WASHINGTON — Where are the jobs? God knows. After preaching for weeks about the urgency of Washington taking action to create jobs, lawmakers decided to put their mammon where their mouths are. And so on Tuesday evening they descended from the mountaintop and came forth to anoint a jobs bill of bi...

WASHINGTON — The Hermanator is now the hunted. Herman Cain, the long-shot Republican presidential-candidate-turned-front-runner, has done just about everything wrong since news broke Sunday night that his former employer had paid two women to settle sexual harassment complaints against him....

WASHINGTON — Herman Cain searched his memory for details about what might have caused a woman in the 1990s to accuse him of sexual harassment. No, he couldn’t remember her, not much at all. Then again, there was one time, he told me, when he stood next to the woman and noted that she was about t...

WASHINGTON — Herman Cain’s craggy-faced Chief of Staff Mark Block took a drag off a cigarette, blew smoke at the camera and sent the political class into coughing fits. Theories about what Block intended have run the gamut from James Carville’s “He was drunk,” to amateurish campaigning, to...

WASHINGTON — On perfectly beautiful days such as these, it is impossible to conceive of conflict. How, I’ve often wondered, do soldiers muster the psychic energy necessary to inflict and suffer injury on an autumn or spring day when sitting in a breezy sun shaft is so much more compelling —and...

WASHINGTON — The operative maxim in cable television can be summed up as follows: Is it good TV? Brilliant is good, but not enough. Attractive is imperative, but not enough. Also needed are tension, conflict and passion. Television is visual storytelling and it doesn’t succeed without all elemen...

WASHINGTON — The call by some members of the black media for African-Americans to support President Obama in racial solidarity is a terrible idea. Just as terrible as women supporting women only because of their sex, or any other group viewing the world solely through the narrow prism of their own...

WASHINGTON — By the time Steve Jobs’ Wikipedia page had been adjusted to past tense, eulogists had added a footnote to his biography of success. Failure. Jobs, though wildly successful, also failed often and badly. Therein, we note posthumously, lies perhaps the larger lesson of his life: Someti...

WASHINGTON — Undoubtedly many Americans, not least among them television producers, are disappointed by Sarah Palin’s decision not to run for president. On the bright side, Palin has proved (finally) that there is a God. How so?...

WASHINGTON — “Obama, Hitler and Hank Williams Jr.” is not a headline one ever could have imagined writing. But then, who could have thought that we would become so idiotic? Let’s be perfectly clear: Barack Obama is not Adolf Hitler. He doesn’t even look like him. Unless, that is, you paint...