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<p>ESPN’s Body Issue has celebrated the nude and semi-nude bodies of athletes - from football players to yachtsmen - every year since 2009. And this year, in its 10th annual issue, it made history by featuring a same-sex couple on the cover for the first time.</p>

The New York Times is doing stories on its own reporter, a perfect instance of meta-reportage, under the pious guise of how the Ali Watkins revelations of sleeping with sources – multiple sources, it turns out – "rattled the Washington media." Really? Never seen a news agency do a full investigative piece, full of unsourced gossip, about one of its own reporters and her love life, from all her chatty, unnamed colleagues, as straight news. It's actually more like high school. It also suggests that the NYT higher-ups are getting ready to get rid of her. Maybe they care about...

Not that this will come as a surprise, but it is entertaining to watch NBC’s John Heilemann gleefully explain how “we” have a great opportunity to bludgeon President Trump and the GOP with the faux crisis at the border. In a mere 47 seconds, he gives the game away on a couple of fronts:

President Trump declared in a spur-of-the-moment interview with "Fox and Friends" Friday morning that he wants people to sit at attention for him like they do for North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Kim stands accused of leading a murderous regime that starves its own people. But Mr. Trump has heaped praise on Kim since meeting with him in Singapore, saying repeatedly that the two have "good chemistry." "Hey, he is the head of a country and I mean he is the strong head," Mr. Trump told Fox News' Steve Doocy on the White House lawn Friday. "Don't let anyone...

TEHRAN - The spokesman for the Iranian government is warning North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that President Donald Trump could nullify any nuclear deal with North Korea. The semi-official Fars news agency quotes Mohammad Bagher Nobakht, as saying Tuesday: "We are facing a man who revokes his signature while abroad." Nobakht's remarks are the first by an Iranian official after Trump and North Korea's Kim concluded their nuclear summit. The U.S. pulled out of the landmark 2015 nuclear deal with Iran in May.

SINGAPORE - Over the past week, President Donald Trump alienated allies and cut a deal with a brutal dictator. He praised North Korea’s Kim Jong Un as “honest, direct and productive” and lambasted Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “dishonest.” For critics, Trump’s moves are confounding and perilous evidence of incoherence. For his allies, they’re a reminder of his no-apologies approach to foreign policy. For everyone, it's a reminder that the Trump Doctrine, as one senior White House official told the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, is "We're America, Bitch." But Trump has also increasingly shown an affinity for the idea that...

President Trump's break with American allies at the G-7 Summit was the worst foreign policy outing of his presidency, and the worst summit since they started back in 1975, according to Ian Bremmer, president and founder of the Eurasia Group. Bremmer called Mr. Trump's performance "the geopolitical equivalent of the Comey firing." German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the president's reversal "via tweet" from signing onto the G-7 statement was "sobering and a bit depressing." On "CBS This Morning" Monday, Bremmer, said, "It was Trump unable to control his emotional impulses in doing something that I am sure felt very satisfying...

PITTSBURGH - Dozens of protesters gathered outside the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to support long-time cartoonist Rob Rogers. Rogers has been drawing political cartoons since 1993. But in the last few weeks, many of his controversial cartoons haven't been making the paper. They've covered topics like immigration, racism and the National Football League. The story has now gained national attention. Participants told Channel 11 they hope their action will hold the Post-Gazette accountable. In a statement to the Washington Post, the Post-Gazette's publisher and editor-in-chief said this is an internal, personnel matter that has little to do with politics, ideology or President...

The perception of a severe decline in rights and freedoms has been a constant factor among international observers of Turkey in recent years, as seen in a steady stream of reports by reporters, rights groups and lawyers on the country now known as the world’s largest jailer of journalists. For Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, though, such criticism may as well have come from a parallel universe. Speaking to Judy Woodruff in a filmed interview for the U.S. channel PBS, Çavuşoğlu said that far from restricting citizens’ rights, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has in fact brought them...

Democratic leaders recently rolled out a new theme they hope will prove successful this November: President Donald Trump’s "culture of corruption." As Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer put it when announcing the new strategy in May, “The swamp has never been more foul or more feted than under this president.” Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat in the House, added: “Instead of delivering on his promise to drain the swamp, President Trump has become the swamp." It’s a pretty good strategy. With Democrats hoping to take the House back and maybe even the Senate, a progressive national platform in 2018 that...

HOUSTON -- President Donald Trump spent more than an hour privately Thursday with some of those impacted by a Texas mass school shooting that killed 10 and wounded more than a dozen on May 18. But at least one of the victim's parents came away unimpressed. Rhonda Hart, whose 14-year-old daughter, Kimberly Vaughan, was killed at the school, told The Associated Press that Mr. Trump repeatedly used the word "wacky" to describe the shooter and the trench coat he wore. She said she told Mr. Trump, "Maybe if everyone had access to mental health care, we wouldn't be in the...

Commentators, almost always from the right, have documented liberal media bias for many years now. And the response by the perpetrators of this bias has been both constant and predictable: Circle the wagons and blame the accusers. Accuse us of bias for seeing their bias. The bias we've been talking and writing about is usually about partisan politics and hot social issues like abortion. But there's one kind of liberal media bias that hasn't gotten much attention. It's a bias that liberals both in and out of the media often attach to conservatives, but almost never to themselves. It's racial...

Journalism got a lot smaller last week. The media lost two of their biggest names – author and journalist Tom Wolfe and Interview Magazine. Wolfe, who wrote “The Right Stuff,” spent decades making people appear larger than life. Interview, founded by pop culture icon Andy Warhol, used its larger-than-normal format to make its subjects grow in stature. The industry is diminished, left with its war against President Trump as journalists battle over whether an informant sent to spy on the Trump campaign is actually a “spy.” That is part of their larger anti-Trump crusade, but it’s also tied to how...

It doesn’t matter what you think about Donald Trump — revelations that a major party’s administration was spying on another one deserve a seriousness that’s lacking in major media coverage. A recent piece by CNN’s Chris Cillizza encapsulates many of the absurd talking points adopted by an extraordinarily incurious media. And when I say incurious, I mean they’ve taken to actively dismissing evidence regarding a story that would be a huge deal in any other era. The persistent claim that Trump is abusing power for engaging in actions that are well within his purview is especially galling coming from people...

... In recent days the president, in tandem with his allies in conservative media, has launched a full frontal attack on special counsel Robert Mueller's probe into Russian election meddling and possible collusion with the Trump campaign. But the president has provided no evidence to support his allegations. This latest unproven claim of a spy scandal now joins of list of other bold allegations by the president that so far have not proven true, including his claim that President Barack Obama had Trump Tower wiretapped, that millions of people voted illegally in the 2016 election, and that President Obama was...

President Donald Trump has long complained about what he calls a "witch hunt" investigation into his 2016 presidential campaign by "deep state" actors in the law enforcement and intelligence communities — a probe that he says was first designed to deny him the presidency and, after he won, to delegitimize or even remove him. Now, with all the tools of that federal government at his disposal — including some of the very agencies he's cast as enemies of his presidency and the American public — he is weaponizing them to make his case that he is the victim of malfeasance...

It was just over a week ago that President Donald Trump and his legal team in their eyes got vindication -- a federal judge that questioned the scope of special counsel Robert Mueller's now one-year-old probe. The judge, T.S. Ellis, questioned the scope of the probe as he presided over a second case involving former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Ellis, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, caught the attention of many in that early May hearing after he poked, prodded and even appeared to question the motives of the prosecutor arguing against the effort to have the case...

Wow, word seems to be coming out that the Obama FBI “SPIED ON THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN WITH AN IMBEDDED INFORMANT.” Andrew McCarthy says, “There’s probably no doubt that they had at least one confidential informant in the campaign.” If so, this is bigger than Watergate! 7:56 AM - 17 May 2018

Thursday marks the one-year anniversary of the appointment of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. The milestone has emboldened White House critics of the probe to declare, as Vice President Mike Pence did on NBC News, that "it is time to wrap it up." Never mind that the Mueller investigation is, comparatively, in its infancy. The Whitewater probe of Bill and Hillary Clinton, for example, began in 1994 and ended more than six years later. Mueller's 12 months of work has turned up more clear wrongdoing than Kenneth Starr ever did: There have been 20 indictments and 5 guilty pleas,...

From the beginning of his campaign for president, Donald Trump portrayed illegal immigration as a forest fire that threatens to spread rapidly and engulf us all. Mexicans, he charged, are “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” He thought Americans should be afraid. The president and his attorney general ignore the real dangers posed by most foreigners here illegally: They will fill jobs that Americans don’t want, learn English, pay taxes and stay out of trouble. Chilling, huh? The president relishes lurid tales of the criminal gang MS-13. Last year, he said: “They stomp on their victims. They beat them...