It’s the robo-calls, stupid

It’s interesting how we never really know what the election is going to come down to, at least far as issues that dominate the political world’s attention go. A month ago, Mark Foley was a largely-unknown backbencher from Florida, and no one cared. Ten days ago, John Kerry was telling plenty of jokes about Bush, […]

Kerry’s ‘botched joke’ was widely seen? You don’t say

MSNBC and CNN have been touting the results of this poll all day, and I have to admit, it’s more than a little annoying. “There also are some indications that Sen. John Kerry’s ‘botched joke’ about the war Iraq may have had a modest impact on the race. Fully 84% of voters say they have […]

‘He should have disappeared’

By now, everyone following the midterm elections has noticed the gameplan: Dems want to nationalize the campaign cycle, Republicans want to localize it. To that end, Bob Novak writes today, Bush has been screwing things up for the GOP. At Sellersburg in southern Indiana on Oct. 28, George W. Bush began 10 days of nonstop […]

Well, that was unpleasant

Apparently, the day before the election, there’s someone who doesn’t want you to read The Carpetbagger Report, so he or she decided to attack the database. Everything appears to be back on track, at least for now. Obviously, I regret the inconvenience (and the spectacularly bad timing of the inconvenience).

He’s guilty; they’ll tell us why after the elections

When an Iraqi court convicted [tag]Saddam Hussein[/tag] yesterday of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to death, the ruling was a little short on details. In fact, there was no formal explanation/reasoning at all, only a [tag]verdict[/tag] and a [tag]sentence[/tag]. Josh Marshall, noting an NBC report, explains why. The full verdict, a document of several […]

Monday’s political round-up

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 final statewide poll before voters head to the polls in Connecticut, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I) appears to be poised to win another term. A new Quinnipiac poll shows the incumbent […]

‘This is making me nervous’

DCCC Chairman Rahm Emanuel is keenly aware of some very recent national polls showing the Dems’ generic-ballot lead shrinking. He told the NYT, “It’s inevitable that there would be some tightening in the end.” Emanuel added, however, “This is making me nervous.” Indeed, the Pew Research Center for People and the Press released a poll […]

Key House Republican says Bush gang ‘screwed up’ on nuclear secrets

Alas, the story late last week about the Bush administration accidentally publishing nuclear secrets in Arabic on the Internet did not cause quite the stir that I had hoped for. Perhaps if John Kerry had told a joke about it, and left out a word, the story could have received wall-to-wall coverage on TV. That […]

Secretaries of State used to be above politics

The WaPo had an interesting item over the weekend noting Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s busy schedule of late. That makes sense — there’s a war in Iraq, the North Korean crisis is simmering to a boil, there’s a major transition underway at the United Nations, and there are ample challenges that require the attention […]

The Republicans’ cowardly robo-calls

There’s a line in the movie “Serenity” in which Jayne Cobb, who’s something of a mercenary, explains a bit about his philosophy on shooting people. “Hell, I’ll kill a man in a fair fight,” Jayne said, “or if I think he’s gonna start a fair fight.” We’d all like to think that there’s some nobility […]