Late on Tuesday, Open Left front-pager Paul Rosenberg approvingly flagged a Salon piece in which Nancy Goldstein sought to skewer President-elect Barack Obama, in response to Monday's late-breaking announcement that Obama had invited Bishop Gene Robinson, of New Hampshire -- the country's first openly gay Episcopal bishop --...

What matters is what John McCain and Sarah Palin are not saying.

For weeks --- starting well before the recent surge in xenophobic and racially charged attacks on Barack Obama that now have become a stock feature of the McCain campaign --- McCain's friends in the news media defended McCain...

Atlantic Monthly political blogger Marc Ambinder wrote this past Friday morning that

a faction within the McCain campaign...has come to believe that [Sarah] Palin, perhaps unwittingly, subconsciously or otherwise, has begun to play Sen. McCain off of the base, consistently and deliberately departing from the campaign's...

A gaffe, we are told, is not simply another name for misspeaking. Rather, it's a very specific kind of misspeaking, in which the speaker utters something that inadvertently reveals a damning and subconsciously understood truth that --- even once spoken --- can remain hidden in plain sight. Hidden...

On last night's episode of NBC Nightly News, Brian Williams introduced a short profile of Todd Palin by NBC reporter John Larson. A little more than halfway through the segment, Larson reported --- as fact --- that last week's Troopergate report found that Sarah Palin "did not break...

Pay attention. These --- and these alone --- were the real questions that were raised by Palin's responses last week to Katie Couric's questions about Roe v. Wade.

The rest --- the tabloid obsession with Palin's evident brain freeze --- was just the sideshow that reinforced the existing...

In his op-ed last week about Washington's continuing efforts to hammer out a deal to rescue the country's financial system, Paul Krugman praised the Congressional "Agreement on Principles," released last Thursday, as a marked improvement over Treasury secretary Henry Paulson's original proposal.

Writes Krugman (emphasis mine):

...

On the night that ABC aired the first part of Sarah Palin's interview with Charles Gibson, a commenter over at Open Left --- a doctoral student in physics --- offered this:

When a [physics] grad student takes his or her oral qualifiers/defense...[t]he [unwritten] rule is that...

Barack Obama has been getting a lot of advice about whom he should pick for his running mate. But the "four-star checkmate" contingent and the no-woman-but-Hillary crowd must be feeling a little left out in the cold, if we can believe what all the vice-presidential crystal-ball-ers and tea-leaf readers are...

Let's cut through this, shall we?

From late 1995 to early 1997, President Bill Clinton engaged in an extramarital sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

This story broke in January 1998, and --- as a direct response to Clinton's subsequent efforts to hide the relationship --- in December 1998, the U.S....

The McCain campaign has been saying that Obama was playing the race card when, last Wednesday, Obama said:

What they're going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know, "He's not patriotic enough, he's got a funny name." You know, "He doesn't look like all those...

**Updated Below**

In his latest, Adam Nagourney of The New York Times wonders why Barack Obama is not doing better in the "national opinion polls" [emphasis mine]:

Most surveys now show Mr. Obama with a lead of about 6 or 7 percentage points over Mr. McCain nationally,, and Mr....

According to The New York Times, it was two weeks ago that the Pentagon gave Barack Obama the green light to land in Ramstein, Germany, this morning, where he was to visit wounded American soldiers at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center. For all intents and purposes, the Pentagon red-lighted the...

Mayhill Fowler wrote yesterday about the

blue postcards advertising Barack Obama's appearance tomorrow at the Siegessaule....Yesterday and today volunteers from Americans Abroad for Obama, as well as college students...have been plying Berliners and tourists with these rather bizarre cards -- the artwork reminiscent of both German Expressionism and Soviet...

Last Wednesday, in anticipation of the Fourth of July, Time magazine published a pair of mini-essays on patriotism -- one by Barack Obama, one by John McCain.

Given the holiday, the mainstream venue, and the fact that we're kicking off the general election of a presidential campaign, you know,...