vote was not enough to win outright. But considering that the spoiler candidate in the race — D.C. Morrison — “ran to the ideological right of both [Lincoln] and Halter,” she has a decent chance of prevailing in the runoff against Halter, the progressives’ favorite....

The Specter-Sestak primary in Pennsylvania will probably grab most of the headlines over the next 48 hours. But the race I’m watching on Tuesday is the Lincoln-Halter primary in Arkansas. I have nothing against Mr. Halter, the state’s lieutenant governor. In fact, I don’t know enough about him to offer either praise or criticism. But I am a big fan of Sen. Lincoln’s, and have been ever since I heard her speak at a convention I attended several years ago. I’ll never...

David Brooks deems the new coalition government in Britian — and its prospects for resolving the nation’s fiscal issues — the result of “sheer good luck.” Is it that, or the unflappable wisdom of crowds … or perhaps a bit of both?

So David Cameron, it appears, is “the youngest Prime Minister in the 200 year history of British government.” I’m older. He was born in late 1966. I was born in early 1965. I think that’s a first for me, being older than a prominent, contemporary world leader. Granted, there have been child and teenage heads of state — eons ago. And maybe some tiny kingdom somewhere has been led by someone my junior in my lifetime. But I certainly don’t recall the front...

Since we launched our new comments forum on Saturday, we’ve received a number of recurring questions. Tyrone offers the following answers. —————— Every post on the blog appears in the “Community Boulevard” section of District TMV. In “Community Boulevard” — CB, for short — blog posts are typically NOT listed in chronological order. Instead, they are most-often ranked on the volume of dialogue (comments) about them,...

Indiana, Ohio and North Carolina voters pick candidates today for the general election. Chris Cillizza offers a summary of the contests.

The award is shared this week by Michelle Malkin and Scott Johnson. Both jumped on the following thought from the President, spoken Wednesday when he was in Quincy, Illinois: I think at some point you have made enough money. First, if Malkin and Johnson are going to put quotation marks around comments made by anyone, they should quote the actual words, which (according to Ed Morrissey and the audio recording on which he relied) were these: I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money. Does...

The first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, was not afraid to unleash the federal government on a bold project. And no, in this case, I’m not talking about keeping the union together. In his case, I’m referring to Lincoln’s decision to sign into law a bill to boost the construction of a transcontintental railroad. Of course, Lincoln shouldn’t get all the credit. Support for a transcontinental railroad was part of the Republican Party platform of 1860. David Brooks...

A colleague emailed me today. She had heard my radio commentary Monday re: the Coffee Party and thought I might be interested in this related article from the current edition of Newsweek. The article recounts an experience that Annabel Park, the C-Party’s founder, had with some of the people her movement attracted to a gathering at a D.C. venue. … from the moment folks in the crowd stood up to speak their minds, Park knew these people had not come to sip cappuccinos and set an example...

A March 1 article in The New York Times was my first introduction to the Coffee Party. Over the next six weeks, I spent multiple hours attempting to learn more about this movement, with a focus on its manifestation in my back yard. I summarized what I learned in my latest commentary for KWMU, St. Louis Public Radio, an NPR affiliate. Three-and-a-half minutes of air time … derived from about a dozen pages of handwritten notes and twice that many pages of related news reports. Net: There’s...

The NYT columnist restates the obvious. … things have not worked out for those of us in the broad middle. Politics is more polarized than ever. The two parties have drifted further to the extremes. The center is drained and depressed. He then asks the obvious question — “What happened?” — and answers it thus. History happened. The administration came into power at a time of economic crisis. This led it, in the first bloom of self-confidence, to attempt many big projects...

I received a couple notable reactions to my post from earlier today. First, “Mike Lee” wondered what exactly I meant by “refinement.” If you mean just removing the accidental provisions that slipped through, I wouldn’t expect or encourage any Republican to take you up on that. Although Republicans have made use of the “it’s so big you can’t possibly know what’s in it” argument, they have also pointed to several things that we know are in it that they...

Politically speaking, I don’t care if you’re left, right, or straight up the middle. Whoever and whatever you are, you simply have to cringe when you read this article. In a new report, the Congressional Research Service says the law may have significant unintended consequences for the “personal health insurance coverage” of senators, representatives and their staff members. For example, it says, the law may “remove members of Congress and Congressional staff” from their current...