Several years ago, Jeb Bush and Florida Republicans created the nation’s first state-wide voucher scheme, disregarding language in the state Constitution that prohibits state funds from going to private religious schools and institutions. The program sparked a lawsuit, and the voucher system was struck down by the Florida Supreme Court. So, before Republicans and voucher […]
This Michelle Obama quote, uttered back in February, is probably the Republicans’ single favorite development of the presidential campaign. “What we have learned over this year is that hope is making a comeback. It is making a comeback. And let me tell you something — for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am […]
We saw an interesting political/media controversy this week when Fox News characterized Michelle Obama as “Obama’s baby mama.” (The phrase is slang for an unwed mother who gets no support from a baby’s father.) The Wall Street Journal had a good item the other day putting the flap in the broader context of media scrutiny […]
It makes perfect sense that the McCain campaign would make at least cursory efforts to reach out to Hillary Clinton’s most ardent supporters. John McCain does, after all, have very little to lose. There are some lingering hard feelings after the longest and closest Democratic presidential primary ever, and even though the intra-party factions agree […]
What Barack Obama said: He warned that the general election campaign could get ugly. “They’re going to try to scare people. They’re going to try to say that ‘that Obama is a scary guy,’” he said. A donor yelled out a deep accented “Don’t give in!” “I won’t but that sounded pretty scary. You’re a […]
At first blush, this doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense. Many of Hillary Clinton’s supporters were women, many of whom were excited by the prospect of having a woman head a major-party presidential ticket for the first time. Clinton, of course, came up just short of her goal. Now, however, it appears that […]
A couple of weeks ago, the McCain campaign had to get rid of two top officials — including the man McCain tapped to manage the Republican National Convention, because they were both lobbyists tied to Burma’s brutal military junta. We learned at the time that McCain passed over a different lobbyist for the convention post […]
It’s routine for high-profile political figures to appear at fundraisers on behalf of congressional candidates nationwide. It tends to be pretty beneficial for everyone — the candidate benefits (he/she gets money and the credibility that comes with the association) and the VIP benefits (he/she helps the party, boosts his/her visibility, and knows that the candidate […]
This week, John McCain tacitly conceded his campaign’s shortcomings as they relate to research. It was, after all, the excuse they used when McCain cozied up to radical TV preacher John Hagee and Rod Parsley. We pursued them for a year, the campaign said, but we didn’t know anything about them. So, while talking about […]
Last week, The God Machine offered a story about religious activists, hoping to undermine confidence in modern biology by encouraging school districts to introduce “strengths and weaknesses” language into curriculum standards. This way, the argument goes, teachers wouldn’t literally be teaching creationism, they’d just be teaching why creationists don’t like evolutionary biology. This week, we […]