Andrew Romano

I was not excited.My editor had just stepped into my office to discuss a new assignment. The NEWSWEEK brass is interested in Twitter, he told me, but they're looking for an original way to cover it—which is where you come in. OK, I thought. Fine. For a youngish reporter like me, this is standard operating procedure.

In the year and a half since Barack Obama was elected president, Republicans nationwide seem to have given up on the whole governing thing and chosen instead to play a long, rancorous game of "I'm More Conservative Than You Are."

So far this election cycle, the establishment or incumbent Republicans who've found themselves on the receiving end of a serious Tea Party primary challenge have been at least somewhat moderate.

News flash! Sarah Palin has endorsed Carly Fiorina in Carlyfornia's California's Republican Senate primary race, and her Tea Party supporters, who tend to side with Fiorina's more conservative rival, Chuck DeVore, are not at all pleased with the decision.

As you may have heard, torrential downpours in the southeast flooded the Tennessee capital of Nashville over the weekend, lifting the Cumberland River 13 feet above flood stage, causing an estimated $1 billion in damage, and killing more than 30 people.

 Even though most nonpoliticos probably blinked and missed it—and by "blinked" I mean "watched the American Idol contestants butcher the music of Frank Sinatra"—last night just so happened to be the first Super Tuesday of the 2010 election season.

At their best, charts and graphs are more than just the Y axes and X axes and data points that make them up. They're narratives in number form. In that sense, the most interesting statistical story I've read lately is the Pew Center's interactive map of Public Trust in Government: 1958-2010—both for explaining how we got here, politically speaking, and for predicting why President Obama's first year in office may prove to be the last gasp of activist Democratic governing in a long time. ...

 In last week's cover package, "Don't Mess With Texas," my NEWSWEEK colleagues Evan Thomas and Arian Campo-Flores compared Lone Star State governor Rick Perry to the "Marlboro Man," and looking at the cover image, I could sort of see why: the creased face, the squinty eyes, the windswept mane.

Good news from the White House. When the health-insurance overhaul passed Congress last month, it stipulated that instead of getting booted from their parents' health-care plans at the tender age of 19 or 22, qualifying young adults would now remain covered until 26.

As I write in this week's dead-tree magazine, one of the most surprising—and, frankly, self-defeating—aftershocks of Obamacare's passage is the way that Republicans are now roasting once-and-perhaps-future presidential candidate Mitt Romney for enacting similar reforms as governor of Massachusetts.

The former Massachusetts governor talks about the subtle differences between his state's health care reform and that signed by President Obama.

Finally, Democrats and Republicans agree on something. Too bad it's not something worth agreeing on. In Washington, D.C., a bipartisan consensus seems to be forming around the idea that President Obama should choose a judge without an Ivy League education to replace John Paul Stevens.

Last week house minority Leader John Boehner renewed his party's commitment to repealing health-care reform. But the GOP's Senate candidates aren't echoing the national message machine—at least not in North Carolina, Indiana, and Ohio, the states where primary season kicks off next month.

Mitt Romney may be more responsible for national health-care reform than the president himself. Why he ought to take credit for it.

As my fellow Gaggler Liz White reported yesterday, Sarah Palin has raked in a cool $12 million in personal income since quitting the Juneau Statehouse last July.

The radio and TV talk-show host gets such outsize media coverage—especially from the left—for the same reason he attracts conservative viewers: he validates their beliefs.

When a Supreme Court justice announces his retirement—as John Paul Stevens did earlier today—the press immediately launches into its "first rough draft of history" mode, filing endless reams of elegant, elegiac prose on Who He Was and What He Meant.

Is T-Paw the new John Kerry? When outgoing Minnesota governor and aspiring 2012 Republican presidential nominee Tim Pawlenty announced yesterday that he plans to sue the federal government over the new national health-care law, almost nobody in Washington raised an eyebrow.

Yesterday, I posted a column here on the Gaggle criticizing a Politico story by Carol Lee for framing Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick's re-election campaign as "a bellwether for how Obama fares in 2012." Now Ben Smith, the site's lead blogger, is linking to my post and describing it as "an odd, lengthy, attack...

Official White House photo by Pete Souza Publishing the least-informative inside-the-Beltway story of the week is no small feat—especially when it's only Monday morning.

It's a weird moment right now for the GOP. On one hand, the base has rarely been more riled up—and understandably so. For the past year, party leaders have told rank-and-file Republicans that the passage of Obamacare would represent a kind of Nazi-Bolshevik Armageddon, and that they must band together as honest, freedom-loving Americans to do everything in their power to stop the "Democrat [sic] Party" from destroying the country.

They tried voting "nay" en masse. They tried threatening to filibuster. They tried painting reconciliation as some sort of abomination. And the Democrats passed health-care-reform legislation anyway.So what do Republicans do now?

As I (and my fellow Gagglers) have written before—see here, here, and here—Republican efforts to repeal President Barack Obama's newly minted health-care reform law are almost certain to peter out as soon as the current political firestorm dies down.

 For a little while there, Mitt Romney was beginning to act like a humanoid. In order to position himself as the "grown-up" 2012 alternative to the rabble-rousing right-wing fringe (see: Palin, Sarah), the former Massachusetts governor has spent the past few months shedding the ill-fitting, hardcore conservatism of his 2008 run and staking out reasonable positions on a number of important issues.

So here we are. The hour is upon us. The end is nigh. After more than a year of haggling, it looks the House will vote Sunday on a revised version of the Senate health-care-reform bill, and Pelosi and Co.

Dining out is one of our purer expressions of desire: the transformation of mere sustenance into something worth paying for and obsessing over. Which is why I've always thought that restaurants can reveal, in a more visceral way than books or movies or even Lady Gaga, what we crave as a culture.I recalled this theory recently during a disorienting lunch at Street in L.A.

 When word hit the wires late last week that Army Gen. David Petraeus had agreed to speak at St. Anselm college on March 24, the political punditocracy (rather predictably) flipped out.

Has Meg Whitman come down with a case of Palinitis? On Tuesday, the former eBay CEO and current candidate for California's Republican gubernatorial nomination swung by a Union Pacific train facility in Oakland—and invited the press along for the ride.

The Garden State's real bosses—bootleggers, cross-dressers, organ traffickers—put Tony Soprano to shame.

 Late last week, President Barack Obama announced that he would be appointing a gentleman named Edward Tufte to the independent panel that advises the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (i.e., the team of inspectors general who track how stimulus funds are spent).