The New Republic

There was some initial Beltway confusion this week in the search for a larger, unifying meaning to justify our monomaniacal coverage of the scandal trifecta. The scandals showed that Barack Obama was too political. No, they showed that he was not political enough. READ MORE >>

Imagine for a moment: You work at an Internal Revenue Service back office in the Midwest. No, you are not in a posthumously published David Foster Wallace novel. You are in the Cincinnati office, which is charged with vetting applications for 501(c)(4) status, which allows groups not only to avoid paying any taxes on the money they collect but also to keep their donors secret. READ MORE >>

Young Republicans and College Democrats have their perks—the occasional trip to a state party convention, maybe—but they can’t hope to compete with young centrists. When a dozen college students came to St. Louis recently as part of a competition funded by the 85-year-old billionaire deficit hawk Pete Peterson, they were put up in the Ritz-Carlton, while the hundreds of other students attending the same conference stayed in humbler quarters. READ MORE >>

There are few more hopeless places on Earth than the tiny, impoverished West African nation of Guinea-Bissau. In addition to the usual challenges afflicting that part of the world, the former Portuguese colony of 1.6 million people has, over the past decade or so, had to contend with the side effects of having become a key transit point for cocaine headed from Latin America to Europe: addiction and prostitution, death threats against police and journalists, and, above all, an officialdom so riddled with corruption that it's hard to know who is not on the take. READ MORE >>

The announcement of the Pulitzer Prizes last week was rightly overshadowed by the bombings at the Boston Marathon, which was, of course, only appropriate: No one knows better than serious reporters that hard news trumps ceremony. READ MORE >>

As the Boston area was gripped by the manhunt that followed the Marathon bombings late last week, the opinion pages of the Concord Monitor just up the road in New Hampshire were consumed with another subject: Senator Kelly Ayotte’s vote against legislation to expand background checks for gun purchases. READ MORE >>

Barely had the legislation to expand background checks for gun purchases fallen short of the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster than the crowing started on the right. And soon afterward came the equally predictable reaction in the mainstream media and on the left: jaded fatalism. READ MORE >>

When two bombs went off near the finish line of the Boston Marathon on Monday, killing three people and injuring 176, the Department of Homeland Security’s designated “center of excellence” for developing explosive detection technology was closed for the day. Why? Because the center is co-directed by Northeastern University, which, like just about everything else in Boston, was closed for Patriots' Day. READ MORE >>

When the Senate takes up the bill to expand background checks for gun purchases this week, we will hear plenty rationalizations for opposing it similar to the one offered recently by Heidi Heitkamp, the newly elected Democrat from North Dakota: “In our part of the country, [gun control] isn’t an issue. This is a way of life. READ MORE >>

If the Germans covered Albany, they’d have a word for the ambivalence that Andrew Cuomo provokes in those with fond memories of his father. READ MORE >>