Swing States poll: A shift by women puts Obama in lead  —  MILWAUKEE - President Obama has opened the first significant lead of the 2012 campaign in the nation's dozen top battleground states, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds, boosted by a huge shift of women to his side.

Former President Clinton on Mitt Romney: Etch-a-Sketch “Is What He's Got to Do”  —  Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, currently faces a dynamic similar to the one President Bill Clinton faced during his first presidential run 20 years ago: a long, bruising primary, driving up his unfavorable ratings.

Obama extends olive branch to Cantor after passage of jobs bill  —  President Obama has extended an olive branch to Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and invited him to the White House this week to attend a signing ceremony for bipartisan jobs legislation.

Pink Slime Economics  —  The big bad event of last week was, of course, the Supreme Court hearing on health reform.  In the course of that hearing it became clear that several of the justices, and possibly a majority, are political creatures pure and simple, willing to embrace any argument …

Spike Lee puts the ‘twit’ in Twitter  —  Just when you thought the controversy over the Trayvon Martin shooting couldn't get any worse, it got worse.  Or, more accurately, several parties helped make it worse.  —  Enter Marcus Davonne Higgins, a Los Angeles man no one's probably ever heard of …

Senior citizens continue to bear burden of student loans  —  New research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows that Americans 60 and older still owe about $36 billion in student loans, providing a rare window into the dynamics of student debt.  More than 10 percent of those loans are delinquent.

About William D Cohan  —  Why Are the Fed and SEC Keeping Wall Street's Secrets?  —  Getting what should be public information about major Wall Street firms can be maddeningly difficult.  —  Bloomberg News discovered this in its ultimately successful effort to get information on the $1.2 trillion in …

Keith Olbermann's Angry Email Trail Traces Breakup With Current TV  —  His bitter divorce from Al Gore's network followed months of escalating complaints to Current TV executives.  Howard Kurtz unearths the acrimonious correspondence.  —  It was a terrible marriage from the beginning.

Dubious donations (2012 edition)  —  Barack Obama has proved the greatest campaign fund-raiser of all time by a long shot.  In 2008 his campaign raised more than $750 million.  The Obama campaign even went the extra mile to raise campaign funds by failing to adopt standard protections against fraudulent and illegal giving.

The right's stealthy coup  —  Right before our eyes, American conservatism is becoming something very different from what it once was.  Yet this transformation is happening by stealth because moderates are too afraid to acknowledge what all their senses tell them.

At Summit, Nations Move to Increase Aid for Syrian Rebels  —  ISTANBUL — The United States and more than 60 other countries moved closer on Sunday to direct intervention in the fighting in Syria, with Arab nations pledging $100 million to pay opposition fighters and the United States agreeing …