Gen. Stanley McChrystal summoned to Washington following magazine profile  —  KABUL — The top U.S. general in Afghanistan was headed to Washington early Tuesday for an impromptu White House meeting, after apologizing for an upcoming magazine article that portrays him and his staff as flippant …

Why Won't Obama Waive the Jones Act?  —  Five years ago, in the midst of another crisis in the Gulf of Mexico, the Bush administration waived the Jones Act, easing the way for foreign vessels to move in U.S. waters and between ports.  The decision came with the administration under duress for its handling of Hurricane Katrina.

Poll: Most Say Obama Lacks Clear Plans on the Oil Spill, Energy or Jobs  —  CBS News Poll analysis by the CBS News Polling Unit: Sarah Dutton, Jennifer De Pinto, Fred Backus and Anthony Salvanto.  —  Most Americans do not believe President Obama has a clear plan to deal with the oil spill in the Gulf …

Orszag Leaving as Budget Director  —  Peter R. Orszag will leave his job as the White House budget director in July, according to someone familiar with his plans, making him perhaps the first official to leave the Obama Cabinet and removing a major player from President Obama's economic team.

Gay Workers Will Get Time to Care for Partner's Sick Child  —  WASHINGTON — President Obama will soon expand the rights of gay workers by allowing them to take family and medical leave to care for sick or newborn children of same-sex partners, administration officials said Monday.

Is U.S. Now On Slippery Slope To Tyranny?  —  When Adolf Hitler was building up the Nazi movement in the 1920s, leading up to his taking power in the 1930s, he deliberately sought to activate people who did not normally pay much attention to politics.  —  Such people were a valuable addition …

In Law Schools, Grades Go Up, Just Like That  —  One day next month every student at Loyola Law School Los Angeles will awake to a higher grade point average.  —  But it's not because they are all working harder.  —  The school is retroactively inflating its grades, tacking on 0.333 to every grade recorded in the last few years.

President Obama's enigmatic intellectualism  —  It can seem that at the heart of Barack Obama's foreign policy is no heart at all.  It consists instead of a series of challenges — of problems that need fixing, not wrongs that need to be righted.  As Winston Churchill once said of a certain pudding …

Faustus Makes a Deal  —  It was the winter of 2007.  Dr. Faustus, the famous left-wing philologist, was sitting in a coffee shop in despair over the Bush-Cheney regime and the future of his country.  —  Suddenly, Mephistopheles, who happened to be the provost at his college, appeared, sipping a double mocha frappuccino.