Today is this website’s last day. I’ve already said goodbye – on Monday – but since then I’ve gotten some nice, even moving emails from folks and I’d like to share a few of them. I’m leaving out the names of the writers. “Hi Barry–You should feel as proud as a peacock for the quality [...]

Here is what Mitt Romney should say without further delay: I hereby make public all hitherto unpublished information about my income taxes. It was a lapse of judgment on my part not to have done this sooner. I am proud to pay taxes. As the press will learn when it examines the records I have [...]

Does any journalist who is not an overt shill for the right actually believe that Republicans are pushing voter ID laws because they’re concerned about  voter fraud? No, of course not. And for good reason. Voter fraud simply isn’t a problem in this country. Studies have definitively debunked the voter fraud myth time and again. In Pennsyvlania, [...]

Two recent books about national security have incited an overwrought kerfuffle about leaks. But what they should have done is provoke a vigorous debate about the startling policies they describe, and the many things that remain unknown. I reviewed the two books — “Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power“, [...]

Like Captain Renault in the movie Casablanca, sportswriters and the NCAA are “shocked, shocked” by the revelations that continue to tumble out of the child-molestation scandal at Penn State. How could such a travesty unfold in the billion dollar business of NCAA Inc.? Judging from coverage and commentary it’s as though no one who is [...]

Were they the least bit interested in exercising any oversight at all into the war that American soldiers are still fighting and dying in — and that Chinese bond buyers are still providing the cash for — members of Congress wouldn’t have to go very far to find some excellent questions. Congress’s own think tank [...]

President Obama had a message to journalists in his talk at the ASNE convention on Tuesday. (Here’s the transcript.) That message in a nutshell: The center is not the midpoint between me and the Republicans. It’s where I am. “This bears on your reporting,” he said. And he explained: I think that there is oftentimes [...]

To hear the NCAA tell it, the organization must resent the fact that Phi Beta Kappa pre-empted it by 130 years in creating an academic honor society in 1776. For the NCAA – the National Collegiate Athletic Association, founded in 1906 – is loudly proclaiming the intellectual mantle for itself. Its insistent, mess-up-your-head assertion of [...]

The best way to heal self-inflicted wounds is to confess error quickly, fully and unambiguously. The Susan Komen breast cancer foundation’s apology for withdrawing funding from Planned Parenthood, and to reinstate the money, fell short of candidly explaining why it adopted a policy one of its board members described, accurately, as “stupid.” The policy it [...]

I got an email from my nephew Daniel Sussman the screenwriter. He has been living in Greece for a while and thus has a calm, detached perspective on what’s going on in American politics. He wrote: Okay, maybe this is naive, but… Just about every sane person is (or a significant number of people are) [...]