Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton Are 2010's Most Admired  —  Sarah Palin and Oprah Winfrey are closely matched behind Clinton  —  PRINCETON, NJ — President Barack Obama is Americans' Most Admired Man of 2010, substantially ahead of the former presidents, iconic religious leaders, and others who fill out the top 10 list.

White House Confirms Obama's Michael Vick Phone Call, But Says He Condemns The Crime  —  WHAT'S YOUR REACTION? … NEW YORK CITY — The Obama administration confirmed on Monday afternoon that the president, in a call with the owner of the Philadelphia Eagles, expressed gratitude …

DeMint challenger Alvin Greene to run for S.C. state house  —  Alvin Greene, the unemployed military veteran who won the Democratic nomination to face Sen. Jim DeMint (R) this fall, has filed to run for South Carolina's state house.  —  Greene, who lost to Demint by over 30 percentage points …

Inside The GOP's Plan To Stifle Obama's Executive Branch Power  —  In the nearly two months since the November midterms, the conventional wisdom has centered on the idea that President Obama's agenda will be largely protected from an influx of Republicans by the Senate's arcane rules and his own veto pen.

The Trouble With Liberty  —  Libertarians, of both left and right, haven't been this close to power since 1776.  But do we want to live in their world?  —  Just before Thanksgiving, in an impassioned speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, Ron Paul called for Congress to be groped.

The worsening journalistic disgrace at Wired  —  (updated below)  —  For more than six months, Wired's Senior Editor Kevin Poulsen has possessed — but refuses to publish — the key evidence in one of the year's most significant political stories: the arrest of U.S. Army PFC Bradley Manning for allegedly acting as WikiLeaks' source.

Division Wrought by New Tea Partiers  —  Rep. Mike Castle, R-Del., who was taken out in his primary by Tea Party favorite Christine O'Donnell, expresed alarm at the division the movement had caused within his own party.  —  “The Tea Party movement really is quite a bit different …

SARAH PALIN KNOCKS CONSERVATIONISTS  —  It was time to pick up the chainsaw and yell “timber” on Sunday night's episode of “Sarah Palin's Alaska.”  —  While last week's installment had Sarah doing a little of everything, from dog sledding to waitressing —this week, the show focused …

Does the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act need title reform?  —  Puh-pack-uh?  Is that some kind of llama?  —  In fact, it's the ungainly acronym of the new health-care law - PPACA, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.  Many people who support the law, or are neutral toward it …

IF ONLY THOSE ‘LUCKY DUCKIES’ HAD SOME ‘SKIN IN THE GAME’.... It's been about eight years since the far-right Wall Street Journal editorial page came up with the notion of “lucky duckies.”  The label was used to describe the millions of Americans who don't pay federal income taxes because they don't earn enough money.

Sotomayor Guides Court's Liberal Wing  —  At her confirmation hearings last year, Sonia Sotomayor spent a lot of time assuring senators that empathy would play no part in her work on the Supreme Court.  —  That was a sort of rebuke to President Obama, who had said that empathy was precisely …

Christmas bomb plot: nine men remanded over plan to ‘blow up Big Ben and Westminster Abbey’  —  Nine alleged terrorists plotted a Christmas bombing campaign targeting sites that included the London Stock Exchange and Big Ben, a court heard.  —  They are alleged to have carried …

In tough times, Barbour flies high  —  The Mississippi state plane, a zippy Cessna Citation with a capacity of 12, is a model favored by corporate executives and the wealthy, and its principal passenger, Gov. Haley Barbour, might easily be mistaken for one of them when he arrives …

Peretz in Exile  —  For decades, Martin Peretz taught at Harvard and presided over The New Republic—a fierce, if controversial, lion among American intellectuals and Zionists.  Now, having been labeled a bigot, taunted at his alma mater, and stripped of his magazine, he has found peace in a place where there is little: Israel.

Michigan Town Is Left Pleading For Bankruptcy  —  HAMTRAMCK, Mich. — Leaders of this city met for more than seven hours on a Saturday not long ago, searching for something to cut from a budget that has already been cut, over and over.  —  This time they slashed money for boarding up abandoned houses …

A Return to Normalcy  —  Over the past three years, American politics has been dominated by a liberal fantasy and a conservative freakout.  —  The fantasy was the idea that Barack Obama, a one-term senator with an appealing biography and a silver tongue, would turn out to be Franklin Delano Roosevelt …

THE JOBS CRISIS  —  The recession has been over for more than a year now, but so many people are out of work that it doesn't feel like much of a recovery.  In November, the economy added just thirty-nine thousand jobs.  The failure to translate G.D.P. growth into job growth has given us …