How Dumb Are We?  —  NEWSWEEK gave 1,000 Americans the U.S. Citizenship Test—38 percent failed.  The country's future is imperiled by our ignorance.  —  What Don't You Know?  Take the Quiz.  —  They're the sort of scores that drive high-school history teachers to drink.

Sarah Palin To Israelis: “Why Are You Apologizing All The Time?”  —  ABC News' Mary Bruce Reports: Sarah Palin made her first pilgrimage to the Holy Land on Sunday, joining a long line of presidential hopefuls who have traveled to Israel prior to throwing their hat in the ring.

McCaskill will sell ‘the damn plane’  —  Sen. Claire McCaskill is selling the personal plane that has caused her turbulence in recent weeks after POLITICO revealed she used taxpayer money to cover the cost of political travel.  —  The first-term Democrat said she was very happy she was able …

Why Obama Doesn't Need to Ask Congress Before Attacking Libya  —  It's simple: Most of Washington doesn't want him to.  To coin a phrase: If they want the president to do it, that means it's legal.  —  Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of Congress's most prominent hawks, who must at this point …

Stock Footage of Minorities in Pawlenty's Presidential Announcement Video  —  Few minorities are featured in Tim Pawlenty's presidential announcement video, and, as it turns out, most of them were taken from Getty stock footage.  —  Pawlenty, who served as governor of Minnesota until January …

The Right's New Meme  —  Most of the GOP leadership is playing it mum or playing it vicious on the Libya madness.  Surprise!  Obama cannot win because his un-Bush style of intervention is so ... liberal.  Palin is the most vacuous, of course.  Her criticism is entirely of style …

AZ Senate President Russell Pearce Takes Tentherism To New Level: ‘You Are Not A Citizen Of The United States’  —  One of the most radical offshoots of modern conservatism in the United States is called “tentherism,” which invokes the Constitution's Tenth Amendment to claim that a whole host …

US army's ‘kill team’ in Afghanistan  —  Commanders brace for backlash of anti-US sentiment that could be more damaging than after the Abu Ghraib scandal  —  Commanders in Afghanistan are bracing themselves for possible riots and public fury triggered by the publication of “trophy” …

CNN Poll: Most support no fly zone in Libya but not ground troops  —  Washington (CNN) - Seven in ten Americans support military action by the U.S. and other countries to establish a no-fly zone in Libya, a 14-point increase since last week, according to a new national poll.

Costs of Libya Operation Already Piling Up  —  A U.S. F-16 fighter jet takes off from Aviano Air Base in Italy on Sunday.  The cost of the first day of Operation Odyssey Dawn topped $100 million.  —  With U.N. coalition forces bombarding Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi from the sea and air …

Webb critical of Obama's Libya operation: 'This isn't the way that our system is supposed to work'  —  Last week, the United Nations Security Council authorized the use of force in Libya to protect Libyan civilians from the country's dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

TOO ‘BROKE’ FOR IMMUNIZATION PROGRAMS?.... Part of the problem with the budget plan approved by House Republicans is that it has too many problems.  For critics, it's hard to even know where to start with all the spectacular flaws, and Democrats have struggled — if they've even tried …

Now it's time to defund NPR  —  Even after they fired me, called me a bigot and publicly advised me to only share my thoughts with a psychiatrist, I did not call for defunding NPR.  I am a journalist and NPR is an important platform for journalism.  —  But last week my line of defense for NPR ran into harsh political realities.

For the sins of his father: Gaddafi's son ‘killed in kamikaze pilot attack on barracks’  —  Colonel Gaddafi suffered a massive personal setback today when one of his sons was allegedly killed in a suicide air mission on his barracks.  —  Khamis, 27, who runs the feared Khamis Brigade …

No Country Leans on Upper-Income Households as Much as U.S.  —  During my recent testimony before the Senate Budget Committee ( found here), I cited an OECD statistic that the U.S. has the most progressive income tax system among industrialized nations.  [1] This prompted one Senator to point …

Indiana Republicans at a loss without Democrats  —  Legislative timeline  —  Jan. 6: Indiana General Assembly goes into session, and after only nine minutes the first spat breaks out.  Democrats object to the filing of right-to-work legislation, which would bar which bars companies and unions …

Analysis: Emails favored Walker 2-1  —  One-third of positive emails from out of state … By Kate Golden  —  Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism  —  Gov. Scott Walker was right: The angry crowds in Madison didn't tell the whole story of how Wisconsinites felt.

Not Quite Copenhagen  —  Is New York too New York for bike lanes?  —  The biker careers against traffic; the driver veers into the forbidden lane; the jaywalker marches, oblivious.  But only the sucker yields.  —  Photo-illustration by Peter Rad  —  On a blustery day this winter …

What Ever Happened to the Antiwar Movement?  —  About 100 antiwar protesters, including Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame, were arrested Saturday outside the White House in demonstrations marking the eighth anniversary of the U.S.-led war in Iraq.  It's a far cry from the Bush years …

UNIVERSITY DOWNPLAYS STUDENT'S JIHAD THREAT  —  Montreal police are investigating a student who made threats against a conservative club at McGill University, even though university officials determined the student's threats about jihad and wanting to “shoot everyone in the room” were harmless.

The Low Bar  —  Peter Bergen argues that the intervention in Libya is no invasion of Iraq: … Granting all that follows for the sake of argument, isn't this a strange way for Iraq to impact the structure of debate?  Is “less misguided than the invasion of Iraq” really a reasonable standard for policy to aspire to?

Tweety Was Right: Cats Are a Bird's No. 1 Enemy  —  While public attention has focused on wind turbines as a menace to birds, a new study shows that a far greater threat may be posed by a more familiar antagonist: the pet house cat.  —  A new study in The Journal of Ornithology on the mortality …

FLOTUS: ‘American dream’ true in Chile  —  First lady Michelle Obama on Monday lauded higher education as the engine that propelled her to a successful career, and the key reason her husband—whose own family “struggled to make ends meet” when he was a child — became president of the United States.