Reality TV wannabes Tareq and Michaele Salahi claimed a dead cell phone battery prevented them from hearing a voicemail earlier that day advising them they did not make the White House guest list.

The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan says that even if the Taliban lay low, the 18-month period allows time to bolster Afghan military and governing capability to make it harder for the militants to return.

The statement of General Stanley McChrystal regarding President Obama's speech on his Afghanistan strategy. 

Lawmakers plan to use two days of high-profile hearings on the war, beginning Wednesday, to express their misgivings about bama's escalation of the war in Afghanistan.

Many say they support the surge as long as it helps to end the eight-year-old conflict, but shake their heads at president's announcement of 2011 troop withdrawal date.

The defense secretary, a Bush administration holdover, will be more closely identified with the outcome of the Afghan war than he ever was with the Iraq war.

By offering something to all sides in the debate, Obama may have left all sides unsatisfied -- from liberal groups who have protested troop increases to conservatives who object to a fixed timetable for withdrawal.

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., an obstetrician-turned-lawmaker, says during a rancorous floor debate that President Obama's health care overhaul will shorten the lives of America's seniors by cutting Medicare. 

U.S. troop buildup in Afghanistan will begin almost immediately, with the first Marines in place this month; lawmakers blast president's preliminary timetable for withdrawal.

California's insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner says he will push insurance companies doing business in California to divest up to $12 billion in indirect investments in Iran's defense, nuclear, energy and banking industries.

In 1994, he co-founded the conservative Democrats' Blue Dog coalition -- fiscal hawks who said they were "choked blue" by their party's liberal flank.

Excerpts from e-mails exchanged between Tareq and Michaele Salahi and Michele Jones, special assistant to the defense secretary.

President Obama's speech Tuesday night did not always match the reality on the ground in Afghanistan.

A transcript of Obama's speech at West Point about Afghanistan.

A handful of House Republicans did their best on Tuesday to shame Democrats and the Obama administration for its supposed connections to the controversial anti-poverty group ACORN.

A bipartisan group of anti-abortion senators are preparing an amendment similar to one on the House side that would erect a blockade between taxpayer dollars and abortion coverage. 

President Obama's decision to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan after a 92-day review appears to be a compromise between his hawkish advisers who were pressing him to heed the advice of his military commanders and his political advisers, most notably Vice President Biden, who argued for an alternative strategy that would have scaled back the effort.

At a time when job creation is the number one problem and a chief goal for Washington, D.C., many tax experts say U.S. corporate tax policies are falling behind European nations -- known for their expensive social welfare systems and the high income and sales taxes that go with them.

HarperCollins spokeswoman Tina Andreadis said Tuesday that just two weeks after publication, Sarah Palin's memoir has sold 1 million copies. 

It took four months to plan and now will take only six months to deploy 30,000 more U.S. troops in Afghanistan, a rapid pace that surprises observers both inside and outside of the Defense Department.