Freeport Mayor George Gaulrapp, who has supported the encampment and fended off calls for it to be shut down, says Romney should get directly involved in the issue.

Mitt Romney's tour of awkwardness continues. A video of Romney speaking to a group of donors at a $50,000-a-person fundraiser, where he described 47...

Many have already commented how the national nominating conventions have morphed over time to become nothing more than protracted infomercials for each party. 'Twasn't always thus, however.

While the Republican convention may have strengthened Romney's position with the base, it did little to expand his coalition. The momentum from "You didn't build that" has been halted.

Weeks before the Democratic National Convention, I lamented the lack of women's voices slated for prime speaking roles in Charlotte, wondering aloud on these pages, "Where are the women?"

Who can't admit that to lead this country (or any country) is challenging and tiring and, as President Obama said so honestly Thursday night, drives a person to their knees?

Politicians are hoping that if they flatter our inner "momliness," we will forget many of them have tried to strip our rights as humans and as women, or at the very least that women are far from equally represented in government.

I wish the Republicans had devoted more energy in trying to humanize their ideas and policies rather than their candidates, especially those who can flip at the drop of a hat.

I need to hear more from our president. What do you mean by "move our country forward"? How will you do it? Yes, we know you're human. So am I.

Lincoln is back (Spielberg's Lincoln opens in November), and with him urgent questions: Are we locked in a new form of Civil War in our time? If so, why and what is it about? And where is our own Father Abraham? President Obama, an Illinoisan and Lincoln devotee who launched his own candidacy at the Old State House in Springfield, invoked his hero at the Democratic Convention in Charlotte, saying that he, like Lincoln, had learned from his own failings. Of course we are not in a fratricidal war, but much of our politics is eerily reminiscent of Lincoln's time, when the country split in two. Now, as then, the party system is broken and achingly in need of upheaval. As the Civil War approached, the two parties of the era were powerless to resolve the fundamental issue of slavery. Only the rise of a new Republican Party broke the gridlock. We may be reaching a similar point again.

As an innocent bystander who watched from home and tried to follow the most important prime-time speeches and then channel surfed for different pundit reactions of both conventions, here is my assessment of the two presidential conventions of 2012.

A closer look at past Republican and Democratic conventions reveals a significant flaw in the history of our democratic process: brokered conventions in the event no candidate garners a majority of delegates in the primaries and caucuses.

WASHINGTON -- The reelection campaign of Barack Obama is back in the lead on the fundraising front after raising $114 million in August. The total, wh...

But in an era of ''low info" voters --- for the right and left and everything in between, this is easier said than done. For the moment, Darwinism is the central tenet of the super extreme right and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

"Special taxing districts" are a microcosm of the para-piratical dystopia Republicans would create for the entire country, where corporate rule is supreme and democracy is as faint a memory as oceangoing corsairs.