Would most politicians have gone to a meeting with someone advertised as being an agent of the Russian government?

President-elect Trump says he's not even sure the Russians did the hacking.

I've talked to several who have been approached for short- or long-term duty in the Trump administration. The evidence of the work environment that mounts with each passing day makes them highly wary.

The Chinese, our allies, have been allies with North Korea.

When she died, Mom left me her letters and journals. Windows into things I would have been too young to understand when she was alive, or too busy, or too much of a know-it-all.

The locker rooms that Donald Trump is in are not at the cut-rate gym with the broken treadmills - they are at his swish golf clubs. They are places of stature.

People out there with pre-existing conditions, they are worried. Are they going to have the guarantee of coverage if they have a pre-existing condition or if they live in a state where the governor decides that's not a part of the health care, or that the prices are going to go up? That's the worry.

Mr. Obama said that he personally told Mr. Putin to knock it off and vows to retaliate. But the Obama presidency is coming to an end, and his successor still won't accept that Russia is guilty of tampering with U.S. elections.

When I interviewed John McCain in 2000 about whether he had taken medication for his anger, I remember thinking, 'Let's see how this is going to work.'

A picture excites the love of parenting that comes through meditation on a child.

In their day, no man worthy of the presidency would ever stoop to campaigning for it. George Washington was asked to serve. Decades later, his successors were also expected to sit by the phone.

I believe that Jesus Christ existed and that He died for my sins. And I believe that what He said in the Gospels is a model for the way I should try to lead my life and that I will always fall short of that and, therefore, need Him to redeem me.

In the 2012 campaign, the president successfully transformed the most intense conservative positions into liabilities on immigration and the role of government.

When the campaign ends, and you are home, the alarm clock is the same, but you don't know where to start after it goes off: expense reports, new stories, the crusted paint cans that have to go to the hazardous-waste disposal site, the wiper blade on the Honda that has gone droopy.

When the news broke that John McCain had been diagnosed with brain cancer, the outpouring of well wishes all hailed his toughness.

Comey worried that the pressure from Trump to end the Flynn investigation or remove the 'cloud' of the larger investigation would 'infect' the investigation if he let others working on the case know about it. You don't need to believe the particulars of each exchange to see that this mode of management was not productive to a larger purpose.

When former Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrote his recent book, 'Duty', it was full of tough assessments and candor.

The house was big enough for my brother and me to have firecracker wars at one end and leave Mom and Dad undisturbed at the other. When firecrackers weren't available, we attacked each other with pennies and marbles and clumps of Crisco, which made brilliant greasy asterisks when you missed and hit the wall.

If Michael Flynn lost his job because of a gradual erosion of trust, shouldn't the easy and frequent production of official statements that are so many connecting flights from the truth also be concerning?

To be the windowpane - this is basically a bastardization of what Orwell said about good writing - so you can get the conversation going and frame it the right way and make sure people aren't lost. And then you let the candidates illuminate the issues themselves.

In the end, Obama won, stealing the change message from John Edwards and beating back Hillary Clinton's focus on experience. And the race turned on a remarkable speech Obama gave on the night of Nov. 10, 2007, in Des Moines.

Mother's Day is a welcome event in partisan times. Nearly everyone agrees that we should show mothers gratitude.

For Hillary Clinton, Iowa was a tough state for her in 2008, and she's put a lot of effort into fixing those mistakes.

A number of Donald Trump's supporters told me during the campaign they had faith that he would be a good president because he would be helped by the experts around him. But the president's improvisation saps experts of their key skill: pattern recognition.