Daniel Stone

Normally, the Web sites of political parties are supposed to feature photos of beaming candidates alongside pleas for donations. But that's not quite the case this afternoon over at the online portal of the Chicago Republican Party.

You might call April a nuclear month for President Obama. After announcing the administration's Nuclear Posture Review this week, the president will travel to Prague tonight to sign a treaty with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev—an overture to a nuclear-arms summit hosted at the White House next week that is expected to include more than 30 heads of state.Prague was chosen to kick off the proceedings because of a speech Obama gave there last year in which he called for a nuclear-free world.

Remember the charges last summer that civility in Washington is dead? Not so. Just ask GOP Sen. Tom Coburn, who at a town-hall meeting over the weekend in Oklahoma had some choice words for the Foxerati.

As the scene in West Virginia becomes more dire—and as the death toll, now at 25, continues to rise—Washington has taken note. Dozens of lawmakers have offered condolences and West Virgina Rep.

 Washington, a city built upon a swamp, doesn't get many nice days. Today, however, is one of them. For President Obama, it's a day centered squarely on ceremony.

Can Michael Steele recover from the latest scandal to hit the Republican National Committee? While critics have been calling for his ouster for more than a week, the chairman gave his first interview this morning to ABC's George Stephanopoulos to say that he plans to stay put.The interview was clearly meant as a fence-mending exercise.

...Then you'll want to mosey over to The Washington Post to check out its annual Peeps diorama contest. We bring this to your attention for two reasons. One, these are not your average fifth-grade dioramas.

One of Nancy Pelosi's main selling points to Democrats mulling how to vote on health reform was that after it passed their party would be rewarded with a bump in the polls.

In only its first year, Sean Hannity argues, the Obama administration has been radical, even tyrannical, in its "socialist" policies. But rather than whine about it, conservatives should focus their anger strategically. Calm down and think smart, warns Hannity. And above all, keep saying no to Democrats wherever possible.

EPA chief Lisa Jackson is taking on the president's next big challenge: climate change. Will her hardball tactics persuade Congress to play along?

After a long and bumpy past, it's now clear that cap-and-trade has gone from the gurney to the morgue. The stark admission came this morning during a CNBC interview with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. "I think the term 'cap-and-trade' is not in the lexicon anymore," he said, suggesting that more agreeable goals, like slowing pollution and reducing oil imports, were more in the scope of the administration.

Speaking at adjacent podiums, French President Nicolas Sarkozy stood half a head shorter than President Obama in the East Room of the White House. Such was the setting for the joint press conference the two men hosted at the White House this afternoon.

When news hit the wires this morning about top Republican National Committee officials living the high life—frequenting strip clubs and musing about buying a private jet—the RNC went into crisis mode.

It appeared to be a quiet weekend for President Obama to spend with his family at Camp David until midday Sunday, when the White House announced that Obama had touched down in Kabul as part of a secret trip to Afghanistan.

President Obama wants to double production of renewable energy by 2012, but a chicken-sized ground bird is tripping up progress. In the last century, the sage grouse—known for its iconic spiked tail -feathers—has been decimated by mining, ranching, and, most recently, the development of the rural West for wind farming.

The U.S. and Russia have an undeniably storied past. There was the Cold War, of course, but relations since have only become slightly less tense. The nuclear arsenal of both countries has led to a begrudging acknowledgment of mutual existence, but friendship would be a far stretch.

Republicans, feeling steamrolled on health care, may not play ball on climate change.

If there's anyone who knows how to turn America's freedom of speech laws into a payday, it's Ann Coulter. The sometimes incendiary and always controversial conservative commentator has made millions on books and speeches that refer to liberalism as "a mental disorder" and progressives as "godless." But does her ability to incite at the expense of others end when she leaves the country?

Now that President Obama and his 20 pens have signed the health-care-reform bill, the debate now officially begins in the Senate over the 153-page list of fixes.

 Little matters more to Michigan environmentalists at the moment than stopping the flow of invasive Asian carp entering Lake Michigan. The state has sued, as high up as the Supreme Court, to lock existing waterways from Illinois that feed the lake, and through which the fish have been traveling.

We're just learning that it was Texas GOP Rep. Randy Neugebauer who shouted "baby killer" at Rep. Bart Stupak on the House floor last night. The moment came close to 11 p.m.

Under that pretense, Clinton's speech may be remembered as the most consequential thus far in her tenure as secretary of state. After decades of slow progress on Israeli-Palestinian relations in such a volatile region of the world, her point was framed as a turning point, as if to say that piecemeal negotiations were no longer good enough.

After more than a year of debate, the House passed a health-care-reform package late Sunday night that will be sent to the president for him to sign into law.

As my colleague Sarah Kliff noted yesterday, much of the last-minute scrambling before tonight's health-care vote is centered around the office of Michigan Rep.

There are plenty of ways that partisan maneuvering over the past year has eroded trust on Capitol Hill. Each party has squarely opposed the other, almost unanimously.

Washington, D.C., is littered with the careers of well-meaning public servants who came to do good but fell victim to politics. Lisa Jackson is determined not to become one of them.

Last night, while speaking at a White House reception honoring Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen, Joe Biden royally stepped in it, referring to Cowen's mother as having passed away ("God rest her soul")—even though she's still very much alive. Whoops. But what impressed us more was Biden's witty recovery. Have a look:

The latest effort from the team behind 'Planet Earth' shows the struggle and beauty of being alive.

It's been a crummy year for environmentalists. First it was the leaked e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit showing some questionable discussions among scientists about climate-change research.

The goal over the past month for the Obama administration has been to discredit its opponents on health reform. It's why the president hosted the televised policy summit last month, which wasn't really about finding common ground, but was mostly an effort to show in a public setting that the other side's ideas to fix the ailing health-care system were all talk and no action.Now the administration is taking the fight to the real opponents of reform, the lobbyists who have funneled more than $20...