As with almost every significant aspect of the Bush presidency, its handling of 9/11 was a catastrophe from start to finish.

For the past eight years, the right has been better at working the refs. Now the left is learning how to play the game.

If newspapers were a baseball team, they would be the Mets - without the hope for those folks at the very pinnacle of the financial food chain - who average nearly $24 million a year in income - 'next year.'

Certainly there are worse sins than doing everything possible to make your presidency matter.

So was it a political mistake for Obama to put so many eggs in the health-care-reform basket? Well, a negative decision from the Supreme Court will certainly make it appear so.

Liberals do not appear to address potential solutions with anything like the far right's aura of God-given self-confidence.

Bringing democratic control to the conduct of foreign policy requires a struggle merely to force the issue onto the public agenda.