Tagged: NPR Opinion

George Zornick is a Washington reporter at The Nation.

Jonathan Cohn is the senior editor of The New Republic.

The controversy over contraception has faded a bit. Congressional Republicans are rethinking efforts to overturn a requirement that would make birth control coverage a mandatory part of health insurance. Rush Limbaugh has stopped talking about the issue, at least for the moment.

Joshua E. Keating is an associate editor at Foreign Policy.

Jonathan Bernstein blogs at A Plain Blog About Politics.

Even with the major distraction of a Republican presidential primary, tonight's State of the Union speech will guaranteed to, however briefly, capture the undivided attention of all political junkies. They're not wrong: The annual tradition does matter. And yet the conventional wisdom about the importance of the speech tends to be almost exactly backwards.