After it first gained wide attention here at HuffPost yesterday, media commentators started weighing in on the brief video captured (probably via cell phone) at a private fundraiser in which President Bush joked about Wall Street getting "drunk" and making light of the U.S. housing crisis. Dan Froomkin at The...

An ABC-TV outlet in Houston, and now the Houston Chronicle, have posted a video taken at a political fundraiser for Pete Olson, featuring George W. Bush last week -- capturing some embarrassing/revealing moments after, he noted, he had asked cameras to be turned off.

The first moments form the...

It started innocently enough, over coffee in a hotel lobby, with me (as usual at that hour) huddled over a newspaper--in print, not on a laptop, unlike everyone else in the vicinity. A little more than a day later, the front-page article I was reading, and getting worked up about,...

Unless I'm mistaken, while the media -- and bloggers -- have focused on Maliki's seeming endorsement of Obama's position on Iraq, what has been largely ignored is his statement in the same Der Spiegel interview that also undercuts McCain badly.

In fact, I was only dimly aware of it until...

For more than five years now, I have written often about a subject that once got no coverage, and still gets far too little: so-called "noncombat" deaths among U.S. troops in Iraq. Included are those who die from illness, accidents and suicides. One case I have followed lately involves the...

Speaking at an early afternoon panel at Netroots Nation in Austin, Texas, today, Paul Krugman predicted, with seeming confidence, an Obama victory in November -- but added that "within three months of taking office, no, less than three months" the media would be out to get him, as much as...

Ten days ago I wrote about a freelance war photographer who committed the sin of taking war photographs -- and not hiding the graphic ones -- and then lost his embed status in Iraq and getting send packing to Baghdad. Now I've learned that he is back in the U.S....

With all the attention on this week's New Yorker cover, it should not be overlooked that one email that inspired it is still circulating, though long repudiated by the alleged author.

A friend of mine received it just this week from a close (rightwing) relative. It's cute that it cites...

Sure to get media tongues a-wagging when published on July 31 is the new John Darnton novel, Black & White and Dead All Over. A newspaper editor is slain in the newsroom and, as the cover copy puts it in headline type, there are "Too Many Suspects." But it gets...

Reaction today to the now-famous cover art in The New Yorker this week has been swift and wildly varying. Here is a cross-section:

Andrew Malcolm, Los Angeles Times'blog Top of the Ticket: "A lot of people won't get the joke. Or won't want to. And will use it for non-humorous...

It has been rumored for some time that the U.S. Army has had to lower its standards to get enough recruits for its expanded war-fighting needs in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now firm evidence has emerged, and it is not pretty.

For instance: The percentage of Army recruits receiving "moral...

I've written often here about my friend Cheryl Harris, whose son Ryan Maseth was electrocuted and died in Iraq. You remember: the military lied and told her he had carried an electrical appliance into the shower. I helped her trace a total of at least a dozen other electrocutions and...

Had some fun with Rachel Maddow last night, subbing for Olbermann, on Fox "going nuts" and airing that Jesse Jackson tape. Why did they do it? Why did they hold it for O'Reilly instead of treating as hot news?

Why, after much teasing, did O'Reilly not play any more...

In this week's issue, coming on Friday, TIME magazine suggests that former Rep. Bob Barr, the Libertarian candidate for president, "could help nudge the Presidency to Barack Obama."

Nathan Thornburgh observes, "Since 2000, Libertarian candidates have peeled off enough votes from Republican congressional candidates to cost the party races...

When a major political figure or celebrity utters a newsmaking, off-color, remark it is always interesting to observe how different news outlets handle the offending word or words.

We monitored this recently when former President Bill Clinton called Vanity Fair writer Todd Purdum a bunch of names after the reporter...

If you were sickened in the past week by much of the media coverage of the passing of "conservative icon" Jesse Helms, you ought to take heart from the following. A state worker in Helms' native North Carolina named L.F. Eason III quit the only job he'd ever had rather...

The nearly-8,000 word cover story on radio talker Rush Limbaugh in The New York Times Magazine last Sunday drew surprised approval from many conservatives -- and, now, condemnation from many others. Eric Boehlert at Media Matters, for example, ripped the Times today for "duping" its readers by assigning a conservative...

As some may know, I have followed here, for months, the saga of my friend Cheryl Harris, whose son, Ryan Maseth, was electrocuted and died in Iraq several months ago. You remember: She was first told by the military that it was his fault for taking an electric appliance into...

The surprising Time magazine piece this week about the gambling habits of John McCain (craps) and Barack Obama (poker) continues to reverberate, with McCain's much more avid and cash-expending pursuit drawing most of the attention.

A diarist at DailyKos is even probing whether McCain has ever filed the proper...

So much has been said and written about the outing of former CIA operative Valerie Plame -- and the cast of characters that swirled around it, from Judith Miller to Karl Rove -- that today, on the fifth anniversary of how it all began, it seems proper to quote the...