Authorities probe threat against Cruz  —  Law enforcement officials are investigating a threat against Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who was vaulted into national prominence with his push to defund ObamaCare.  —  A person identifying himself as Troy Gilmore Jr., posted on Twitter Friday morning …

Peter Baker's ‘Days of Fire’  —  The Bush administration opened with a second Pearl Harbor, ended with a second Great Crash and contained a second Vietnam in the middle.  —  The story of those eight years would seem far too vast to contain inside a single volume.  Yet here that volume is.

Dick Cheney calls his current health “a miracle”  —  Dick Cheney says his current health is “a miracle” in a frank discussion of the heart disease he suffered over his entire political career and especially when he served as the vice president.  In his first interview about his new book …

States Are Focus of Effort to Foil Health Care Law  —  RICHMOND, Va. — The federal government is again open for business, and Republicans in Washington are licking their wounds from the failed Tea Party attempt to derail President Obama's health care overhaul.

Watch Megyn Kelly Desperately Try To Rein In Sarah Palin  —  Megyn Kelly had Sarah Palin on her new show on Thursday night, and the interview went about as you would expect it to go.  Our favorite part came in the first couple of minutes.  —  Kelly set Palin up nicely …

Inside the Fox News lie machine: I fact-checked Sean Hannity on Obamacare  —  UPDATE I re-reported a Fox News segment on Obamacare — it was appallingly easy to see how it misleads the audience  —  I happened to turn on the Hannity show on Fox News last Friday evening.

Texans Stick With Cruz Despite Defeat in Washington  —  HOUSTON — Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas and the face of the angry right, has been criticized, lambasted and lampooned for putting the nation through a 16-day government shutdown and the prospect of a financial default.

Phill Kline indefinitely suspended from practicing law  —  Citing “clear and convincing evidence” of professional misconduct, the Kansas Supreme Court on Friday indefinitely suspended the law license of former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline.  —  The court found that Kline violated 11 rules governing …

Nate Silver previews site, hits POLITICO  —  Nate Silver, the statistician who recently joined ESPN from The New York Times, previewed his new website on Friday and dished out some criticisms of the current journalism environment, much of it directed at POLITICO.

Potemkin Parliament  —  Washington's governing systems are in a bad way.  —  The least dispiriting moment of another grim week in Washington was the sight of ornery veterans tearing down the Barrycades around the war memorials on the National Mall, dragging them up the street, and dumping them outside the White House.

Are Private Schools Worth It?  —  A new book argues that public schools are actually academically superior.  —  Sarah Theule Lubienski didn't set out to compare public schools and private schools.  A professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she was studying math instructional techniques …

Regulators fire up engines again  —  The federal rulemaking machine is rumbling back to life as agency officials tackle the backlog of work that was created by the government shutdown.  —  Conservatives worry officials are preparing a surge of new regulations to make up for lost time and meet upcoming deadlines.

GOP isn't learning from its mistakes  —  My children and I love watching Peter Pan.  In fact, we've seen the Disney classic so often through the years that we could probably recite most of the movie from memory.  Maybe that's why the opening lines came so easily to my mind earlier this week …

Saudis Shock U.N., Quit Security Council Over Syria  —  Saudi Arabia took the extraordinary step Friday of refusing to take its seat on the U.N. Security Council — despite pursuing the position for years.  It's an unprecedented protest over the council's failure to take firmer action in Syria and Palestine.

The solution to hyper-partisanship already exists, and it doesn't involve gerrymandering  —  The latest game of political chicken that drove Washington to a government shutdown and the very edge of the debt ceiling gave new life to the omnipresent complaint of elder statesmen and centrist wise guys …

Video of men toppling rock formation in state park could have criminal consequences  —  HIGHLAND — Two men have come under scrutiny by the public and possibly by prosecutors after a video made the rounds online showing them pushing over an iconic rock formation.

NJ Supreme Court rules same-sex couples can marry beginning Monday  —  Same-sex marriages will begin Monday in New Jersey after the state Supreme Court ruled Friday that the state must begin granting same-sex marriage licenses, a rebuff to Gov. Chris Christie.