Obama weighs in on Michael Vick, and other cultural issues  —  HONOLULU - President Obama doesn't seem to shy away from the divisive social and cultural topics that Americans are debating in their living rooms, gyms and workplaces.  —  He has spoken out about the responsibility of fathers …

Optimism for Obama Should Come With Caution  —  For as poorly as President Obama's Democrats performed on Nov. 2, you can find several assessments of his re-election chances that seem doggone optimistic.  —  The Washington Examiner's Michael Barone, in a careful analysis, suggests that Mr. Obama won't be easy to defeat.

GOP Turns To K Street Veterans To Help Unravel Health Care Law  —  House Republicans are turning to old friends on K Street to lead their legislative attempts to repeal the new health care law.  —  Three recently hired Republican aides — two set to work in senior positions on the powerful Energy …

Palin's Food Fight  —  Michelle Obama and childhood obesity.  —  President Obama's indiscriminate expansion of federal power has inspired a healthy populist rebellion, but his opponents sometimes seem to lose their sense of proportion.  Take Sarah Palin's mockery of Michelle Obama's childhood antiobesity campaign.

GOP Sen.-elect Paul: Attach spending cuts to every ‘major’ bill  —  GOP Sen.-elect Rand Paul said Monday that he wants to attach spending cuts to every piece of major legislation that comes before the Senate next year.  —  Paul (Ky.) — who won his race with strong support from the Tea Party movement …

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 …

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 …

Obama's Budget Delayed a Week  —  WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama's budget proposal for fiscal 2012 will be released in mid-February, a little more than a week after its planned release date.  The administration is scrambling to assemble what could be a pivotal document following …

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 …

Group Opposed To DADT Repeal To Fight On Against Shower Policy  —  Since 1993, the Center for Military Readiness has been fighting to keep gay men and lesbians from infiltrating the United States military.  So now that “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” has been repealed, what's next for the group …

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.

Tests of ‘Roe’ more frequent since justices upheld late-term abortion ban in '07  —  LINCOLN, NEB. - Mike Flood, the 35-year-old speaker of Nebraska's legislature, had a problem: He wanted to stop the state's well-known abortion provider from offering late-term abortions.

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 …

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.

Earmarks Ban May Loom, but Lawmakers Find Ways to Finance Pet Projects  —  WASHINGTON — No one was more critical than Representative Mark Steven Kirk when President Obama and the Democratic majority in the Congress sought passage last year of a $787 billion spending bill intended to stimulate the economy.

N.J. senator criticizes Gov. Christie, Lt. Gov. Guadagno for being out of state during blizzard  —  TRENTON — A Democratic lawmaker is questioning why both Gov. Chris Christie and Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno are out of state at the same time, leaving Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D-Gloucester) …

The 2010 Daily Dish Awards: An Update  —  Malkin Award: In what has traditionally been our most competitive award, Roger Ailes has an early lead for calling NPR executives Nazis, but South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer is currently in second for comparing government aid recipients to stray animals.