Tony Hayward's arrogance of success Jonathan Fenby: Like Lehman Brothers and Toyota before it, BP has allowed a major accident to turn into a public and political calamity  Read Opinion

  " Republicans squandered their hard-won reputation as the party of ideas." Read Article   

 Obama is bashing on the brick wall of unlogicIf the President’s health Bill fails, everyone loses except shameless vested interests — and opportunist RepublicansGiles Whittell In the first of two recent conversations with despairing Americans, a successful professional from Montana listened patiently while I said the NHS wasn’t as great as it was cracked up to be by people like Michael Moore.“Hmm. OK,” he said. “How about this? Over the past 25 years my employer has paid about $250,000 [£165,000] in premiums for health insurance for my wife and I, for about $25,000 worth of care. Who got the other $225,000? Don’t tell me something isn’t wrong here.”The second conversation was with the owner of the oldest continually operated coaching inn in North America, a romantic time capsule in the hills of northern Virginia. She said she could hardly bring herself to talk about President Obama and then talked about him at length. “I see him destroying our country every day,” she said. “Take healthcare. Last year I needed surgery on my knee. My insurance didn’t cover it. Then I needed post-operative care and the insurance didn’t cover that either.”Her name was Rachel. We should all sympathise with Rachel, whose “good” leg looked as if it was going to need surgery pretty soon as well. We should also be ready to sympathise with Barack Obama in case he meets her and proves unable to resist the urge to bang her head against one of her 300-year-old brick walls for being so unbelievably obtuse.The argument tearing at the insides of the American body politic this week is between two different sorts of logic. President Obama’s is the logic of Bentham. He is a technocrat in search of a solution to a problem that consumes 18 per…

  Obama's pledge to close down Guantanamo is 'not even close' Commander says camp will take months to shut – and he's still waiting for the orderBy Robert Verkaik, Law EditorThursday, 19 August 2010
GETTY IMAGESThe US Vice-President Joseph Biden, left, and retired military officers watch President Barack Obama sign orders to close down the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in January 2009  Read Article    

 Friends Provide Glimpse Into Nominee's 'Very Full Life'
  By Keith B. Richburg, Robin Shulman and Nancy Trejos
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, May 31, 2009
    NEW YORK -- Last November, soon after Barack Obama was elected president, a close friend of Judge Sonia Sotomayor's was hospitalized on Long Island because of a series of strokes. Speculation was already swirling that the new president might make Sotomayor his first pick should a vacancy open on the Supreme Court. Sotomayor also had a full caseload she was balancing as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in Manhattan. But three or four times a week, Sotomayor would leave work around 7 p.m. to visit her friend. Ever the urbanite, Sotomayor would pick up some chicken soup, get in her white Saab convertible and wind through rush-hour traffic to Long Island to sit by the bedside of a woman who was often unconscious and unaware that Sotomayor was there. Finally, the trips came to an end in April -- not because of the pressures of the trip on her busy life, but because her friend died. Those visits, recounted by several of Sotomayor's closest friends, provide a telling glimpse into the private life of the woman nominated last week by President Obama to be the next Supreme Court justice and the first Hispanic on the high court. The friends go on to describe her in laudatory, if predictable, ways: collegial, intensely loyal, a bedrock in crisis. But another portrait emerges as well in their descriptions, one that sets her far apart from the retiring justice she would succeed, David H. Souter. Souter is known as a bookish recluse, a loner…