Good news! The Army recruiting dilemma has been solved. Sophisticated political thinker Sen. James Inhofe has done Oklahoma proud once again with the discovery that the enlistment shortfall isn’t due to little things like the fact that June was the fifth deadliest month of the war for U.S. soldiers or that we continue to send out troops into battle without the proper equipment to keep them safe. No, according to Inhofe, the reason the military is having trouble attracting people is “all the negative media.” You see, the Senator feels the media are covering Iraq too much. They’re just not devoting enough attention to things like white girls “missing in paradise,” shark attacks, and celebrity trials. If only we could get the media to stop obsessing on what’s going on in Iraq then maybe all those parents discouraging their kids from enlisting wouldn’t be as reluctant to sign their kids right up. Every time Bush and Cheney come out and give their Pollyanna assessments of what is going on in Iraq, why do the America-hating media insist on undercutting them with the truth? Don’t they know that only leads people to distrust the president and make parents less likely to put the lives of their children in George Bush’s hands?

Comparisons to Bill Clinton are all over the blogosphere today. Here are three: 1) According to Zogby, 42 percent of the country favors impeaching P...

First this Sunday morning check out Lawrence O'Donnell's new post responding to Karl Rove's lawyer. Then in our Sunday roundup we've put together pos...

It’s a red, white, and blue Monday on the HuffPost and to celebrate we’ve got a great collection of very independence-minded Fourth of July posts. From Lawrence O'Donnell, a Rove update, and from me, a look at Sunday’s Meet the Press, which, in contrast, was another example of the congealed, inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom. The show opened with Senators Arlen Specter and Patrick Leahy, the ranking members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, talking about the upcoming Supreme Court fight -- and offered a preview of how the Washington press is going to cover the nomination fight: as a story about rhetoric and process rather than about the rights and freedoms at stake (guest host Andrea Mitchell was very concerned that the rhetoric would get “heated up”). But pray tell me, if Bush picks a right-wing zealot, is anyone going to be saying in five years, “Sure, Justice so-and-so has been a disaster for the country, but at least the rhetoric during his nomination wasn’t overheated”? During the civil rights movement, there was a lot of overheated rhetoric -- some of it from those struggling for equal rights and some of it from those fighting to maintain Jim Crow. It wasn’t all the same then, and it’s not all the same now. It turns out one side was right and one side was wrong.

I’ll take my teachable moments anyplace I can find them… even if it means jumping into the middle of the celebrity spitting match between Tom Cruise and Brooke Shields. And thanks to Tom and Brooke, and Tom and Oprah, and Tom and Matt, this is certainly a teachable moment to be grabbed by those of us who have been raising our voices for years about the epidemic of mood-altering drugs being prescribed to our kids. There are now over a million children on Prozac and its equivalents, and more than six million on Ritalin. And although there are undoubtedly children who are properly diagnosed as clinically depressed and are legitimately prescribed antidepressants, as a country we’ve gotten into the habit of treating childhood as a disease. Indeed, the official psychiatric diagnostic manual describes as symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder “squirms in seat,” “interrupts or intrudes on others,” and “is often on the go.” Sounds a lot like...uh, childhood -- a condition that -- when left untreated -- tends to cure itself over time. Isn’t it a supreme irony that we have no problem turning our kids into legally drugged up zombies at an earlier and earlier age and then expect them to just say no to illegal drugs down the line?

So just what can and can’t be asked of a Supreme Court nominee? Sadly, there is no Judicial Miss Manners to lay out the do’s and don’ts of proper confirmation hearings etiquette. So Senate Republicans and White House sources have helpfully begun providing some parameters. It seems that it boils down to this: the nominee can be asked about anything… as long as it has absolutely nothing to do with jurisprudence. For those of you who are really confused about what is and isn’t a proper line of questioning -- especially you Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee -- I have, through my White House sources, been slipped the following list of approved questions (And for any special prosecutors out there, I will never divulge the source of this leaked information… not even in an email to Lawrence O’Donnell): “Given your experience as a judge, and drawing upon your years of legal training, who do you like better on Desperate Housewives, Bree, Gabrielle or Edie?” “Aren’t puppies cute?” “Do you think these pants make me look fat?” “Do you think Tom really loves Katie, or is the whole thing some sort of publicity stunt?” “What size robe you gonna need?”

How is it that the second most powerful man in America is about to take a fall and the mainstream media are largely taking a pass? Chatter about the Rove story has come to dominate the downtime at the Aspen Institute’s five-day Ideas Festival. One such discussion took place just after David Gergen had finished a conversation with Rick Warren, author of The Purpose-Driven Life. A cluster of high-powered media insiders quickly switched over to “The Gossip-Driven Reality.” The well-informed suppositions were flying faster than the peloton at the Tour de France...

Another after-dinner discussion at the “Belly-Up” bar. During a panel on “American News Media in Crisis?” moderated by Ken Auletta, I asked N...

Obviously, the big news today is all about London. And, sure enough, when I picked up this morning's New York Times there was a headline about London. Except that the above-the-fold, front page story was about London landing the 2012 Olympics, and came complete with a big color picture of jubilant Londoners… an image that had been completely surpassed by the much bigger news out of London today. If one needed more proof of the ascendancy of online news, this morning put the Internet vs. print battle into stark relief -- and foretold the Net’s inevitable victory. News happens every second of the day -- it doesn't stop after the next day's newspaper is put to bed -- and blogs and Internet news sites are clearly better equipped to keep up with this never-ending news cycle. So as this tragic story continues to unfold, I know exactly where I'll be getting my up-to-the-second news from -- and it won't be from the old-before-it’s-new paper sitting on my doorstep tomorrow morning. Is there any doubt that more and more millions will be doing the same? And not just news, but real time commentary, like our posts from Jamie Rubin, Simon Jenkins, Jann Wenner, Andrei Cherny, Tom Hayden, and Marty Kaplan.

Odds are we probably won’t be hearing for a while the Bush mantra that the reason we're fighting them over in Iraq is so we don't have to fight them here at home. For the last few months, this ludicrous shibboleth has been the president’s go-to line -- his latest rationale for slogging on in Iraq. Not only was this flypaper theory empirically disproved by the London carnage, it directly contradicts the president’s other most often used justification for the war -- that we invaded to liberate the Iraqi people. So let me get this straight: we invaded them to liberate them... and to use them as bait to attract terrorists who we could fight on the streets of Baghdad rather than the streets of London and New York? Of course, it didn't take the London bombings to reveal this premise as a sham. The presence of American forces in Iraq didn’t keep the enemies of western culture from attacking Madrid. And it didn’t keep them from planting explosives in London’s tubes. And it won’t, in and of itself, keep them from striking here. Indeed, it’s helping terrorists recruit new followers -- and hone their deadly skills. If Iraq is like flypaper, it unfortunately looks like we’re the ones who are stuck there. Any predictions of what Bush’s rewrite boys will come up with next?

Don’t you love the way many in the media are trying to spin the London bombings? Instead of focusing on the bloody deconstruction of Bush’s “fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here” strategy, they are using it to promote Bush’s failing agenda. For instance, there was Stuart Varney on Fox, making the case that what happened in London “puts the number one issue right back on the front burner right at the point where all these world leaders are meeting. It takes global warming off the front burner. It takes African aid off the front burner.” So, Stuart, when exactly did global warming become a front-burner issue and the war on terror a back-burner one? Was it after the vice president spent the entire campaign trying to convince voters that another terrorist attack in America was imminent? The London bombings will not make global warming go away. The London bombings will not make the crises in Africa go away. They also won’t make it okay for Bush to appoint right-wing extremists to the Supreme Court or make his plan to privatize Social Security acceptable or make John Bolton a good choice for the UN. And they sure as hell don’t make Bush's lack of a plan for Iraq any less of a disaster for America.

After the horrors of this week, we could all use a little weekend palate cleanser. And who better to provide this Saturday summer sorbet than Britain’s own immortal Bard, a writer who dealt with all the darkness of the human soul but also brilliantly celebrated the light and tickled our fancy? The following bit of Shakespearean amusement was concocted by my great friend Bernard Levin, who passed away last year. It was recited to perfection by Michael York at a dinner in Aspen given by Lynda and Stewart Resnick in honor of all the speakers at the Aspen Institute's Ideas Festival. If you cannot understand my argument, and declare "It’s Greek to me," you are quoting Shakespeare; if you claim to be more sinned against than sinning, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you recall your salad days, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you act more in sorrow than in anger, if your wish is father to the thought, if your lost property has vanished into thin air, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you have ever refused to budge an inch or suffered from green-eyed jealousy, if you have played fast and loose, if you have been tongue-tied, a tower of strength, hoodwinked or in a pickle, the more fool you, for it is a foregone conclusion that you are (as good luck would have it) quoting Shakespeare.

I’m leaving for a three-week trip to Europe, from where I’ll keep blogging and sending regular reports on the coalition of the willing -- and the disgruntled. Although this might sound strange, this has already been one of the best political summers of my life… all because of what’s been going on in the West Wing. No, not the real West Wing -- even though the unraveling of Rove is fun to watch -- but that other West Wing, the one created by Aaron Sorkin. Specifically, my 16-year-old daughter Christina has become obsessed with the show, devouring the first five seasons on DVD and tapes. So this summer has featured lots of dinner table talk about politics. But instead of questions like “Is Rove going to be indicted?”, I get: “Mom, do people really talk like this in the White House?” I hated to break it to her but, sadly, a conversation between Karl Rove and Scott McClellan is almost guaranteed not to be as clever as one between Josh and C.J.

Check out this great video from Crooks and Liars and see what I meant when I said that Scott McClellan is starting to look more and more like Ron Ziel...