Gov. Chris Christie is in extreme damage-control mode, apologizing to constituents and asking forgiveness for the dunderheaded shenanigans of some of his closest staffers. He is desperate to evade a growing reputation as a political bully that could scuttle his chance to become the Republican nominee for president in 2016.

As revealed by a series of email exchanges, three of Christie’s top aides closed down all but one of the traffic lanes at the entrance to the George Washington Bridge to punish the Democratic mayor in the nearby town of Fort Lee, who failed to fall in line behind the Republican governor in his recent reelection campaign. New Jersey commuters spent days stalled at the bottleneck, emergency vehicles were slowed down and one elderly woman died before she could be taken to a hospital.

In a two-hour news conference, Christie claimed he knew nothing about the scheme to exact political retribution by manufacturing a traffic nightmare. The three staffers have been...

President Obama must feel as though his Hawaiian Christmas holiday was way too brief. He has now left the palm trees of his birthplace far behind and is back in Washington, with a polar vortex chilling most of the country and Republicans still frozen in contrarian disagreement with everything he does and says -- some even disputing the location of his birth.

For once, the president’s vacation was not interrupted by an emergency of some kind. He played a lot of golf, went to a basketball game, hung out with his family and avoided most public appearances, except when he visited his favorite shaved ice shop. Reporters covering him had very little to do except thank the tiki gods that they were in sunny Honolulu and not back home waiting for an ice storm to hit.

On the political docket now is a three-month extension of unemployment benefits, a revived push for immigration reform and the ongoing convulsions over the Affordable Care Act, with every debate skewed by maneuvers by both...

I confess my intent is to be provocative by dragging Phil Robertson into another cartoon at a moment when the “Duck Dynasty” controversy seems to have simmered down. But, after all, provocation is the whole point of political cartoons and, now that I’ve got everyone’s attention, I want to share some thoughts about cartoons, religion and free speech.

My rumination was inspired by the 339 reader comments that came in reaction to my Dec. 26  “Horsey On Hollywood” cartoon and column. The cartoon depicted two A&E producers pleading with “Duck Dynasty” patriarch Robertson, to apologize for his Bible-inspired comparison of homosexuality to bestiality, murder and other grievous sins. In the cartoon, Robertson responds, “I say you queer-lovin’ God haters are goin’ straight to Hell.”

Some readers blasted me for putting words in Robertson’s mouth that he didn’t say. To that I plead guilty and note that the A&E...

I was gifted a book for Christmas that has made me question the way I’ve used my time on this planet – Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and the Golden Age of Journalism.” 

It is not as if I have been a total washout; a couple of Pulitzers must count for something. Still, I have often felt like a lazy bum compared with two of my longtime friends, Jay Inslee and Tim Egan. After serving eight terms in Congress, Jay is now governor of Washington. Tim is a New York Times columnist and author of a string of successful books, including the National Book Award-winning “The Worst Hard Time,” “The Big Burn” and, most recently, “Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher.”

Both Jay and Tim have always seemed to have endless energy and a disciplined work ethic that I only exhibit in short bursts. Combine them both, though, and their accomplishments would add up to only a fraction of what...

The proliferation of college football bowls with goofy corporate names must be making at least a few players and coaches cringe. Doesn’t it feel like a dubious honor to be the winner of the Buffalo Wild Wings Bowl?

That is the distinction Kansas State can claim, having beaten Michigan 31 to 14. Does the victory come with a side of fries?

Then there’s Detroit’s Little Caesar’s Pizza Bowl, where I imagine there must have been a few lukewarm pepperoni pies delivered to the locker rooms at halftime. St. Petersburg, Fla., hosted the Beef O’Brady’s Bowl, named for a chain of sports bars and restaurants in the South. Beefy as that bowl name may be, it doesn’t have the heft of the good old Cotton Bowl.

Atlanta’s claim to a slice of the fast food football sponsorships is the Chick-fil-A Bowl. Same-sex married couples may want to skip this one.

The bowls are not all about high-calorie cuisine. My own almamater, the University of Washington, sent...

When the calendar flips from an old year to a new one, we have a sense of being given a new start and new possibilities. Of course, the reality is that days and months and years are human constructs that merely mark the progress of the Earth around the sun. The world we live in on Jan. 1 is pretty much the same as the world we experienced on Dec. 31. This is especially true when it comes to Congress.

Our senators and representatives left town for their Christmas break with plenty of unfinished business, and that business will be waiting for them when they return to work in a few days. Immigration reform, the farm bill, an extension of unemployment benefits and a long list of other bills languished on their desks in 2013, and 2014 is unlikely to bring a break in the political dysfunction that has prevented swift action on any of the challenges facing the country.

Soon, we will face another fight over raising the debt ceiling. There could be another budget showdown as well, because the...

Tomorrow and the day after that and all the days beyond, we can worry and gripe and argue about guns and greenhouse gases; tea party politics and the gap between rich and poor; Obamacare and immigration. On Christmas Day, though, we all deserve a break.

Forgetting for a while the wise guys of human folly, most of us can spend the day being wise men and women sharing love, friendship, good times and a communal meal with the people in our lives who matter the most.

Appreciate every blessing that comes with the occasion and, as Tiny Tim said, "God bless us, every one."

I'm a big fan of Christmas, but I'm not inclined to join Sarah Palin's pro-Christmas crusade. Her new book, "Good Tidings, Great Joy: Protecting the Heart of Christmas," lays out the case that Christmas is under attack by stringing together a litany of slights against the holiday -- real, imagined and exaggerated -- that do not add up to much more than her usual chip-on-the-shoulder complaint against anyone outside her narrow definition of "real Americans."

A columnby Michelle Cottle of the Daily Beast includes a pretty good summation of Palin's book: "From the first chapter, it is clear that, whatever her concerns about 'a Christ-less Christmas,' Palin has found a convenient frame on which to hang her rage at pretty much everything: Obamacare, Obamaphones, Nancy Pelosi, the national debt, gay marriage, sexual sin, crony capitalism, the preferential treatment of Muslims (whoo-wee! does she get rolling on that one), the lamestream media, Chick-fil-A haters, abortion, Mitt Romney’...

For 12 years, America’s national security apparatus has grown like kudzu on steroids, but, finally, President Obama may soon start trimming it back to preserve at least a small space for personal privacy in the United States. 

A panel of five independent experts appointed by the president has come up with 46 recommendations that would set limits on the broad authority of the National Security Agency to engage in cyber spying. The panel is suggesting enhanced oversight and new checks on such things as the NSA’s spy operations targeting foreign leaders and cyber attacks abroad.

The item on the panel’s list that has gotten the most attention is the recommendation to prohibit the NSA from hoarding data on every phone call placed by U.S. citizens. Instead, the information would stay with the telecommunications companies and could only be accessed by the government for a specific investigation authorized by a court order. Though it can be argued that no one’s privacy...

After four years of bitter, poisoned, polarized politics of a kind not seen since pre-Civil War days, cooler heads in Congress finally prevailed long enough to get a federal budget passed. It is a budget no one actually likes, but it is better than another government shutdown.

Does this moment of compromise and sanity portend a more productive new year for the 113thCongress? Probably not.

The budget deal went through because House Speaker John A. Boehner finally got sick of being manhandled by the absolutists in his caucus and the right-wing activist groups that pushed for the October shutdown and the ill-fated showdown over raising the debt ceiling. Boehner stopped placating the hard-liners and instead slammed them for stampeding Republicans into a boxed canyon with no exit plan.

However, the war for the soul of the Republican Party has only begun and Boehner could yet become a victim. When the House voted on the budget, 169 Republicans voted yes with the speaker. That is fairly...

Rush Limbaugh is freaked out by Pope Francis’ sharp critique of capitalism and consumerism. Rush says it sounds like “pure Marxism coming out of the mouth of the pope.” 

Well, let us consider the pope's words: “Vast multitudes are still living in conditions of great material and moral poverty. The collapse of the communist system in so many countries certainly removes an obstacle to facing these problems in an appropriate and realistic way, but it is not enough to bring about their solution. Indeed, there is a risk that a radical capitalistic ideology could spread which refuses even to consider these problems, in the a priori belief that any attempt to solve them is doomed to failure and which blindly entrusts their solution to the free development of market forces."

Yes, that’s what the pope said — but not Pope Francis. Those are the words of Pope John Paul II, who became a hero to conservatives for the role he played in bringing down Soviet...