Are this year's "tea parties" really tea parties? What could today's protesters have in common with the "Indians" who dumped 90,000 pounds of tea in Boston harbor in 1773? Quite a bit, actually.
What do today's tea partiers want? According to the Christian Science Monitor, the movement "is about safeguarding individual liberty, cutting taxes, and ending bailouts for business while the American taxpayer gets burdened with more public debt. It is fueled by concern that the United States under Mr. Obama is becoming a European-style social democracy where individual initiative is sapped by the needs of the collective." Broadly speaking, the tea parties reflect a growing anger in America that...

In politics, as in life, there's often a very fine line between a fluke and an earthquake. They can even be mistaken for each other. In many ways, Scott Brown's upset victory over Martha Coakley on January 19 for the Senate seat long held by Edward M. Kennedy, just as Congress was nearing agreement on the health care bill, was a fluke. The confluence of seemingly unrelated events had more impact than any of them would have had individually. Even the date of Kennedy's death last August had major consequences: if it had happened a month later, the President might already have signed a health care bill into law by the time the election was held. A senior Democratic House strategist told me,...

Rangel strongly rejects the notion that his leave of absence might be permanent.

Apologizes...(Second column, 10th story, link)Related stories:BIG SIS: TSA makes disabled boy, 4, take off leg braces...

U.S. economic conditions kept improving slightly at the start of 2010, but the blizzards that hit the East Coast hurt several areas, the Fed said in its beige book report.

Rather than adhering to the Beltway tradition of waiting for Friday to release bad news, Interior Department Secretary Ken Salazar eschewed convention today and dropped a bomb on American energy independence, economic recovery, and public opinion when he announced that the next offshore drilling program will not begin until 2012.When Salazar took office last year there was an existing leasing plan set to begin in 2010, a plan that critics believed the Obama administration would alter but not scrap completely. After massive unrest in the summer of 2008 over $4-per-gallon gasoline, Congress finally lifted its 25-year ban on offshore drilling, clearing the way for a common-sense leasing plan.

UPDATE: Helicopter fails to reach climber who fell into volcano...(Second column, 2nd story, link)Related stories:Dead in crater...

UPDATE: Helicopter fails to reach climber who fell into volcano...(Second column, 2nd story, link)Related stories:Dead in crater...