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WASHINGTON -- Is Supreme Court justice-designate Sonia Sotomayor going to have to eat her words and forget her past to win a seat on the high bench? That would apparently appease some of her right-wing critics, who are grasping at straws in their campaign to try to derail the Hispanic woman’s nomination -- or, at least, try to rough her up a bit. Does she have to be a narrow constructionist and interpret the law their way? Let’s hope not -- conservative jurists have had their way for too long on the high court. If she wins Senate confirmation, Sotomayor...

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu got together officially this week for the first time, but their talks failed to win agreement on how to solve perennial Middle East problems. They managed to agree on a common concern that Iran is secretly developing nuclear weapons. In meeting with the hawkish Netanyahu, Obama agreed that a nuclear-armed Iran was unacceptable. He warned that the diplomatic talks he was initiating to halt Iran’s program would not continue forever, and he roughly set a one-year deadline for the dialogue. The president also said he wouldn’t foreclose "a range...

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama should appoint a woman to the U.S. Supreme Court to fill the vacancy created by the retirement of Justice David Souter. And she should be a liberal. The high court is top heavy with conservative justices. And there is only one woman, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, on the high bench. Obama’s choice will say a lot because Supreme Court’s decisions are the ultimate in our national life. Republicans are itching for a fight over the nominee, despite the fact that they had their way for too many years and worked to tip the court to the...

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama’s 100 days in office have not shaken the world, but he has been compelled to focus on the legacy bequeathed by former President George W. Bush: the worst economic slump since the Great Depression and two wars. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, avoiding any credibility-destroying urge to praise his boss with ridiculous extravagance, gives the president a "B-plus" on his report card. "What the president has achieved is something we’re proud of," Gibbs said, adding: "There is room for improvement." Probably the biggest change Obama has brought about is the country’s new hopeful spirit,...

Shock and shame is the only way to react to the latest revelations of the Bush administration's brutal interrogation of suspected terrorists. As the world now knows, torture techniques -- approved by President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld -- were exposed in four memos released by the Justice Department under a court order obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union. Much as President Obama wants to move on and to forget the unsavory history of the preceding administration, he has to face up to its ugly reality. The Bush administration's legal memos...

WASHINGTON -- White House spokesman Robert Gibbs and President Barack Obama share the same trait: They both are very cautious when speaking with reporters. Gibbs measures his words hesitantly between some "ums" and "ahs," before voicing carefully selected words in response to a reporter’s question. As White House press secretary he is in the bull’s eye every day at televised news briefings, which may explain why he appears most comfortable with the reporters for wire services and TV networks he schmoozed with on the campaign trail. In a position where many predecessors have blown their tops out of frustration or...

WASHINGTON -- Words count, as President Barack Obama once said. Words spoken truthfully count even more. The president's triumphal eight-day six-country overseas tour, ending with his emotional visit to U.S. troops in Iraq, will go down in history as an opportunity for us to collect Obama's words and save them in our computers so we can match them with the administration's future actions. It's refreshing to hear words of optimism, courage and determination aimed at solving long-standing problems and threats. As the president said in Turkey, "If we don't reach high, then we don't make progress." So let's firmly assign...

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama seems to be more interested in propping up Wall Street than saving the car companies and the auto workers in Detroit. He displayed his "get tough" side when he laid down the law to General Motors and Chrysler, whose restructuring plans had displeased the White House auto task force. The president gave the car makers a choice of coming up with tougher plans or face bankruptcy. GM was given 60 days to produce a plan for Obama, who has never ran a company, and Chrysler was given 30 days, with a threat to end its...

It takes a lot to motivate the American people but they are hopping mad over the bonus payments to Wall Streeters from their tax money. I haven’t seen this much "people power" since the grass-roots protests against the Vietnam War riled the nation. This anger is highly justified, but it hasn’t slowed the Obama administration’s peculiar drive to bailout Wall Street by buying banks’ toxic assets (bad loans and mortgage-related securities) to the tune of possibly up to $2 trillion dollars to stabilize the banks and to jump-start the credit industry. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner Monday unveiled the plan amid...

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama is already back-tracking on some of his high-road campaign stands and is copying some of former President George W. Bush’s dubious policies. A couple of weeks ago the Obama administration invoked the controversial state secrets act in the case of Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian native, and four other detainees. They claimed they were victims of the Bush administration’s rendition program under which terrorism suspects were secretly taken to other countries where, they say, they were tortured. The Bush administration’s position has been that the case should be dismissed because even courtroom discussion of their treatment...

Some readers resented The Washington Post for publishing an Associated Press photograph of a critically wounded Iraqi child being lifted from the rubble of his home in Baghdad’s Sadr City “after a U.S. airstrike.” Two-year-old Ali Hussein later died in a hospital. As the saying goes, the picture was worth a thousand words because it showed the true horrors of this war. Neither side is immune from the killing of Iraqi civilians. But Americans should be aware of their own responsibility for inflicting death and pain on the innocent. The Post’s ombudsman, Deborah Howell, said about 20 readers complained about...

The American people have heard President George W. Bush and his spokespersons say many times that the U.S. government does not engage in torture. Whether Bush was believed or not is another story -- especially in light of the photographic evidence of the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, the prison near Baghdad. It’s understood that many of the photos are too sadistically graphic to be made public. Still, the official U.S. denials of torture continued until earlier this month when Bush acknowledged in an interview with ABC-TV that he knew about and approved “enhanced interrogation” of detainees, including “waterboarding”...

If history repeats, the loser of this year’s presidential election will blame the news media. Richard Nixon, in the wake of his loss in the 1962 California gubernatorial race, bitterly taunted reporters, telling them, “You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.” (Turned out he was wrong on that point.) Barbara Bush also had some choice words about the press when her husband, President George H.W. Bush, lost his reelection bid in 1992. The media could be even a larger target this year because of the influence of blogs and talking heads...

Sad to say, with the popularity and availability of e-mail, personal letters may soon be a thing of the past. Historians, too, will lose out. Communications may soon be reduced to instant messages and sound bytes on the air. That’s why we should savor the National Geographic’s new collection of letters to first ladies titled “Dear First Lady” that give us some insights into their personal sorrows and joys. The authors -- Dwight Young and Margaret Johnson -- selected some poignant missives, love notes between presidents and their wives and letters that marked great moments in history, such as President...

Surprise, surprise. Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, wants to put a halt to any more troop withdrawals for the foreseeable future. The highly politicized Petraeus seemed to be dutifully following his White House marching orders when he testified before congressional committees earlier this week. Under his scenario, there will be no drawdown of U.S. forces in that strife-ridden country until President Bush leaves office. That’s fine with Bush, who obviously has no intention of ending this futile war on his watch. Apparently feeling no responsibility for starting the war, Bush is planning to pass the Iraqi...

Hillary Clinton should hang in there and run a good race. And she has vowed to do so. Clinton has been under unprecedented pressure to bow out of the divisive Democratic primary and to clear the field for her opponent -- Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois. Among those who want her to throw in the towel are, of course, Obama’s supporters. But many other Democrats are trying to push her out of the contest on the ground that a contentious race can hurt the party and could help their Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain of Arizona. Clinton also has been...

Back in President Lyndon B. Johnson’s worst days when he was grappling with the Vietnam quagmire and raucous anti-war protests at home, he said that in the big decisions about war and peace, “The people should be in on the takeoffs as well as the landings.” Tell that to President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, who apparently could care less what Americans think -- except every four years at election time. Cheney made that clear in an intriguing interview with ABC News on his recent Middle East trip. Despite the difficulties surrounding the unprovoked U.S. invasion of...

A salute is due Adm. William Fallon, who tried to prevent a wider war with Iran. After serving one year as commander of U.S. Central Command, Fallon has resigned, saying he was quitting because his differences with official U.S. policy had become a “distraction.” But there is a widespread perception that he was pushed out by the neo-conservatives among President George W. Bush’s aides, especially Vice President Dick Cheney, because of Fallon’s reluctance to go along with the administration’s hawkish moves toward Iran. Cheney, who took five consecutive draft deferments to stay out of the Vietnam war, does not mind...

Let us hope that the next president of the United States knows some history. And let us hope that the next president will know that the United States cannot call all the shots, or pick and choose which leader-dictator we will talk to or decide which countries can have unconventional weapons. In other words, the U.S. should not rely totally on the arrogance of its formidable power in its foreign relations. That is why the performance of the New York Philharmonic in the Stalinist-style closed society of North Korea is a remarkable breakthrough. Music is the universal language. In the...