Given the harshness of her remark, I guess this was largely inevitable. A Barack Obama adviser has resigned after calling rival Hillary Rodham Clinton “a monster.” A campaign official told The Associated Press Friday that Samantha Power’s resignation is effective immediately. Power told The Scotsman that Clinton is a “monster” who will stoop to anything […]
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: * In the unlikely event you haven’t heard, this is one of the more impressive fundraising achievements I’ve ever seen: “Democratic Sen. Barack Obama raised a record $55 million in February for his […]
Slate’s John Dickerson had an interesting item last night that seemed to summarize the conventional wisdom on intra-party criticism pretty well. The Clinton team is setting the same trap for Obama my 4-year-old sets for her older brother. She hits him knowing that he’ll get in trouble for hitting back. Right on cue, Clinton’s senior […]
The reality is, the punishment was never really supposed to matter. Florida and Michigan were breaking the party’s rules by moving their primaries up, and they were willing to accept the DNC’s punishment as a consequence, but everyone acted with a wink and a nod — once a candidate emerged in the primaries as the […]
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is the highest ranking Roman Catholic official in the federal government, and not surprisingly, she finds John Hagee’s anti-Catholic rhetoric offensive. Yesterday, to her credit, she pressed John McCain on why he refuses to denounce Hagee’s bigotry. Nico Pitney has the story. “That behavior is outside the circle of civilized debate […]
One of the benefits of having a prolonged Democratic primary race, after Republicans have already winnowed their field to John McCain, is that it’s a two-against-one dynamic — the GOP can’t direct all of its ire at one Dem, and there are two Dems to go after McCain at the same time. Of course, that […]
Today’s edition of quick hits. * Bloodshed in Baghdad: “Fifty-three people were killed and 125 were wounded in two bomb attacks Thursday evening in a Baghdad commercial district, an Interior Ministry official said. A roadside bomb exploded first, around 7 p.m., in the central Baghdad district of Karrada, killing and wounding a number of people, […]
One of the more outlandish claims John McCain routinely makes on the campaign trail is his boast that he called for Donald Rumsfeld’s ouster before he resigned. Part of the problem with the bogus claim is that major media personalities believe the claim, and keep passing it on to national audiences as if it were […]
Given the clarity of Article II, Sec. 2 of the Constitution, and the fairly obvious role Congress is supposed to have in approving treaties, there really shouldn’t be any question about lawmakers’ role in approving a new security agreement struck between the White House and the Maliki government. But this is Bush we’re talking about, […]
It’s been a while since we’ve heard any new Halliburton-related outrages, so I suppose we were due. The latest is evidence that Halliburton subsidiary KBR used a creative Cayman Islands-based scheme to avoid paying employment taxes. (thanks to reader E.S. for the tip) Kellogg Brown & Root, the nation’s top Iraq war contractor and until […]