Once upon a time I was elderly. I called it quits with that demographic after learning from The New Yorker’s James Surowiecki about the anti-social antics of my former cohorts. Surowiecki wrote that the mid-term election results might accurately be called the “revolt of the retired”. The elderly not only turned out in unusually large [...]

Can’t Barack Obama do anything right? When he’s not being rebuked for being too much in the limelight (the New Yorker, Jan. 25), he’s being zapped by Frank Rich in the March 7 New York Times. Or was it Rich? The high-profile, hard-hitting lift-out quote in his column – “One year on, everyone is puzzling [...]

During President Obama’s five back-to-back Sunday television interviews, “No one…asked an unexpected question,” Alessandra Stanley wrote in the New York Times. That was a powerful and warranted indictment of the ascendant non-journalism masquerading as journalism. The interviews, on CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS and Univision, were “as tightly choreographed – and eerily similar – as the [...]

On message and with a streak of steel, Barack Obama’s senior advisor Valerie Jarrett made it clear that the president is fighting back challenges to his agenda. It “takes a certain temperament, perseverance and stubbornness” to make changes in Washington, Jarrett said. She addressed poll numbers, town hall disruptions and what it will take to [...]

In good time for consideration of President Obama’s pick for the Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, the May 25 issue of The New Yorker magazine offers a detailed report on John Roberts, the Chief Justice appointed by George W. Bush. The article is written by staff writer Jeffrey Toobin, author of “The Nine: Inside the [...]

President Obama holds a prime-time press conference tomorrow night to mark his 100th day in office, and if the major news organizations really want to make it interesting, they won’t send their White House corrrespondents. No, I’m not suggesting a boycott. What I’m proposing is that, depending on what they want to probe, news organizations [...]

President Obama wanted to hit the ground running when he was sworn in, but there are thousands of federal convicts and ex-convicts waiting for him to wake up and take notice of their requests for pardons or commutations. Of all the powers granted to him by the Constitution, his authority here is complete. Yet he [...]

Poor President Obama. All he did was laugh a couple of times during his Sixty-Minutes interview, and he was pummeled by media critics. How DARE the man even smile in the thick of the crises encircling him? He did explain that his laughter reflected a kind of “gallows humor,” a necessary relief from the burdens [...]

They walked along Pennsylvania Avenue and the crowd roared. President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama looked relaxed and not the least bit cold and – just like that – it was real. Men jumped on other men’s shoulders to get a better look, parents held children high in the air and throngs of [...]

Each night leading up to the inauguration of Barack Obama brings more celebrations, more of that particular mix of celebrities, politicians and media folk. Sunday night, the Root inaugural ball also added history. At the party at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History, you could see film director John Singleton ducking into a [...]