Hard questions await Obama at news conference  —  This is not what the White House wanted for President Barack Obama's first news conference of his second term.  —  He won't be able to dwell much on his stronger-than-expected victory or even press his agenda for the next four years.

Jill Kelley claims ‘honorary’ diplomatic status  —  Jill Kelley, the woman at the center of scandals swirling around Gens.  David Petraeus and John Allen, tried to invoke what she claimed was honorary diplomatic status in a 911 call complaining about trespassers on her lawn.

Look Who's Refusing To Compromise To Avoid The Fiscal Cliff  —  Budget Talks: If President Obama wants to get a deficit deal done to avoid the fiscal cliff, his biggest challenge won't be Republicans, but his own hard-core left-wing supporters.  —  Two days after the election …

Woman ‘denied a termination’ dies in hospital  —  Two investigations are under way into the death of a woman who was 17 weeks pregnant, at University Hospital Galway last month.  —  Savita Halappanavar (31), a dentist, presented with back pain at the hospital on October 21st …

Ryan: It ‘Looked Like We Stood A Pretty Good Chance Of Winning’ On Election Day  —  In an interview with WISN 12 News in Milwaukee on Monday, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) admitted that he and Mitt Romney were indeed caught off guard by the results of last week's election, claiming …

Relationship between Boehner, McConnell faces tough test  —  The relationship between House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) will be tested in the months ahead as political forces pull them in different directions.

Majority Supports Path to Citizenship; Greater Division on Other Social Issues  —  Most Americans support a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, an issue that may be high on the agenda of newly re-elected President Obama and the 113th Congress, given the increased importance of nonwhites …

ABC Affiliate: ‘All Up In My Snatch’ Petraeus Book Graphic A ‘Mistake’  —  Today in adventures in television news: graphics gone wrong.  An ABC affiliate in Denver, Colo., said it was a “mistake” to run an image of Paula Broadwell's David Petraeus biography that listed the title as …

Misreading Election 2012  —  The GOP might be out of step with some voters, but Mitt Romney was an unusually unpopular party standard-bearer.  —  Postelection talk of “lessons learned” is often exaggerated and misleading, and so it is in 2012.  —  A week after President Obama won re-election, two themes are dominant.

A Mormon Reporter On The Romney Bus  —  On the night of the South Carolina Republican primary in January, I sat near the front of a dark campaign press bus, and listened to reporters talk about Mitt Romney's underwear.  —  Earlier in the day, one of them had happened upon the candidate …

Colbert's super-PAC files termination paperwork with FEC  —  According to the Federal Election Commission, Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow had its termination paperwork scanned onto the commission's website at about 7 p.m.  —  Among it its final disbursements, the committee reports giving the …

Hurricane Sandy: Katrina on the Hudson?  —  Glenn Reynolds notices similarities, in USA Today: … But there is one difference: … It took days for FEMA to hit the ground in hard-hit parts of NYC.  More than a week after the storm, FEMA representatives were just getting on the ground and opening temporary offices in New Jersey.

General Petraeus' fatal flaw: not his affair, but the Afghan surge  —  The CIA director's resignation over a sex scandal has obscured how badly his counterinsurgency strategy failed in Afghanistan  —  More than three years ago, I sat in an overflow room in Washington, DC's Willard Hotel listening …

Why Obama is more than Bush with a human face |  Slavoj iek  —  Ground-floor thinking can give Obama lift-off.  His reforms have already touched a nerve at the core of the US ideological edifice  —  How did Barack Obama win re-election?  The philosopher Jean-Claude Milner recently proposed …