It’s not generating national attention, but there are a few interesting congressional races today that will help set the stage for the rest of the year. The biggest race is in South Dakota. A special election will decide who holds the state’s lone House seat after former Rep. Bill Janklow (R) had to resign after […]
The other blockbuster of the weekend was a Time magazine scoop regarding a certain VP and his former oil company. Cheney’s relationship with Halliburton has been nothing but trouble since he left the company in 2000. Both he and the company say they have no ongoing connections. But Time has obtained an internal Pentagon e-mail […]
Slate’s Avi Zenilman noted the other day that legendary Washington Post Editor Ben Bradlee once lamented, “Even the very best newspapers have never learned how to handle public figures who lie with a straight face.” Fortunately, the Post came very close to figuring it out in a front-page stunner yesterday. Dana Milbank and Jim VandeHei […]
Off for Memorial Day. See you tomorrow.
It’s the end of the week and you know what that means — the latest state polling data in the presidential race. This week was a little tricky because there were only a handful of states with published data, but a Zogby/Wall Street Journal poll released a report on Monday covering 16 states. I’ve separated […]
Yesterday’s front-page article in the Washington Post about the Bush administration’s budget plans made a lot of waves yesterday, but the Kerry campaign and other Dems are focusing on one point in particular: cuts to veterans’ benefits. The Post item noted, for example, that the administration plans to cut nearly $1 billion from Department of […]
A week of uproar over John Kerry’s idea of delaying his Dem nomination has made it abundantly clear that the traditional role of political conventions is in need of an overhaul. Nearly every argument I heard against the plan floated by the Kerry campaign sounded redundant. Critics said it would relegate the convention to a […]
Speaking of good liberal groups taking on interesting legal challenges (see below), I was thrilled to see that the Sierra Club is contesting Bush’s recess appointment of William Pryor to the 11th Circuit, which the environmental group believes is unconstitutional. (I agree with them.) As you may recall, Bush nominated Pryor, perhaps the most right-wing […]
I haven’t written a word about the ongoing, and disturbingly partisan, efforts of the Roman Catholic Church to use communion as a political weapon, but there’s been an interesting development I wanted to highlight. It’s been a bizarre evolution. First, the problem was with women who have abortions and the court rulings that allowed this […]
What was initially healthy skepticism about John Ashcroft’s political motivations has turned into widespread disbelief over the timing and substance of the latest public warnings about an imminent al Queda threat. And oddly enough, the critics aren’t limited to Dems and other Ashcroft critics. The attorney general told the public Wednesday that a serious terrorist […]