Revisions in airport security procedures, including in Los Angeles, have helped keep the threat of terrorism on Americans' minds.  Read Article"Since before Obama was sworn into office, Republicans have been building a case that he is weak on national security, and in the wake of the intelligence and security failures that led to last week's incident, they think that narrative might stick. Congressional Republicans and GOP pollsters said they believe the administration's response to the failed attack on a Detroit-bound plane -- along with Obama's decisions on the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the intelligence lapses connected to November's massacre at Fort Hood, Tex. -- damage the Democratic brand."   

 Democrats Focus on G.O.P. Senators From Maine   Read Article HereAnxious about how little maneuvering room the weekend victory by Senate Democrats on health care provided, Obama administration officials and their Congressional allies are stepping up overtures to select Senate Republicans in hopes of winning their ultimate support.

 Read Today's Articles 
  

  Opinion Journal:
The Glenn Beck PartyJason Riley discusses Glenn Beck's rally at the Lincoln Memorial. Video    

 The invention of Barack ObamaDreams from My Father was a notable contribution to African-American memoir long before it became a campaign sensation. In an exclusive extract from his biography of the American president, David Remnick explores the ultimate act of self-creationDavid Remnick The Guardian, Saturday 24 April 2010 Article historyBarack Obama and his father Photograph: APWith Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama was working in the oldest, and arguably the richest, genre of African-American writing: the memoir. This tradition begins with the first slave narratives. "Deprived of access to literacy, the tools of citizenship, denied the rights of selfhood by law, philosophy, and pseudo-science," wrote the literary scholar Henry Louis Gates, "and denied as well the possibility, even, of possessing a collective history as a people, black Americans published their individual histories in astonishing numbers, in a larger attempt to narrate the collective history of 'the race'."The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obamaby David RemnickAs a young man, Obama searched for clues to his own identity by very purposefully reading his way through WEB Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and Malcolm X. He has also mentioned texts by Frederick Douglass, Marcus Garvey, Martin Delany and a range of novelists – in particular, Toni Morrison. In fact, reading as a way of becoming is a feature of African-American autobiography, as it is of so many outsider-memoirists of any ethnicity: Malcolm X, for one, provides an extended account of his self-education.One way in which Obama joins this tradition is that usually, in European literature, a writer writes his or her novels, plays and poems, and then, towards the end, writes a memoir; it is more common among African-American writers to begin their writing lives by asserting themselves…