The New York Times

According to the film “National Treasure,” the Declaration of Independence is a document of such far-seeing sagacity that it has secret codes and treasure maps hidden in the parchment. You just have to know how to look for them. But that poses the question: which document, precisely, is the Declaration of Independence?

Most of us would answer that it’s the manuscript written on vellum, dated July 4, 1776, now displayed in a baroque case at the National Archives, where it is… more

Two days ago, during an off-the-record session with a group of foreign policy experts, Vice President Dick Cheney got a question he did not want to answer. “Mr. Vice President,” asked one of them, “I understand that on Wednesday or Thursday, we are going to de-list North Korea from the terrorism blacklist. Could you please set the context for this decision?”

Mr. Cheney froze, according to four participants at the Old Executive Office Building meeting. For more than 30 minutes he had… more

...Several years ago, Tim Pawlenty, the Minnesota governor, said the Republicans should be the party of Sam’s Club, not the country club. This line is the animating spirit of “Grand New Party.” Douthat and Reihan Salam argue that the Republicans rode to the majority because of support from the Reagan Democrats, and if the party has a future, it will be because it understands the dreams and tribulations of working-class Americans...LINK

As the 2008 general election heats up, one of John McCain’s strongest political advantages is his opponent Barack Obama’s lack of political experience. No surprise there: when Mr. McCain began his political career, Mr. Obama was still a college student.

But lately, Mr. McCain seems to be taking the experience argument in an extreme direction: intimating that Mr. Obama doesn’t actually know, well, much of anything.

Here, for example, is Mr. McCain in a recent op-ed in The Detroit Free… more

Sixteen years ago, the most influential campaign speech of the last two decades was delivered at a hotel ballroom in Washington. It wasn’t broadcast on television and only a few hundred Americans heard it in its entirety. But when presidential candidate Bill Clinton appeared at the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition on June 13, 1992, and attacked an obscure rapper named Sister Souljah it fundamentally changed the popular perception of the Democratic Party.

Standing only a few feet from… more

To paraphrase an old axiom: You don’t buy water, you only rent it. So why did Americans spend nearly $11 billion on bottled water in 2006, when we could have guzzled tap water at up to about one ten-thousandth the cost? The facile answer is marketing, marketing and more marketing, but Elizabeth Royte goes much deeper into the drink in “Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It,” streaming trends cultural, economic, political and hydrological into an… more

...Preventing attacks planned by small bands of zealots in the garages and basements just off Main Street or the alleys behind Islamic madrasas is more a job for the local police and the F.B.I., working with undercover informants and with authorities abroad. “If it’s a ‘leaderless jihad,’ then I can find something else to do because the threat is over,” said Peter Bergen, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan New America Foundation, who puts himself in Dr. Hoffman’s camp. “Leaderless… more

Pennsylvania Avenue started out as a mere spoke on one of L’Enfant’s radial sketches of the new federal city, connecting the would-be Capitol with the would-be White House. Today it is among the country’s most celebrated thoroughfares, right up there with Madison Avenue, Wall Street and Route 66. It is not much of an exaggeration to call it, as this book does, “America’s Main Street.”

But it is also a street that has radically changed over the last generation, not only… more

The Pentagon is moving forward with plans to build a new, 40-acre detention complex on the main American military base in Afghanistan, officials said, in a stark acknowledgment that the United States is likely to continue to hold prisoners overseas for years to come.

The proposed detention center would replace the cavernous, makeshift American prison on the Bagram military base north of Kabul, which is now typically packed with about 630 prisoners, compared with the 270 held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Until… more

Full article . . . Jeffrey G. Lewis, an arms control specialist at the New America Foundation, a nonprofit research group in Washington, said the military buildings that make up Plant 821 were probably unusually strong compared with civilian structures. “I’d rather have been in the reactor building than a grade school” on Monday when the quake struck, he said. The site’s various plants “were built as military facilities, and so I wouldn’t be surprised if,… more