A second House Democrat, Rep. Maxine Waters of California, could face an ethics trial this fall, further complicating the election outlook for the party as it battles to retain its majority.

The case of the Nobel Peace Prize winner and the massage therapist has been closed.

For all of its "Matrix"-like convolutions and "Alice in Wonderland" allusions, the new film "Inception" adds something significant to the ancient ruminations about reality's authenticity -- something profoundly relevant to this epoch of confusion. In the movie's tale of corporate espionage, we are asked to ponder this moment's most disturbing epistemological questions: Namely, how are ideas deposited in people's minds, and how incurable are those ideas when they are wrong?

Former Vice President Al Gore won't be prosecuted over allegations by a masseuse that he groped and assaulted her in his Portland hotel room in 2006, the county prosecutor said Friday.

The House has rejected a bill that would repeal a tax filing requirement in the new health care law that could swamp businesses with paperwork.

Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson, America's Most Annoying Senator, will vote against Elena Kagan, because -- well, the "reason" he gives is completely unimportant, because he is just voting against her to prove that he is not a socialist, like the president.

A 5.7-magnitude earthquake rattled the northeast Iranian city of Torbat-e Heydariyeh on Friday, injuring at least 110 people.

For the low, low price of $35 a year, you can trade in your tired old "free" Gmail or Yahoo or Hotmail e-mail address for the privilege of enriching the man Ronald Reagan and his hated first wife adopted in 1945 and promptly forgot about. That's right: Michael Reagan is selling "@reagan.com" e-mail addresses. Offer ends tomorrow!

Surprising no one, the FBI announced today it had tracked the left-wing historian Howard Zinn for 25 years, despite having apparently no evidence that he ever committed a crime.

In the chorus of critical reaction to the WikiLeaks Afghanistan documents we heard two strains of criticism: One suggested that the material would harm the U.S. war effort and endanger people working for it. The other suggested that, because no earth-shattering headline could be mined from the mountain of documents, the whole thing was a waste of time.

Authorities say a tampered gas line has been found at the scene of a commercial building explosion that killed two people in South Los Angeles.

[UPDATED]Oh boy, here we go again: Anthony Weiner put on a show on the House floor last night, the clip went viral, and now left-leaning blogs are singing his praises.

A suspected natural gas explosion Friday at an industrial plastic-coating shop collapsed part of the building and hurled two workers into the street, killing one and leaving the other in critical condition, fire officials said.

Last night, House Republicans blocked a bill providing billions of dollars for healthcare for first responders and others suffering due to breathing toxins on 9/11. They were able to do so because Democrats used a procedural maneuver to prevent Republicans from adding pointless, partisan amendments, but that maneuver meant the bill needed a two-thirds super-majority to pass. One hundred and fifty-nine Republicans then voted against the bill, even though most of those Republicans say they support helping the heroes of 9/11. So New York Democrat Anthony Weiner took to the floor to castigate the opposition party. You have probably seen it on the YouTube:

BP gas station owners across the country are divided over whether the oil giant stained by its handling of the Gulf spill should rebrand U.S. outlets as Amoco or another name as part of its effort to repair the company's badly damaged reputation.

Newt Ginrich's spokesman told Salon in a phone interview today that building a mosque at Ground Zero "would be like putting a statue of Mussolini or Marx at Arlington National Cemetery."

The Anti-Defamation League has come out against the construction of an Islamic Community Center in Lower Manhattan, to be called the Cordoba House. The Cordoba House is also known as "The Ground Zero Mosque," an appellation bestowed on the project by the fear-mongering bigots who've made it the centerpiece of a campaign of anti-Muslim hysteria.

The White House is imploring the website Wikileaks not to post any more classified documents about the Afghanistan war, saying U.S. national security and Afghan lives are at risk.

John Boehner's image makeover effort, detailed in Politico on Thursday, seems destined to fail on two fronts.

MSNBC's "Hardball" today might have seemed like a case of blind men describing an elephant, as host Chris Matthews, Gov. Howard Dean and I all appeared to have seen different Shirley Sherrod videos. And we wound up sparring over that (though Dean and I were on the same side), rather than the perfidy of Andrew Breitbart, on the day Shirley Sherrod announced her intention to sue Breitbart, the impresario of Big…Everything, but especially Big Propaganda, and a big, big smear of Shirley Sherrod.