Last summer, Mark McKinnon, the former chief media adviser to George W. Bush, and now a top aide to John McCain’s presidential campaign, admitted that he liked Barack Obama so much, he didn’t want to work on the campaign running against Obama and he wouldn’t create negative ads against the Illinois senator if he became […]
The McCain campaign has already fired four top aides and the man picked to manage the Republican National Convention because they were lobbyists with awkward clients in their past. Complicating matters is Charles Black, McCain’s senior strategist, whose work on behalf of some nefarious international thugs has prompted calls for his resignation. Today, however, the […]
The news out of Boston is discouraging: Sen. Ted Kennedy has a malignant brain tumor. Doctors for the Massachusetts Democrat say tests conducted after Kennedy suffered a seizure this weekend show a tumor in his left parietal lobe. Preliminary results from a biopsy of the brain identified the cause of the seizure as a malignant […]
Because Barack Obama has indicated he’d consider diplomacy with Iran as president, Republicans and other far-right voices have highlighted the bizarre inanities of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This is the guy, the GOP argues, that Obama would be willing to chat with. But there’s actually some ambiguity to the point. In Iran’s system, Ahmadinejad may be president, […]
Yesterday, the feud was between Fox News and NBC News. Today, it’s between the White House and NBC News. (Insert joke here about the lack of distinctions between Fox News and the Bush White House.) The Bush gang, apparently, is all worked up over the “editing” of an interview between the president and NBC’s Richard […]
Today’s installment of campaign-related news items that wouldn’t generate a post of their own, but may be of interest to political observers: * Over the last 24 hours, there’s been some superdelegate news, with Obama picking up 6.5 new superdelegates (West Virginia’s Robert Byrd, Kansas’ Larry Gates, Washington’s Dwight Pelz, Alaska’s Cindy Spanyers and Blake […]
For a couple of generations, every major presidential candidate, from both parties, has taken the same position on U.S. policy towards Cuba: keep the status quo. The embargo needs to stay in place in order to “keep the pressure” on Castro. Any thawing in relations would be a victory for a brutal thug, and would […]
As discouraging as Bush’s Bubble Boy policies have been, they have not gone unchallenged. In March 2005, for example, three Denver residents obtained tickets to a public town hall meeting on the president’s Social Security plan. Someone working at the event noticed an anti-war bumper sticker (“No Blood For Oil”) on their car, which prompted […]
There was some talk, early on in Bush’s first term, that the Republican Party really, truly intended to take minority outreach seriously. The chairman of the RNC appeared at an NAACP conference to apologize for the party’s past, and White House officials thought they could make a second term more likely if they could boost […]
You may be under the impression that these are challenging economic times. Wages are stagnant; we’re in the midst of a credit crunch and a housing crisis; the economy has crawled to a stop; and the cost of everything from food to gas to college tuition to healthcare has ballooned. But perhaps that’s a myopic […]