The journalism gods turned prankish Friday. As Chesley Sullenberger was taping a PBS News Hour interview about how he how saved 155 lives by landing safely in the Hudson River last January, two other pilots were overshooting Minneapolis by 150 miles. The incident recalled an old standup routine in which Bob Newhart comes on the intercom as a clueless cockpit voice to ask, “Would any of you folks back there recognize Cleveland if you saw it?” Now, the Northwest pilots are facing suspension...

Campaign attacks on Barack Obama and his crew as latte-drinking elitists are finally coming into play in their war of words with Rupert Murdoch’s rough-and-ready outback minions. Any country boy could have told them a basic rule of rural life: Never get into a contest with a skunk. Now, the Administration is finding itself befouled by controversy as an ABC correspondent asks at a briefing why “one of our sister organizations” was excluded from a round of official interviews and...

Life imitates and irritates art as leading musicians join a Freedom of Information suit to discover how loud rock was used as an instrument of torture against Guantanamo detainees. Members of REM, Pearl Jam and Nine Inch Nails want to know details of when and how their work was employed to break down terror suspects, although the CIA insists that the sounds were “not for punitive purposes–and at levels far below a live rock band.” Not so, says a Human Rights group’s report,...

A movement is stirring both here and in Britain to roll back commercial banks to the post-Depression era, when they were barred from gambling on markets with depositors’ money by the Glass-Steagall Act. Today Paul Volcker, the former Fed chairman who heads the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board but is overshadowed by ex-Wall Streeters Tim Geithner and Lawrence Summers, goes public with his proposal to do just that. “The banks are there to serve the public,” Volcker says,...

If Barack Obama had been president in 2002, he says he would have stayed out of Iraq and pursued al Qaeda in Afghanistan. But that “war of necessity” is now morphing into the biggest foreign policy headache of our time, a Hydra of impossible choices in Pakistan, the whole Middle East and beyond. Even as Hamid Karzai agrees to an election runoff with who-knows-what prospects of national unity in Kabul, the perception of a growing gulf between the American military and the White House stirs...

The medical specialists most likely to benefit from the health care debate are optometrists as the Senate Finance Committee releases its 1502-page text and mental health professionals as a new poll shows a national mood swing from August rage against a public option to 57 percent of Americans in favor of it. Max Baucus’ masterwork can now be read as a sequel to the 839-page tome by the Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee, with which it will be merged into a doorstop of legislation...

The knock on Barack Obama from the start was his unwillingness to go head to head–”mix it up a little,” as Maureen Dowd urged during the campaign. Now, after a Nobel Peace prize, he suddenly seems to be brawling with everybody, from the health insurance industry down to Fox News. “They’re filling the airwaves with deceptive and dishonest ads,” he said this weekend in counterattacking the insurers. “They’re flooding Capitol Hill with lobbyists and campaign contributions....

If there is an emergency room for lobbyists, the gunslingers for America’s health insurance giants need treatment for shooting themselves in the foot when they went on the attack this week against the Senate Finance Committee’s bill. Their coming out of the weeds has drawn fire, first from the White House (”everyone recognizes their motives: profits”) and now Nancy Pelosi as she warns of tougher regulation and notes: “It is absolutely clear that it is an unsustainable...

Symbolism comes with a heavy hand these days as Stock Exchange traders cheer at the Dow hitting 10,000 while the national employment rate heads for double digits. The disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street keeps widening as money jugglers, who caused the credit crisis that led to bailouts with taxpayer billions, are getting record bonuses while those who do real work in the world, such as airline pilots, with hundreds of lives in their hands daily, are seeing their salaries slashed. (On...

The assembly line in the Congressional sausage factory is ready to roll, to stuff what Max Baucus’ butchers have hacked up into a casing with scraps from four other committees in the Senate and House. Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and the “Bill Blenders” start work today in a process that will make the past few months look like the Lincoln-Douglas debates as lobbying groups across the spectrum flood Washington with “a torrent of spending and grassroots activity” to influence...

Olympia Snowe may not be out of a Frank Capra movie but, as an independent-minded Republican in an era of hard-line party politics, she is certainly an anachronism. When Time Magazine picked her as one of “America’s 10 Best Senators” in 2006, it noted: “Because of her centrist views and eagerness to get beyond partisan point scoring, Maine Republican Olympia Snowe is in the center of every policy debate in Washington.” As the Senate Finance Committee votes today on health...

On the momentous issue of whether or not the Mouth That Roared should be allowed to become an owner of a professional football team, as cogently debated in one of the posts below, let me add another view that may excite debate in another direction: Al Sharpton has his knickers in a twist over news that Rush Limbaugh is trying to acquire the National Football League franchise in St. Louis, but with all due respect, the Reverend and other protesters fail to see the internal logic of such a move. With...

If the election had gone the other way, Americans would have been spared all this doubt and deliberation about the Middle East. Asked whether adding 10 or 20,000 troops for Afghanistan would suffice, John McCain tells CNN it would be “an error of historic proportions” not to meet Gen. McChrystal’s request for 40,000 or more. If Barack Obama were as sure of anything as McCain is of everything, there would be no need for agonizing over what conservative Peggy Noonan calls “a...

Those too mesmerized by baseball playoffs to watch Letterman, Conan et al last night did not miss much. All day long politicians had been doing stand-ups about Obama’s Nobel Prize. The President himself led off his Rose Garden turn with “Well, this is not how I expected to wake up this morning. After I received the news, Malia walked in and said, ‘Daddy, you won the Nobel Peace Prize, and it is Bo’s birthday!’ And then Sasha added, ‘Plus, we have a three-day...

In time for Halloween, Republican specters are rising up to scare some sense into their Congressional heirs as they move zombielike toward a possible pyrrhic victory in the hope that poll numbers “may get worse for Democrats if they pass a health-care bill.” That prediction is the wisdom according to Karl Rove, who engineered the party’s 2006 loss, but older and wiser Republican heads are emerging to warn against the short-term politics of being intractable on what all sides agree...

When Dwight David Eisenhower came back from World War II, no one knew whether he was a Republican or Democrat until he ran for president. He had spent his years as a commanding general steering clear of politics. Not so today. Starting three years ago when Iraq was in shambles, George W. Bush took political cover behind Gen. David Petraeus, who successfully redirected a misbegotten war into a counter-insurgency that worked well enough to open the way for American troop withdrawal under the next president. Now,...

In last night’s monologue, David Letterman makes a joke about avoiding award ceremonies for fear of being nabbed for sexual misconduct (as Roman Polanski was in Switzerland) and then gives a no-laughs account of being blackmailed over having affairs with women who work on his show. We are deep into media-outdoes-real-life here, in the terrain of the 1976 “Network” movie that posited a TV anchorman who goes raving mad, is exploited for ratings and then killed on-air when they drop. Letterman...

Paul B. Fay Jr., who died this week at 91, was a crony so close that John F. Kennedy appointed him Undersecretary of the Navy over the protests of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. The role of Red Fay, as everyone called him, in Kennedy’s life was much more personal than political. Sons of Irish-American wealth who had met in the Navy during World War II, they bonded to the point that Fay was an usher at JFK’s wedding and later served as a “beard” at his friend’s...

The War on Terror, confusing and anxious-making as it may be, has produced one encouraging side effect in American politics: The gung-ho is gone as all sides concede the military effort in Afghanistan is a dangerous enterprise with an unknowable outcome. As President Obama goes face-to-face with General McChrystal today by tele-conference, the debate over what to do next has been a good deal less rancorous than any other in recent Washington history. “Dithering” has been the harshest...

The bar for embarrassment is so high now it’s almost out of sight for celebrities who do things that would make the rest of us die of shame. Tom DeLay, who left Congress under a cloud of Jack Abramoff corruption, is ready to sashay in sequins on “Dancing With the Stars.” Eliot Spitzer, who resigned as governor of New York for caucusing with call girls, shows up on Bill Maher’s show, pontificating about the economy alongside Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman and defending capitalism...

The newest revelation of Iran’s nuclear sneakiness echoes what happened in 1962 when the Soviets furtively put missiles into Cuba, but John F. Kennedy’s problem was a faceoff for a few days compared to the complex struggle that will play out over the coming months. Yet the key issue is the same–testing an American president’s skill and resolve by an adversary who may be interpreting a rational and measured approach as weakness. Back then, JFK faced an imminent threat to the...

One salubrious side effect of the current debate has been the emergence of an energized GOP with a new generation of original thinkers: *South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, who previously described health care as “Obama’s Waterloo” that will “break him,” now observes that the debate is putting American troops at risk in Afghanistan. He tells an interviewer that “the war in Afghanistan and our economy are our two biggest issues but he’s working on other issues such...

On Letterman Monday night, President Obama joked about his daughters’ future dates who may be stressed out over having men with guns hanging around. If he really wants to know about that, I can tell him what happened when Lynda Bird Johnson was working for me at McCalls, and I went to dinner at Trader Vic’s in New York with our company’s chairman of the board. As we were being seated, the maitre d’ whispered, “The President’s daughter is going to be at the next...

The President spoke to a contentious body of politicians today, asking them to stop bickering and start working together, and was greeted with applause. No one yelled “You lie!” The United Nations, as critics will be quick to point out, is not the US Congress, and this attitude was summed up in a UK Telegraph headline even before the speech: “The UN loves Barack Obama because he is weak.” The postmortems will follow that line. “Obama,” Fox News reports, “just...

The mental health of presidents comes to the fore with Taylor Branch’s new book about eight years of confessional conversations with Bill Clinton in the White House. In more than 70 hours-long sessions, Clinton poured out his feelings to a journalist/friend, a cathartic adventure that recalls the furtive relationship of Richard Nixon with a therapist that started before his Checkers crisis and continued through Watergate and beyond. The political revelations in Branch’s “The Clinton...