The 10 punches Dick Cheney landed on Barack Obama's jaw  —  The spectacle of two duelling speeches with a mile of each other in downtown Washington was extraordinary.  I was at the Cheney event and watched Obama's address on a big screen beside the empty lectern that the former veep stepped behind barely …

Sobbing Kindergarteners Snubbed for Steelers?  —  Kids locked out of White House; officials say they were too late  —  Thursday was supposed to be the highlight of the year for more than 100 kindergarteners from Stafford County, Va. They got up early and took a chartered bus to the White House for a school field trip.

Cheney's speech ignored some inconvenient truths  —  WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Dick Cheney's defense Thursday of the Bush administration's policies for interrogating suspected terrorists contained omissions, exaggerations and misstatements.  —  In his address to the American Enterprise Institute …

White House Reporter Protects Cheney, Accuses Gibbs Of Taking “Swipe”  —  One of the odder things we've seen from some members of the White House press corps this year is a kind of zealous over-protectiveness of the previous administration — Dick Cheney, in particular.

Mancow Waterboarded, Admits It's Torture  —  “It is way worse than I thought it would be”  —  Shock jocks shock.  —  And so it went Friday morning when WLS radio host Erich “Mancow” Muller decided to subject himself to the controversial practice of waterboarding live on his show.

Kaine calls on LU to reconsider Democratic club ban  —  Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr. made his first public comments today about the university's suspension of the campus Democratic party club.  —  “That club still has the right to exist,” Falwell said, although it cannot use the university's name in its activities.

Steele: Obama ‘Was Not Vetted Because The Press Fell In Love With The Black Man Running For The Office’  —  Apparently unable to learn from egregious mistakes from the recent past, RNC Chairman Michael Steele once again took to the radio airwaves today as a guest host for Bill Bennett.

Bush: It's ‘liberating’ to be out of office  —  He gets warm welcome from group of graduating N.M. high school students  —  ARTESIA, N.M. - It was a humbling moment for the former commander in chief: President George W. Bush was walking former first dog Barney in his new Dallas neighborhood …

Media Fawns Over Newt, Ignores Other Former Congressional Leaders  —  Steve Benen observes that these days Newt Gingrich is everywhere you look: … It's a really strange situation.  If were an editor looking for an op-ed from a conservative point of view about the California budget crisis …

Labs Contest  —  Apps for America 2: The Data.gov Challenge  —  What it Is  —  Apps for America is a special contest we're putting on this year to celebrate the release of Data.gov!  We're doing it alongside Google, O'Reilly Media, and TechWeb and the winners will be announced …

“I don't know why your husband doesn't put a gun to his temple.”  —  En route to pick up a tux for a wedding I'm attending this weekend, I flipped on the radio in my mother's car, found it tuned to the AM dial, and heard a host so petulant that he is an outlier even on talk radio.

U.S. to Steer GM Toward Bankruptcy  —  Filing Expected as Chrysler Set to Emerge  —  The Obama administration is preparing to send General Motors into bankruptcy as early as the end of next week under a plan that would give the automaker tens of billions of dollars more in public financing …

Facts and myths about Obama's preventive detention proposal  —  [Updated below - Update II (Interview with ACLU) - Update III - Update IV ]  —  In the wake of Obama's speech yesterday, there are vast numbers of new converts who now support indefinite “preventive detention.”

Blue Double Cross  —  That didn't take long.  Less than two weeks have passed since much of the medical-industrial complex made a big show of working with President Obama on health care reform — and the double-crossing is already well under way.  Indeed, it's now clear that even as they met …

Backward Runs ‘Newsweek’  —  Blah blah newsmag remake blah blah.  —  Having recently been dumped by Time, I naturally had great hopes for this week's much-anticipated makeover of Newsweek.  Both surviving newsmags (US News is said to exist still in some form, but no one I know has seen it lately) …

Outrage at Serbia ‘beating’ video  —  A young patient appears to be beaten repeatedly with a shovel (Video courtesy of Vreme magazine)  —  Officials in Serbia are investigating a rehabilitation centre affiliated to the Orthodox Church where drug addicts have allegedly been filmed being beaten.

NEPOTISM REIGNS.... Mid-day yesterday, I noticed that Mark Halperin had a headline that read, “Round 2: Liz Cheney vs Axe.”  Round 1, apparently, was President Obama and former Vice President Cheney, and Round 2's “Axe” refers to David Axelrod, Senior White House Advisor to the president.

President Above-It-All  —  EDITOR'S NOTE: This column is available exclusively through King Features Syndicate.  For permission to reprint or excerpt this copyrighted material, please contact: kfsreprint@hearstsc.com, or phone 800-708-7311, ext 246.  —  Put Barack Obama in front of a teleprompter …