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Three big scandals. Two Marine umbrellas. And a non-salute en route to Memorial Day. Plus more visual evidence from 12 days of scandal town.
President Obama's speech on counterterrorism on Thursday won rave reviews among some who seemed to see it as a return of the liberal constitutional law professor who ran for president in 2008. But while the tone might have been refreshing, maybe we should wait to see Obama's follow-through?
The Code Pink protester got herself inside the National Defense University in Washington on Thursday for Obama's big drone speech, even though she's been a famous heckler in Washington for a decade. So how does she do it? By using her old name — plus maybe a little help from middle-aged woman invisibility syndrome.
There ended up being two speakers Thursday at the National Defense University in DC. The first, as planned, was President Obama. The other, speaking for a surprisingly long time, was Madea Benjamin, a well-known heckler.
When justifying his use of drone strikes — in countries we're not at war with, in a war against "networks" with a not-yet-clear end, in a major speech on a limitless war — it helps for President Obama to use the rhetoric of George W. Bush as a foil. At least he's not as bad as that guy, right?
At some point, the government violated the Constitution while conducting electronic surveillance. How and when is masked by the secret court that authorizes such action — the sort of tool Obama offers as a way in which his drone program might be made more transparent. But the existing court shows just how opaque transparency can be.
President Obama just delivered his major policy speech outlining the future of America's military drone program, and the future of the entire war on terror. We have the full text and the key highlights.
President Obama will say he sees a day when the War on Terror comes to an end in a much anticipated speech Thursday afternoon. But when-ish will the War on Terror really end? It's going to be a while — maybe long after Obama has left office.
In his much-anticipated national security speech on Thursday, President Obama will reportedly revisit his longstanding pledge to close Guantanamo. And in the coming weeks, Obama will reportedly announce the restart of detainee transfers to Yemen
The U.S. government admitted for the first time Wednesday that it intentionally droned American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, and that it unintentionally droned three other Americans, including al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son. Attorney General Eric Holder admitted it in a letter to Congress, ahead of President Obama's long awaited speech on Thursday, which could finally lay bare the truth about the administration's targeting killing program.
The New York Times' Bill Keller suggests we should "Bring Back Ken Starr" to get to the bottom of the IRS scandal, because "the scandal circus on Capitol Hill is a terrible distraction."
On Thursday, the president plans to deliver a speech focusing drone attacks and military detention — a pretty sweeping agenda for a simple policy speech, one that might signal a sea change in America's counterterrorism efforts, and Obama's foreign policy legacy.
A majority Americans approve of the job President Obama's doing and think he's focused on issues that are important to them, even though a majority also thinks the IRS intentionally singled out conservative groups for harassment, according to a new Washington Post/ ABC News poll. Why is Obama doing so well in scandal season?
During last week's first-of-many hearing into the IRS scandal, one subplot emerged: Conservatives presented anecdotes to argue that the IRS didn't just target Tea Party groups seeking tax exempt status but a broader swath of conservative individuals and organizations. But the anecdotal evidence does not stand up to the data on tax audits.
So far the facts of the three scandals facing the Obama administration do not tie President Obama himself to the scandalous acts. Since Republicans can't yet indict President Obama, they're shifting to indicting all of liberalism.
The government will use any and all information at its disposal to find journalist sources, as shown in The Washington Post's report this morning on a Department of Justice investigation into Fox News chief correspondent James Rosen, who may face criminal charges for reporting government secrets.
The IRS official who revealed the IRS had inappropriately targeted conservative groups on Friday did so on purpose -- by asking a tax lawyer to ask her about it at American Bar Association tax section’s annual meeting.
As Scandal Week comes to a close, it's worth reviewing the policy proposals that have followed in the revelations' wake. There aren't many.
Now that everyone is paying attention to the scandal stories Republicans have been pushing for months against President Obama, they have a bit of stage fright.
The main thrust of all of President Obama's press conferences for the last two years has been to tell Congress to do its job, and that held true on Thursday, when he answered questions about a trio of scandals by repeatedly saying he was looking forward to "fixing a problem" by working with Congress to pass laws he's wanted all along.
To be clear: There are not three scandals plaguing the Obama White House. By embracing the leaked talking points, Obama's opponents may have taken Benghazi off the table completely.
President Obama held a joint press conference today with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan, but the press had plenty of other things they wanted to talk about.
As expected, President Obama's remarks Wednesday evening on the investigation into the IRS's targeting of "Tea Party" and "Patriot" groups were short, but not without consequence: the acting commissioner of the IRS, Steven Miller, has resigned in the wake of the scandal.
The White House took a step Wednesday to try and limit any political fall-out of the seizure of phone records from the AP. By making overtures to renew a media shield law, the administration gets to have its beloved subpoena power and condemn it, too.
How bad is it in Washington for the Obama Administration? It's Obama "needs to fire somebody" bad, according to former Clinton adviser Vernon Jordan — and, you know, Politico.
If you're looking for a way to simultaneously criticize the president and renewable energy, it doesn't get much easier than the phrase, "Obama is allowing wind companies to kill eagles." Which is true. But a more nuanced assessment is probably in order.
After admitting that his 2012 Republican "fever" theory was wrong, President Obama told donors like Jessica Biel, Justin Timberlake (who was wearing hipster glasses), and Tommy Hilfiger that Washington gridlock is pretty much Rush Limbaugh's fault on Monday evening at a fundraiser at Harvey Weinstein's house in New York's Greenwich Village.
President Obama answered a question about Benghazi during a press conference on Monday, and hi-def photos reveal that some moisture traveled from the president's eye area to his cheekbone in a thin stream. Was it a tear? It certainly looks like a tear. These images revealing Obama's epiphora raise new and troubling questions.
Forced to take questions about the event that will not go away, Obama angrily pushed back Monday at the White House on the idea of a coverup of the Benghazi consulate attack, calling newly surfaced emails a "side show" and insisting that the "whole thing defies logic."
Could what happened in Benghazi lead to an impeachment of the president? Yes, because impeachment and allegations of misbehavior have become the Godwin's Law of national politics.
The revelation that Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan and White House chief of staff Dennis McDonough had a successful secret beer date might be cause to fundamentally rethink skepticism that dinner diplomacy could end Washington gridlock caused by Republicans and Democrats holding diametrically opposed positions.
A Pew poll released Wednesday offers some interesting insights: Democrats are bored with Democrats, independents blame Republicans, and Republicans hate everyone — but a closer look at the data may reveal why Congressional Republicans are tracking higher than Democrats on some of the key issues of the day.
There had been whispers, of course — whatever happened to The Guy Who Famously Elbowed President Obama? — but no one ever landed the post-pickup-game interview. Until now.
Over the weekend, two new "We the People" petitions met the White House's 100,000-signatory standard for a formal response. Unlike most previous petitions, though, the majority of the people doing the signing are more than likely not American citizens.
Accusations that an American documentary filmmaker was posing as a U.S. spy in Venezuela are "ridiculous," if you believe President Obama, who according to Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro is the "chief of the devils." Did you catch all of that? Here's the whole story.
It may be mere coincidence, but after The Atlantic Wire reported that the Twitter account @barackobama is no longer controlled by the Obama administration or the White House, the account began tweeting far less frequently — and the @whitehouse account began tweeting much more frequently.
Despite its straight-from-science-fiction premise, it's real: A group of scientists meeting at the White House to discuss a brand-new ocean. Impending Arctic ice melt makes this just another day in the geopolitics of climate change.
The conventional wisdom going into the midterm elections is that Obama fatigue puts Democrats in major trouble, but the historical evidence says otherwise.
The Obama administration is getting ready to send arms to Syrian rebels, The Washington Post's Karen DeYoung reports, by way of very convoluted descriptions from anonymous senior administration officials attempting to describe the Obama administration's thinking. Got that? Didn't think so. Here's a guide to where we're at — almost.
Obama's approval ratings track much more closely with Bush's than Clinton's, and if he repeats the pattern he saw during his first term — a slow drop followed by a recovery — Obama could see fairly low popularity, right around the time of midterm elections.
With Congress out of town, the president Obama held a rare Q&Awith reporters at the White House today, swatting away the idea of an intelligence failure in the Boston bombings, and a Fox News report about intimidation of witnesses in the Benghazi investigation. He also promised to continue to push for the closing of the Guantanamo Bay prison.
Why hasn't the American public risen up in fury at Republicans over the sequester's annoyances and inconveniences, as President Obama had clearly hoped? Because the annoying things about the sequester perfectly play into the Republican talking point that government is dumb and wasteful and run by people with no common sense.
Fox News reports that "at least four career officials at the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency" have retained lawyers after being threatened by the Obama administration.
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