The NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament is in full swing.  The original 65-team field has been pared to twelve as I write this, and we'll have our Elite Eight set by tomorrow.  Used to be, the entire country would be swept up in the Madness.  Offices would be virtually closed for business on the tournament's opening day.  CEO's and secretaries alike would agonize over their brackets, struggling to divine which teams might advance through their brackets to reach the mythical Final... Read Full Story

Just to review, the Democratic caucus is voting today to decide what to do with Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman.  You remember Joe:Last seen in Minneapolis, palling around with a bunch of fat-ass, conservative white guys wearing funny hats.  That one.Lieberman caucuses with the Democrats (but does most of his traveling with the Republicans:Lieberman is also the chair of the Homeland Security and Government Reform committee, a rather minor committee as these things go, filled mostly with jun... Read Full Story

Rick Perlstein, in Nixonland:It was not as if American leaders hadn't been warned.  It was "the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy," the World War II hero Omar Bradley had first observed in 1951.  Such sage warnings tended to be ignored.  When Undersecretary of State George Ball began criticizing the commitment to South Vietnam in the early 1960's, he was shut out of meetings.  He managed to buttonhole the president nonetheless.  "... Read Full Story

Much is being made of President-Elect Obama's admiration for Abraham Lincoln's Team of Rivals approach towards piecing together an administration.  And, judging by his early actions, with good reason.  He's moving deliberately, so most names are speculative at this point, but here's a look at the current playing field:Chief of Staff -- Rep. Rahm Emanuel, from Illinois.  While an extremely close friend of Obama's chief strategist, David Axelrod, make no mistake about it, he... Read Full Story

After some forty-eight years of deliberation, I am a married man.  I have cliff-dived into the Caribbean Sea.  Allen Iverson is a Detroit Piston.  And Barack Obama is President of the United States.These are ways my life has changed since I last posted here.Let me get Iverson out of the way first -- we're talking about Basketball.  Not life.  Basketball.  Basketball.  (This should obviously be read aloud in the style of Iverson's infamous 2002 rant about practice.)  Basketball is a fr... Read Full Story

One debate down, two to go.  (I don't count Biden-Palin.  That's not a debate, that's vaudeville.)  Last week's first Obama-McCain debate was scheduled to cover foreign policy yet was dropped surreally into the middle of the nation's most pressing economic crisis since 1929.  I don't mean to suggest they should have switched topics but let's just say that Waziristan has never seemed farther away than it did last week while watching the Dow do its impression of a le... Read Full Story

The Dow dropped some five hundred points on Monday, losing 4.4% of its value between breakfast and high tea.  Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, Merrill Lynch was snatched up by Bank of America and American International Group teetered on the brink of collapse.  Contrary to John McCain's initial reaction, the very fundamentals of our economy (the mortgage market, access to credit, pension holdings) were being buffeted by the winds of deregulation.Thank God.Yeah, my net worth fell from i... Read Full Story

Every four years I promise myself I'm going to make it through an entire Republican Convention.  Four nights, five-six hours each night . . . no big deal, right?  I do it happily for the Democrats.  From gavel to gavel, from invocation to acceptance, I am always interested and often thrilled by the spectacle of my party making sausage.  If for no other reason than civic duty, I feel I should be able to do the same on the Republican side.But I can't.  Every four years I fail miserably.... Read Full Story

Rrrrrring!"Hello.""Governor, Senator McCain is on the line.""Awesome.  Put him through.""Sandra, it's John McCain.  I hope I didn't wake you.""Um, no, I was just putting up some walrus meat.  Where does the day go, right?  Well, you know what they say, there's only twenty-two hours of light in a day.  And it's Sarah, actually.""Beg pardon?""My name is Sarah, not Sandra.""Oh, right.  My bad.  Look, I'... Read Full Story

To call the Democratic National Convention conflicted would not do it justice -- it's positively bi-polar.  Dems have spent the first three days alternating between celebration and hand-wringing.  More time and energy is being spent dissecting the Clintons' role in the current state of Obama's campaign than in figuring out how to beat John McCain.I can't think of a time when the passing of the standard bearer's torch from one generation to the next has been so fraught with... Read Full Story