Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell will not be facing a challenge from actress Ashley Judd when he runs for reelection next year. Though he may be happy to have avoided the physical comparison -- she, after all, played Marilyn Monroe in a movie, while he looks like an ancient sea turtle dressed in a $1,000 suit -- the Kentucky Republican may miss having such an attractive target for his attack machine.

McConnell is not all that popular back home. Democrats, of course, can’t stand him and tea party Republicans may like him even less. To militants on the right, he is the quintessential Washington insider, dealmaker and compromiser. In January, a Louisville Courier-Journal poll found that only 34% of Kentucky Republicans would definitely vote for McConnell, no matter who his competitor might be.

McConnell is in the kind of political pickle that his Democratic counterpart, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, found himself in back in 2010. The Nevada senator lucked out by having a...

My friend Mark says he is against gay marriage – but it’s the marriage part, not the gay part he finds objectionable. Mark is a confirmed bachelor who marvels that anyone would want to get married. Still, he says, if gays and lesbians are crazy enough to want to tie the knot, they have as much right to do it as anyone else.

Plenty of same-sex couples are, indeed, crazy enough to desire marriage. This is a recent revelation for quite a few Americans, and I include myself in that number. Over the years, I have counted quite a few gays and lesbians among my friends, acquaintances, colleagues and relatives. It was always clear to me they had not just made a lifestyle choice; their different sexual nature was the way God made them. But, like many progressive, tolerant people – including, most notably, Barack Obama -- I figured legal marriage for same-sex couples was not especially necessary, as long as there were domestic partnership laws that gave them equivalent rights...

This week, the United States Supreme Court is delving into arguments about same-sex marriage and doing so with apparent reluctance and unease.

Today, the justices will consider the federal Defense of Marriage Act that denies federal benefits to same-sex married couples. On Tuesday, the issue before them was California’s Proposition 8, the voter-approved initiative that placed a same-sex marriage ban in the state constitution in 2008. A U.S. District Court judge subsequently declared the ban unconstitutional, and in 2012 the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that ruling.

During oral arguments, some of the nine justices appeared uncomfortable jumping into the gay marriage debate at all. Much time was spent arguing about whether the petitioners on the pro-Prop. 8 side had legal standing to bring the appeal. Determining that they do not, the court could let the lower court’s ruling stand. They could also simply uphold the 9th Circuit’s decision. Either way, the...

Jay Leno had to know the head honchos at NBC were gunning for him when he told the following joke Monday night: "You know the whole legend of St. Patrick, right?" he asked the audience in his opening monologue. "St. Patrick drove all the snakes out of Ireland — and then they came to the United States and became NBC executives."

The harsh humor directed at the guys who hold his fate in their hands is just the latest sign that the star and his bosses pretty much detest one another. So, is Jay really being replaced by Jimmy Fallon? Is "The Tonight Show" going to leave Los Angeles (a.k.a. Burbank) and move to New York City, where it was born back in the days of Steve Allen? Is this going to be another ill-conceived idea cooked up in NBC’s corporate suite that will cost the network even more viewers? We will find out as the latest Machiavellian twist in the serious business of late-hours TV comedy unfolds.

Until Jay Leno took over NBC’s "Tonight Show" in 1992, late-night...

This week, realizing that government actually does do some things people like, senators in both parties tried to undo some of the damage wrought by the sequester/fiscal cliff debacle. Their efforts were quickly undone, however, by the chronic dysfunction of the United States Congress. 

Attempts were made to restore White House tours, maintain an efficient number of meat inspectors, keep up sane staffing of airport control towers, provide tuition help for members of the armed forces, undo cuts to military maintenance and take back many of the other across-the-board cuts that came about when the lawmakers failed to avert the $85 billion in automatic reductions that kicked in on March 1. In the end, though, fixing even the most idiotic cuts was put off so that yet another irresponsible political move could be avoided: shutting down the government.

A stopgap spending bill must be approved by March 27 to keep the federal government in business. The fixes to the sequester cuts came in the...

This time, we dodged a bullet. Another mass shooting – the sort of bloody event that seems to happen on a weekly basis – was averted Monday when James Oliver Seevakumara chose to shoot himself before he could carry out his plot to shoot a bunch of his fellow students at the University of Central Florida.

He had pulled a gun on his roommate, who hid in a bathroom and called police. When the cops arrived, they discovered a blaring fire alarm and speculated that Seevakumara had set it off in order to lure others in his dorm out of their rooms for easy targeting. For whatever reason – perhaps the quick arrival of police – the 30-year-old business student turned a gun on himself instead of anyone else.

Seevakumara could have created plenty of carnage if he had followed through on the plan outlined in notes he left behind. Through the month of February, he had been busy amassing weapons and ammo, exercising his right to keep and bear arms – lots of arms.

No...

A new report commissioned by the Republican National Committee reads like an anti-GOP critique from the “lame stream media.” It describes the party as too rigidly ideological, too in thrall to greedy corporations, too disconnected from nonwhite and young voters, and in desperate need of new ideas.

The authors of the report appear to hail from the Bush wing of the Republican Party. They include Ari Fleischer, George W. Bush’s White House spokesman; Sally Bradshaw, a veteran advisor to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush; and Republican National Committeeman Henry Barbour, nephew of Haley Barbour, the former Mississippi governor and RNC chairman who worked on the presidential campaign of Vice President George H.W. Bush in 1988. Rounding out the five-member group of report writers are two other members of the national committee whose race and ethnicity make them atypical Republicans -- Glenn McCall, an African American from South Carolina, and Zori Fonalledas, a Latina from...

For the first time in history, the Roman Catholic Church has a pope from the New World, but liberal American Catholics should not expect Pope Francis to stray far from the old theology. Some things are excitingly different about this new pontiff. On matters of birth control, abortion, homosexuality, celibate priests and the role of women in the church, however, he is no revolutionary.

When Argentina’s Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio stepped out on the Vatican balcony as the new pope on Wednesday evening, all he was required to do was wave and give a blessing. Instead, he began with a witty reference to the fact his fellow cardinals had picked someone from the far side of the planet to become bishop of Rome. Then, before giving his own blessing to the city and the world — “urbi et orbi” — he asked the multitude in St. Peter’s Square to bless him. His humor, humility and kindly smile immediately endeared him to the faithful and marked a contrast will...

Both Republicans and Democrats say concern about the middle class is at the heart of the ongoing, vituperative debate over taxes, entitlements and fiscal discipline, but the political spat never seems to honestly address the gaping and growing class divide in the United States. As politicians in Washington slam one another over competing budget priorities, most avoid facing up to the disturbing question behind all the numbers: Is the American Dream temporarily stalled or permanently kaput?

Last Sunday, Parade magazine presented its annual survey, “What People Earn,” an exercise guaranteed to appall and infuriate readers as they compare their own salaries with the likes of Brad Pitt and LeBron James. The story is pretty much the same every year: Entertainers and athletes rake in tens of millions while secretaries and forest rangers scrape by on $35,000 to $40,000.

Sure, it seems a little insane that 19-year-old Justin Bieber makes $55 million – $6,261 an hour –...

Here’s a riddle: If gun ownership is declining, why are so many guns being sold?

According to the General Social Survey, a project of the independent research organization NORC, the number of U.S. households with guns dropped from 50% in 1973 to 34% in 2012. This decline has shown up everywhere, including the historically gun-toting regions of the South and West.

According to researchers, just 23% of people in urban areas have guns, compared with 56% of country folk. Even that rural percentage is down from 70% in the 1970s. The number of hunters is dropping fast. Only 10% of women own firearms. Most young people are shunning guns -- just 23% of those under 30 have guns now, compared with 47% four decades ago. Latinos are a growing segment of the population, but their gun ownership numbers are small. 

Democrats and independents have disarmed in droves. The number of Democrats with guns is half what it was when the first survey was taken in 1973. The only two demographic groups...

President Obama’s date with a dozen Republican senators has so caught my imagination that I cannot quite let it go. The idea of the president picking up the tab for dinner in a swanky Washington restaurant for 12 of his most staunch political foes sounds like an improbable plot twist straight out of “The West Wing.” But, as I learned long ago, political reality is almost always more weird and fascinating than political fiction.

In my mind, it’s easy to visualize the film version of the dinner. Low lights casting a golden glow on shadowy faces as the camera moves along the table: Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator with his boyish face sinking into jowls; Saxby Chambliss, the beady-eyed, white-haired Georgian looking slightly appalled to be dining with a Kenya-born socialist; Tom Coburn, with his spiky hair, boxer’s nose and Oklahoma common sense that keeps him from pandering to the lunatic fringe of his party; all the other senators sitting tense...