In the brouhaha over a forthcoming movie by a conservative filmmaker, we are once again on the dark side of free speech, which the Supreme Court visited last month in its decision that validated “Hillary: the Movie,” an election-year smear of Mrs. Clinton A dramatization of John F. Kennedy’s flaws for the History Channel is evoking high emotion even before it has been filmed as defenders of the Kennedy faith denounce the script as “political character assassination…sexist...

With the Capitol Hill horror show on hiatus, the President has an opening to power up and start moving Washington toward some semblance of being functional again. His strength is in a sizable approval advantage over the Congressional clowns who are back home to placate voters for whom incumbent is now a dirty word. With his numbers over 50 percent, he is well ahead of Republicans in hiding who have gained only a few points against the Democratic Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. As Evan Bayh...

Presidents Weekend brings reminders of how history’s most productive economy of goods and services was brought to its knees by glorified paper pushers, crafty clerks who make nothing but money. On CNN, Obama adviser Paul Volcker complains, “We’ve got to produce something that somebody else wants to buy.” According to the former Fed chairman, “we spent 20 years inducing some of our brightest people, our most energetic people to go to Wall Street. And nobody wants to be...

A new poll confirms what we know: Two out of three Americans are “dissatisfied with or angry about the way the government works.” We are in a reprise of “Network,” in which a demented anchorman gets millions to yell their outrage. In the 1976 movie, Howard Beale rants: “Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job, the dollar buys a nickel’s worth, banks are going bust… “We know...

Things could be worse. If the millions who wanted John Edwards as President in the past decade had had their way, the nation would now be involved in a scandal to make Bill Clinton look like Mr. Monogamy. The prospect of an X-rated video starring a Commander-in-Chief surfaces in the current court battle over possession of tapes showing Edwards in carnal congress with Rielle Hunter, who bore his illegitimate child. As legal maneuvering over possession goes on in North Carolina, if history is any guide,...

Before a new blizzard brought Washington to a standstill, Barack Obama made another effort to dig out of the Republican snow job and verbal high winds that have disabled his efforts to govern. After a two-hour meeting to clear the path for legislation, the President told White House reporters, “I won’t hesitate to embrace a good idea from my friends in the minority party, but I also won’t hesitate to condemn what I consider to be obstinacy that’s rooted not in substantive...

In a pre-Super Bowl interview, President Obama told Katie Couric about a televised bipartisan health-care meeting on February 25th to go through “all the best ideas…and move it forward.” If he hadn’t been absorbed in the game, watching Bill Moyers Journal would have given him a more productive idea than meeting with members of Congress who have been bargaining and bastardizing reform into a monstrosity that few Americans understand and the majority disapproves. Moyers interviewed...

The image of a pet rabbit in a boiling pot arises after a night of passion in Nashville, with Sarah Palin auditioning for the Glenn Close role in a remake of “Fatal Attraction.” If the GOP establishment was hoping for a one-night stand with the Tea Party, Palin evoked some serious stalking ahead by promising to campaign for challengers to traditional Republicans: “Contested primaries aren’t civil war. They’re democracy at work, and that’s beautiful.” The...

Political satire started in prime time as Sarah Palin preempted SNL with a parody of herself at the Tea Party convention. “How’s that hopey-changey stuff working out for you?” she twinkled during a $100,000 standup (to be donated to “the cause,” destination unclear) for hundreds who paid $349 to hear her pummel Obama with one-liners about everything from bailouts to the Christmas bomber (in the war on terror, “we need a commander in chief, not a professor of law...

With the approach of Super Bowl Sunday, talking heads are out on TV to handicap and cash in politically on the biggest game of all–a terror attack on American soil. The latest skirmish pits Sen. Kit Bond, ranking Republican on the Intelligence Committee, against White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, who took exception to Bond’s flogging the notion that release of information that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is cooperating with questioners “has no doubt been helpful” to his “terrorist...

Ronald Reagan’s Fed Chairman Paul Volcker is back to bash bankers–and not a moment too soon–as he tells a Senate hearing that the solution for bailouts is “to arrange an orderly liquidation or merger–in other words, euthanasia, not a rescue.” This drastic solution unnerves outgoing Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd into warning that the Obama White House is “getting precariously close” to excessive ambition for regulatory legislation: “I don’t want to be...

Older Americans may find solace in David Brooks’ report today on longitudinal studies “producing a rosier portrait of life after retirement. These studies don’t portray old age as surrender or even serenity. They portray it as a period of development…” So much for Charles DeGaulle’s famous aphorism, “Old age is a shipwreck,” and Freud’s assertion, “Old people are no longer educable.” It’s comforting to learn that we are getting “more...

As the New York Times‘ Public Editor puzzles over the paper’s coverage of a best-seller “filled with racy anecdotes about dysfunctional marriages and political back-stabbing,” we get our first look at Washington’s new Mr. Clean, a Senator arrested for shoplifting at 12 who posed naked for a magazine at 22. In his first Sunday interview, Ted Kennedy’s replacement tells Barbara Walters that “I’m a Scott Brown Republican. What does that mean? That means...

Within 24 hours this weekend, the President tackled two national shortfalls–dollars and cents in the government’s income vs. expenditures, civility and sense in the partisan debate over remedies for an economy ravaged by recession. In his weekly address yesterday, Mr. Obama zeroed in on seven Republicans who had sponsored a bipartisan commission for deficit reduction but then voted against it in the Senate. “Now, it’s one thing,” he said, “to have an honest difference...

Two writers in their nineties died this week. J.D. Salinger, a recluse in New Hampshire, produced four books in his lifetime. Louis Auchincloss lived in old-money Manhattan, practiced Wall Street law and wrote more than sixty novels, biographies and works of criticism. Apart from being published in the New Yorker, they had little in common, Auchincloss the “chronicler of New York’s upper crust,” as the Times headlined his obituary, while Salinger chose a “half-century of solitude...

Until his peroration “to start anew, to carry the dream forward, and to strengthen our union once more,” the President spent more than an hour last night calling out everyone in the chamber, including himself, for “a difficult year.” Congressional Republicans, Democrats, even the Supreme Court came in for their share of scolding. The unusual tone of this State of the Union came from both directions. Below each outburst of applause, there was an unprecedented hum of disapproval...

This week brings intimations of mortality from Osama bin Laden and Carlos the Jackal, two aging terrorists who achieved reknown by cutting short the lives of countless unknown others in pursuit of their ideology. The mastermind of 9/11 is reduced to making an audiotape to hitchhike on the “accomplishment” of the 23-year-old loser who couldn’t find his way to the lavatory to blow up an airliner, claiming that the work of “the heroic warrior Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was a confirmation...

Headlines from the President’s State of the Union speech have been leaking all week–a three-year spending freeze on domestic programs today following yesterday’s package of tax credits for child care, caps on student loan payments and automatic retirement savings for employees. After whatever revelation the White House is saving for tomorrow morning, by the time Barack Obama faces both houses of Congress in the evening, the only remaining suspense will be about his demeanor and...

A Gallup poll confirms that rank-and-file GOP members have followed their leaders in saying “no” to Barack Obama with the widest gap in approval ratings by party for any first-year president in history, 23 percent against 65 for Democrats. Obama, who started as a wannabe conciliator, faces his first State of the Union with a one-word reality: fractured. Now, the White House is signaling a new fighting tone both in the words of the President and those around him. David Plouffe, his campaign...

The Republicans’ new Great White Hope could turn out to be a disappointment for the Right wing of the GOP–and an opportunity for Democrats. “I know what I want to do: Go down there and be a good person, a good and competent senator,” Scott Brown tells Peggy Noonan. “I have huge shoes to fill, the legacy is just overwhelming. I’m a consensus builder…I can disagree in the daytime and have a coffee or beer later on. Everyone’s welcome to their opinion.” This...