By MARTIN SCHRAM, Scripps Howard News Service

By now we are all on a first-name basis. Hillary and Barack have joined us in our living rooms night after night, hoping to close the deal in very different ways.Barack Obama has steadily pushed his optimistic one-word theme: "Change."

The news from Cuba whipped around the planet via the Internet. In a flash, people everywhere were reading it on Cuba's official Granma newspaper Web site. Except people in Cuba, where Fidel Castro had banned them from accessing the Internet.

Now is the time for us to demand that the 2008 presidential candidates confront the one part of their plans for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that President Bush never seemed to understand: The real-world consequences of their actions.

While America's super-sized attention was diverted and divided among the superlatives of Super Bowl Sunday and Super Tuesday, Official Washington began playing its favorite old parlor game: Liar's Poker -- also known as the old budget game.

At the end of his CNN interview before the State of the Union address, Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee was asked a no-trick question: "What is the state of the union?" And he gave a no-duck answer: "I think it's troubled -- to say anything else would be dishonest."

While channel surfing for the latest in the series of blah-blah Democratic presidential debates the other night, I came upon what was obviously an old rerun on Animal Planet and could not tear myself away from the bizarre sight: I witnessed two jackals going after each other, clawing and snapping, while an almost unseen Carolina grouse harmlessly flapped its wings.

Two incidents of unintended consequences this week compel us to revisit just how wrong things can go in the herd journalism that has spread faster than mad cow disease along the 2008 presidential campaign trail.

Almost four decades ago, when the environmentalist movement was just being birthed, The Washington Post's editorial page icon Meg Greenfield put it into perspective by observing that in her fo

Eventually, this column will outline the first action Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig must take in response to former Sen.

We have reached the moment in the 2008 presidential campaign when the candidates have come to an important conclusion about you.