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Scorched earth runs in the family. Having lost the power to heedlessly bomb the world, Cheney has turned his attention to heedlessly bombing old colleagues. Vice’s new memoir, “In My Time,” veers unpleasantly between spin, insisting he was always right, and score-settling, insisting that anyone who opposed him was wrong. His knife-in-her-teeth daughter, Elizabeth...
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President Obama was on the way to Alpha when a plea came for him to be, well, more alpha. LuAnn Lavine, a real estate agent from Geneseo, a rural town just up the road from Alpha, Ill., the last stop on the president’s Midwestern bus tour, told The Times’s Jeff Zeleny: “Everyone was so...
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The president was in “Afternoon of a Faun” mode, a rural deity playing on his panpipes in the woods. Then, suddenly, he stood very still as he sensed electoral danger. After assuring Obama that she was a supporter, an Iowa mother named Emily asked the president at a town hall at the Seed Savers...
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I saw Mitt Romney’s hair move. No really, I did. We were standing amid the soybean and corn fields in rural Iowa and a breeze lifted some of his salt-and-pepper mane out of its Brylcreem perfection. The tenuous and scarce Republican front-runner, who hopes to do “darn well” in Iowa, was poking at President...
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Even the Butter Cow at the Iowa State Fair is not enough to sweeten the mood. Three years ago, Barack Obama’s unlikely presidential dream was given wings by rapturous Iowans — young, old and in-between — who saw in the fresh-faced, silky-voiced black senator a chance to leap past the bellicose, rancorous Bush years...
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BARACK OBAMA must wonder sometimes if his luck has run out. Maybe he used it all up in 2008. “Yes, we can!” has devolved into “Hey, we might.” “When I said, ‘Change we can believe in,’ I didn’t say, ‘Change we can believe in tomorrow,’ ” he told an audience at a Chicago fund-raiser on...
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Even before Emanuel Cleaver, the Democratic congressman from Missouri, called the debt deal “a sugar-coated Satan sandwich” and Nancy Pelosi tossed in a side of “Satan fries,” the whiff of sulfur was rising from the Capitol. The gory, Gothic melodrama on the Potomac is a summer horror blockbuster — without the catharsis. Most of...
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Coons is a smart guy who’s alarmed at finding himself in a vicious combat zone that makes “Shark Week” look like a guppy party. He said he felt as if he were in “an alternative universe.” He wonders if the president, rather than using an analogy about late credit card payments, should explain that...
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So we’ll never go back to the future? A group of physicists at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology has revealed time travel to be more fiction than science. They have released a research report proving that a single photon, a unit of light, cannot exceed the speed of light, as time-travel conjurers...
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Frantically distancing himself from the pope of Fleet Street, David Cameron sardonically assured riled-up lawmakers that he had never seen Rebekah Brooks in her PJs because he had not attended Gordon Brown’s wife’s slumber party at Chequers with Wendi Deng and Elisabeth Murdoch in 2008. He conceded that he should not have ignored warnings...
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