We now know what Barry Obama and his date looked like at prom in 1979 — and they probably looked better than you. Just compare the Obama crew's not-horrible prom fashion to many politicians' prom photos they might wish hadn't been dug up.
President Obama did call the bombing of the Boston marathon "terrorism" in a brief statement on the event Monday, saying instead, "We still do not know who did this or why. People shouldn't jump to conclusions before we have all the facts."
After years of long hours and low-ish pay, many of President Obama's old aides are cashing in on their political connections. But as The New Republic's Noam Scheiber explains, there's some squabbling among the Obama alumni network over who looks like a crass sellout and who's a classy sellout.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio went on seven Sunday talk shows to pitch a bipartisan immigration reform deal, while a handful of Republican lawmakers famous for their wacky cable news interviews can't get any attention.
Late this week we learned that the sequester may bring an end to the annual tradition of Fleet Week, in which members of the Navy and Marines swarm New York. Is this a good thing? We discuss, with unadulterated weekend joy — and posters.
Former Bush adviser Dana Perino made America cringe by rapping a response to Jay-Z's rapped defense of his trip to Cuba, following in the footsteps of many conservatives who have rapped before. They have never not made us cringe.
Ryan gave a speech Thursday night insisting that Republicans not cave on their opposition to abortion, but he ended up making the case for why abortion should remain legal.
Rupert Murdoch wanted Fox News to air The Bible, the hit miniseries on History with an Obama-esque Satan. But Murdoch and Survivor bigwig Mark Burnett couldn't come to an agreement on the money or the rights. This is an unsettling revelation.
Gay marriage is suddenly popular. But what our map GIF shows is that this wave of support for gay rights follows two large anti-gay rights wave, first under President Bill Clinton and then under President George W. Bush.
Senators have come up with compromises on immigration and gun control even though Washington was supposed to be paralyzed and President Obama's agenda was supposed to be pretty much dead, smothered by the fiscal cliff, the sequester, and the NRA.
An analysis on the early details of the "gang of eight" proposal shows a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants that is an intentionally arduous bureaucratic labyrinth that will take two decades years to crawl through.
After country star Brad Paisley kicked off a national conversation about white guys who don't want to be called racist just because they say or wear things with racist connotations, we find a fascinating case study in Salina, Kansas, where a county commissioner suggested the county should avoid "n— rigging" repairs to a local building.
Rand Paul's explanation for how Republicans lost the support of black voters, at a Howard University speech Wednesday, sounded a lot like Mitt Romney's explanation for why he lost the 2012 election — that Obama won because he offered "gifts." Rand Paul's explanation is wrong.
Many Republicans were unaware that Obama's been offering chained CPI for a while. It seems they were also unaware that Grover Norquist, conservatives' No. 1 anti-tax activist and an important GOP ally for decades, opposes chained CPI as a bad deal and a tax increase.
In addition to admitting his run for mayor, Weiner admits he got caught up in the thrill of social media, which allows regular citizens to interact with politicians in a way that's never been possible before. It feels very democratic. But sometimes it also feels like you've seen a kind of desperation that you shouldn't have seen.
The Senate will release a bipartisan immigration reform bill by the end of the week — maybe. The "gang of eight" can't even agree on whether they'll come to an agreement in time. But you wouldn't know that, watching the kook-free coverage of the immigration debate.
Why did country star Brad Paisley write the song "Accidental Racist"? Because he thinks it's time musicians step in to have a national conversation about race.
As the 2016 contender, GOP libertarian spokesman, and son of Ron prepares to give a speech at Howard University about the history of black voters and the Republican Party, it's impossible not to be curious about which story he decides to tell: the one in which the GOP just forgot to campaign for black votes, or the one in which the GOP made a bad bet on racism and is trying to fix it.
Do you think racists are all the same? You are wrong. While racism is pretty much just racism there are so many different species of racists.
Looking at the recent spread of liberalized marijuana laws across the United States, it's hard not to think we're entering some kind of Weed Spring. The latest state to act is Maryland, where on Monday the state senate approved a bill legalizing medical marijuana by 42 to 4, sending it to Gov. Martin O'Malley, who is expected to sign it into law.
A new battle is raging in the conservative civil war over something that has long felt fundamental to organizing the GOP: the crazy right-wing email forward.
Modern women face a stark choice: either give up their careers early to have loving families or die alone and be eaten by their pets. But we feel we must point out that this modern condition is not modern at all.
President Obama called California Attorney General Kamala Harris to say he was sorry for calling her the hottest attorney general in all the land, White House press secretary Jay Carney explained Friday afternoon, after a ton of criticism that Obama acted like an unenlightened bro.
An arrest Friday in Colorado capped a week full of connections between law enforcement killings and white supremacist groups, including Breitbart's claim that "the mainstream media has gone to great lengths to label ad-infinitum the Aryan Brotherhood as a 'white supremacist' group." So what do real white supremacists really think of the Brotherhood? We went straight to the source.
The proposals will include cuts to Medicare and Social Security and tax increases... which doesn't change what the president was offering Republicans last fall — but it does mean pundits will declare Obama is offering a serious budget for serious times, DOA or not.
President Obama revealed his secret adherence to fascist beauty standards when he praised the female California attorney general for being, like, mad hot at a DNC fundraiser Thursday afternoon in Atherton, California.
A Republican Party website is going to try to reach young people by stealing the jokey lists and memes from BuzzFeed. While it's funny to imagine "stuffy white men" (the RNC's words!) brainstorm OMG LOL listicles, this is not cosnervatives' first attempt to tap the power of social media to make their ideas go viral.
The conventional wisdom centers on who might be running. But the reality is that Hillary "Book Deal" Clinton, Rand "New Hampshire" Paul, and Marco "Kindler Gentler" Rubio are already running. Here's the latest look at the field.
President Obama's trip to Denver today to lift up Colorado as "a model of what's possible" on gun control in D.C. The interesting comparison, though, isn't why Congress won't stand up to the NRA — that answer is obvious — but what happened to the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, the state's gun lobby that is, if anything, more radical than the NRA.
The first (and maybe only) thing most people know about Elizabeth Colbert Busch is that she's Stephen Colbert's sister, but if she's going to pull off beating Mark Sanford, the former South Carolina governor most famous for flying to Argentina to cheat on his wife, for a Congressional seat this fall, people are going to have to learn more about her.
While the Republican National Committee thinks it needs to support immigration reform to start winning presidential elections, Republicans in Congress have reason to think they need to oppose to keep winning elections.
One of conservatives' favorite examples of wasteful government spending in recent weeks has been a study of duck penises. This is dumb, and Newt Gingrich knows it: They should promote the very type of technological innovation made possible by the weird science research the party is currently dismissing as silly and wasteful.
Wayne LaPierre was MIA at the NRA's even Tuesday, replaced by moderate-sounding Asa Hutchinson, just the latest move by the gun lobby to repair its image now that its legislative victories have been all but secured.
How can the National Rifle Association oppose something as checking whether someone is legally barred from buying a gun before they purchase one, i.e. universal background checks? Because the NRA is not reasonable anymore.
The push and pull between the Republican Party's members who are more and less enlightened on matters of race has been going on for a long time. And in just the last decade, the GOP has seen plenty of two-steps-forward-three-steps-back moments when it's tried to minority outreach programs.
When The Washington Post's Brad Plumer posted "This is actually the scariest chart about Europe" on Thursday morning, there was a spontaneous reaction of mockery on Twitter that could, in the style of many social movements, mark the beginning of a full-scale rebellion against the maniacal competition to create The One Chart That Will Rule Them All.
On Thursday, President Obama gave a gun control speech and Mayor Bloomberg's group released new gun control ads, all while the NRA runs offensive ads about the president's daughters and rambles about how Bloomberg "can't buy America." That's true. It's much more cost-effective to buy Congress.
Fox News has hired Tucker Carlson to co-host Fox & Friends Weekend, even though the two are on opposite ideological trajectories -- Fox is getting more moderate while Carlson is getting more fringe.
Two days of historic Supreme Court arguments on gay marriage have cheered legal advocates of gay marriage — who think the end of California's Prop 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act is near — but legal experts say the rulings they expect would mean legal chaos for gay couples.
North Carolina Sen. Kay Hagan is the latest Senator to publicly support gay marriage posting on Facebook that "banning gay marriage is bad for families," even though she's up for reelection in 2014 in a state that just passed a state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.
Many politicians and pundits have noticed that gay marriage has become so popular that they have to evolve on the issue to stay relevant. But there are still several conservatives who do have strong feelings. There are a few distinct arguments against gay marriage, and they don't always mesh well together.
You can measure how quickly public opinion on gay rights has changed by looking at poll numbers, or you can see it on the covers of the national newsweeklies.
Mark Sanford, famous for not hiking on the Appalachian Trail, is polling behind Elizabeth Colbert Busch, famous for being the sister of a guy who lampoons conservatives, in the race for South Carolina's conservative first congressional district.
Ted Cruz birthers are like classic birthers in that they deny reality, which is that the freshman Texas senator meets the constitutional requirements to be president. They are not like classic birthers in that they are not seeking mythical documents that will prove Cruz was born outside America.
Clinton signed the federal Defense of Marriage Act in the middle of the night in 1996 because he'd been burned by supporting allowing gays in the military, and he didn't want to get burned again. He's been doing penance for it ever since, and times have certainly changed.
Slate's liberal economics blogger Matt Yglesias bought a $1.2 million three-bedroom condo in Washington, D.C., and a bunch of conservatives are pretty appalled that a liberal would have the gall to be rich.
The civil rights movement wanted to integrate black people into American society. Obama, most Israelis, and Palestinians want a two-state solution. That takes more than changing hearts and minds of average people.
After careful study of Bush's work, we are forced to consider the theory that Bush is the dogs.
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