Yesterday, I had a revealing exchange with Peggy Noonan on MSNBC's morning program "Morning Joe" that highlighted a growing confusion on Ms. Noonan's part (and presumably others who share her political leanings) about John McCain's candidacy. To be fair, Ms. Noonan distinguished herself some weeks ago from toeing the party...

Who cares?

That's what I wondered when George Packer (ace of the New Yorker) asked whether he could post my intention to vote for Obama on his blog.

So I duly ignored him. Only when he bugged me two days later did I say okay, and responded in quick,...

It may appear as though the McCain/Palin campaign is erratically lurching from tactic to tactic on an almost daily basis and, in many ways, it is. But the various McCain/Palin campaign tactics do tie together in a pattern that reflects a level of Republican strategic thinking which would be a...

Wow, it's a lollapalooza of a show today. Arianna's still on the road, so she's not here to settle the men down...

Obama Leads; Which Way GOP; Greenspan's Goof?

A heckuva show today, Tony's a trifle testy over unfair allegations he says are being made against...

I am reading on this site that many of my comedic friends are panicked that something will go haywire on election night; that the one who is supposed to win won't, that something will go terribly wrong -- racism, machines, a catastrophe -- something. I am here to...

Protesters disrupted a convention of mortgage financers in San Francisco this week, storming the stage as former Bush adviser Karl Rove spoke, heckling bankers with bullhorns, and badgering a panel with demands for a foreclosure moratorium.

Fear and frustration compelled ordinary citizens to harangue the green-visor set...

CLINTON, Miss. There he goes again.

John McCain's instant acceptance of the highly suspicious story that one of his female campaign workers had been attacked at an ATM in Pittsburgh by a black Obama supporter who carved a backwards "B" on...

Barack Obama captivated people around the world with this speech in Berlin, in which he identified himself as both a proud American and a "fellow citizen of the world."

Let's start by acknowledging that this election is...

John McCain is losing the race for the White House. Now, this doesn't mean he has already lost it -- we've still got to go vote, after all. I'll cover that aspect in the Talking Points section, but anyone looking at the polls or an electoral map these days would...

From Joe Biden's comments, the McCain campaign is launching another effort to convince people that Barack Obama's election will prompt another terrorist attack to "test" him.

McCain asserts he has been tested, and thus such a challenge will not occur. Somehow, the notion that John McCain is equipped to lead...

This campaign gets stranger and stranger -- and more and more frightening. Brian Williams asked Sarah Palin a fairly straightforward question, based on her repeated use of the phrase "domestic terrorist" to characterize Bill Ayers. Williams asked: "Is an abortion clinic bomber a terrorist under this definition, Governor?"

Palin...

Last month, former President Bill Clinton arrived in Rwanda, the latest in a slew of political figures to visit the country. Several weeks ago, Cindy McCain, Tom Daschle, Bill Frist and others toured the country as part of the ONE Vote '08 mission to draw bipartisan attention to poverty issues....

Resembling a 747 airplane caught on fire high in the sky, John McCain's campaign is taking a nose dive towards the most tragic political crashes in Presidential campaign history. Fighting to remain alive, he and his dead weight side kick Sarah Palin are engaging in their own brand of political...

So Bloomberg has convinced the New York City Council to vote to overturn the City's term limits law. Even Christine Quinn, the Speaker of the Council, voted to throw out the law that New Yorkers approved in a referendum both in 1993 and again in 1996. I thought...

Missouri is the geographic center of the U.S. -- and Missourians like to think of theirs as the "bellwether state," having voted for the winning presidential candidate (with one exception) in every election since 1904. So the significance of Prop C (the initiative being voted on next week that would...

Details are still sketchy, even to me. I am thirsty and I need a hug.

All I know is that I drove into the 'right' side of town with an Obama-Biden sticker on the back of my car when I was approached by thugs riding snowmachines. They said they'd seen...

The U.S. presidential race is mesmerizing the world. The result is hundreds of hours of unprecedented news coverage about the U.S. on international news channels -- including the one that I run, the English-language channel of Al Jazeera.

So why has one of our...

Yesterday, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the bombing of U.S. and French peacekeeping force barracks in Beirut - an assault which remains one of the most deadly and ugly attacks of its kind - the New York Times chose to run two opinion pieces on the subject, both offering the...

Keep religion away from the ballot.

The Constitution, Article VI, Section 3, states "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States." James Madison, the primary author of...

John Sidney McCain III may have represented the American Southwestern state of Arizona in Congress for his entire political career, but he is culturally and psychologically the product of America's Deep South and of the slave-owning, militaristic culture that his Scotch-Irish ancestors established there in colonial times.

Joseph McCain, born...

I've mentioned before on this very blog that Veterans For America will not take sides in the Presidential Race. But right now, in Pennsylvania, Senators Barack Obama and John McCain are asking voters to do just that. I hope as everyone in that great state goes about making their...

Look carefully and you'll notice that Republicans lately have not only been saying that Red Staters are more "pro-America" than others but also that they're more pro-God.

John McCain said recently that Western Pennsylvania is the "most God-loving" part of the country. A Republican congressman Robin Hayes...

The day after her story of a politically-motivated assault made headlines around the nation, coverage pushed relentlessly by McCain-Palin campaign officials, a McCain campaign worker admitted she made it all up. Ashley Todd, 20, told Pittsburgh police on Wednesday night that she had been held up at an...

Last night, I played professional basketball, in a dream, for the 1992 Chicago Bulls. We won, and in the post-game press conference, I tried to explain why. It was difficult, because up until the point at which my dream suddenly jumped chapters -- which my dreams tend to -- from...

The sheer momentum of the Obama-Biden ticket has triggered frantic and massive Republican vote-rigging operations in key battleground states designed to manufacture a counterfeit majority in the Electoral College.

Tactical operations now stemming from the McCain-Palin campaign and its surrogates are designed to lead to litigation in the...

Because the majority of my work has to do with fighting the religious right in one way or another, the first thing that pops into my head when seeing the names Michele Bachmann and Robin Hayes is the Congressional Prayer Caucus, the prayer group founded by Congressman Randy Forbes...

It is almost more courageous to focus on the blight of children in this country and acknowledge that there is a problem right here in the US. Children are receiving very little nutrition and food. They go to school malnourished and fail to study because their stomachs are empty. Federal...

Presidential candidate John McCain and running mate Sarah Palin attempted to manage the surprise endorsement of Barack Obama by Senator John McCain this past Thursday. McCain was dismissive of his 100% endorsement and even took a few shots at himself after the announcement.

"When all is said and...

I don't know about you, but I've heard Ashley Todd's story somewhere before and that somewhere is here in Boston. Twenty year old Todd from Texas is a student volunteer for the McCain campaign in Pittsburgh. Her scarred face turned up all over the internet after alleging that she was...

Sen. Barack Obama is off the campaign trail, but his top aides are running hard today.

Obama's senior strategists held a national news conference by telephone today, bullishly arguing that the campaign is on offense and surging in red states, while Sen. John McCain is scampering to Pennsylvania for an...

Last week, Barack Obama teased Mayor Michael Bloomberg at the Al Smith Dinner by noting that, as Bloomberg tried to alter term limits so he could run again, Bill Clinton replied, "You can do that?" Joke's over. In a run around democracy that not even Chavez or Putin attempted, Bloomberg...

If School House Rock made a campaign ad it might look something like this:

I have been hearing voices in my head for the last 4 years. No, I have not been driven completely around the bend by 8 years of the Bush administration. But not unlike believing and chatting with an imaginary friend -- I have found comfort in pretend conversations with Republicans...

A lot of people feel extremely frustrated about the rampant voter suppression going on as evidenced by the many comments on my last post about my experience in Nevada and the voter registration fraud going on there.

Here's an idea of something we can do right away that...

Dear Senator McCain:

Education policy finally played in the campaign this past week. You exchanged views on education with Senator Obama in the Third Debate, and your surrogate, Lisa Graham Keegan, had a wide-ranging education discussion with Linda Darling Hammond, Obama's surrogate, at New York's Columbia University.

But to tell...

Give him this: John McCain is a world-class apologizer for his sins so far.

It's just a matter of time before McCain says he's sorry to Sen. Barack Obama and the country for the mean-spirited turn his presidential campaign took since a well-dressed Hurricane Sarah made landfall at the...

John McCain is doing what no progressive political leader has been able to do in at least a generation, if not more: He's creating a New Deal mandate for the next president, should that next president be Barack Obama. Indeed, in tacking to the hard economic right and focusing the...

Many politicians have fallen from grace with their trousers at their ankles. We know about couldn't-keep-it-in-his-pants adulterer John Edwards and cookie cutter practitioners of inappropriate conduct like Arnold Schwarzenegger. New York's very own Client #9, Eliot Spitzer, pinned down prostitute Ashley Dupré. David Vitter and Randall...

So most of my posts are fake/parody/satire/pretend/ bullsh*t -- whatever you wanna call 'em. And because of that, whenever I write something real or genuine, people assume it's fake. It's kinda like when Bush tries to tell the truth. But I mean it honestly this time -- this post...

Hearing that a volunteer for the McCain campaign had been attacked and mutilated in my Pittsburgh neighborhood -- indeed, at the very ATM I most often use -- filled me with embarrassment for such mistreatment of a visitor and sympathy for the pain of a fellow being. Disbelief...

Senator Barack Obama's campaign for the White House pulled ahead of his opponent, Senator John McCain, as soon as the current financial crisis hit the headlines. As one of McCain's top strategists recently blurted out, "If we keep talking about the economic crisis, we're going to lose."

There's a reason...

At times, the 2008 Presidential election campaign has been ugly. On top of the unfortunately commonplace personal character attacks in modern politics, Barack Obama's entrance into the global political theater has also shoved the issue of race into the spotlight.

Although the mainstream media proclaim the significance of race in...

Immigration reform seems to have dropped to the bottom of the pile of issues in this election for most of us, but for my Mexican and Guatemalan friends, it's all about "who is better for people without papers." That's the candidate who will get their votes.

For many years, no...

In the final stretch of this election, Proposition 8 is dangerously close in the polls -- after months of it being safely behind. With massive out-of-state funding, including $8.4 million from the Mormon Church, the "Yes on 8" campaign has scared many swing voters into falsely believing that marriage equality...

It had to come from a conservative and again this season Kathleen Parker steps in it. But, finally, someone else wrote this so I didn't have to be the first one. Listen to Patrick J. Buchanan, Lawrence O'Donnell, the guy next door......

In case you didn't realize, today is the 60th U.N. Day, a day celebrating the "anniversary of the entry into force of the United Nations   Charter." Recently the U.N. has been getting a pretty bad wrap, especially in conservative circles, where John McCain has been leading a charge...

There are boo hoos instead of Boola Boolas in New Haven this year. For the first time in 40 years, there will be no Yale graduate on the ballot for president or vice president.

I was in the first group of women who graduated from Yale, which went...

I parked, walked to the front of one of my favorite local restaurants and there, in front of its sign, was a McCain Palin yard sign. What was I to do?

To make matters worse, the McCain/Palin yard sign was in front of a favorite Indian restaurant I'd invited a...

In Maine, a state that's progressive on reproductive health, family planning providers are concerned about contraceptive and health care access issues already. So a proposed new regulation from the Department of Health and Human Services that would expand protections for providers who would deny women birth control and other...

Several readers wrote in when ProtectMarriage.com ads started showing up for our California readers on Bilerico Project. The pro-Prop 8 graphic was arriving via Google ads. Since none of the Editorial Team is in California, we had no idea they were popping up. One alert Projector grabbed this screenshot...

My first job out of college was an internship at Bloomberg. The interview took place in October 2001, when the election was still up in the air. If he won, "Mike's Group" (the Corporate Communications department) at Bloomberg LLC was going to need extra support, at least temporarily, because so...

If Mary Glazier's claim, that Palin joined her prayer-warfare group almost two decades ago, is true it raises the possibiity that Sarah Palin personally participated in a 1995 campaign to drive an alleged "witch" out of Alaska.

[please vote this story up on Digg]

At two key points...

I was recently lucky enough to tag along with United Here's members who are doing GOTV for Obama in Wisconsin. Nationally we have 335 members on leave from their jobs to do election work so far. I went to Wisconsin for a few reasons -- to get an understanding...

Sarah Palin's contradictory and nonsensical answer on what constitutes a terrorist is being thoroughly fisked online. Her claim that William Ayers is a terrorist but an abortion clinic bomber is not leaves a lot to be desired intellectually, which begs an important follow-up: what would her view of...

In 2004, several conservative Catholic Bishops and a few megachurch pastors like Rick Warren issued their list of "non-negotiables," which were intended to be a voter guide for their followers. All of them were relatively the same list of issues: abortion, gay marriage, stem cell research, etc. None of them...

There's a new meme in the presidential race: The Internet is helping expose dirty tricks, enhance campaign accountability and punish the purveyors of dog whistle sleaze. Web luminaries from Arianna Huffington to Micah Sifry pushed that argument this week. The Obama campaign agrees.

On Friday, Obama's new...

The recent controversy over whether public school teachers can wear political buttons in the classroom highlights a significant obstacle to improving our schools: teachers' unions would rather dig in their heels in a fight over something trivial than actively work to improve learning in the classroom.

Should a school district...

Back during the Democratic primary (which, when you think about it, feels like an entire lifetime ago) I looked briefly at how Google Trends, which shows the popularity of different search terms, so closely resembled the data coming out of the national pollsters. Google's search stats not only...

It had drawn wide local and national -- even political attention, with the McCain and Obama campaigns weighing in -- but now the Ashley Todd story has fallen apart. Police in Pittsburgh have now declared the tale a hoax and the woman, who has confessed, now faces charges for her...

By now, hopefully many people have heard about Troy Davis, who is set to be executed Monday in Georgia for the murder of a police officer in Savannah. Investigations conducted since his 1991 conviction have produced disturbing affidavits showing that seven of the nine key witnesses who testified against Davis...

I must say I wasn't surprised when I read the statements made by outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert regarding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. I had been informed by an Israeli friend of mine about Olmert's dramatic conversion over the past few years, and especially last year.

The statements can be...

Olbermann is never kind to extremist lunatics. It's taken him a while but he's finally gotten around to Robin "Weepy" Hayes, a kind of feudal type who represents a sprawling district that stretches from Charlotte to Fayetteville (NC-08). Apparently he had either just lost control of himself or he was...

Fifty clergy and human rights leaders are demanding that Congress oppose the pact being negotiated in secret by the Bush and al-Maliki administrations to bind the hands of the next Administration with a continued war and occupation in Iraq.

The White House and Pentagon commanders are threatening "consequences" if Iraq...

Please don't be angry with Sarah Palin for excluding all those big, funny places with skyscrapers from "Real America" and its "Pro-America" borders. Nor should you blame John McCain's adviser Nancy Pfotenhauer for excluding Northern Virginia from the "Real Virginia," or Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann for looking...

In this wacky-tobaccy world of 21st Century politics, if you can't parboil an idea down to a sound byte then you might as well chug it raw. We the people like our politics plain and simple, like meat and potatoes: Democrats and Republicans, Liberals and Conservatives, good guys and bad...

It's been more than half a year since Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad embarked on a historic trip to Baghdad, accusing the United States of fueling the violence in Iraq and portraying his nation as a close friend of the neighbor it once fought in a bitter eight-year war.

"The Iraqi...

So this is how John McCain is going to go out. You can just picture the staff concocting this bizarre argument:

STEVE SCHMIDT: OK, so we say Obama hates old ladies.

MARK SALTER: Yeah, I like it!

STAFFER 1: Damnit. Guys, just got this on my Blackberry....

Remember the oldie-but-goodie "Kill the Golden Goose"? It's an Aesop fable, actually, but who cares?

Aesop's point was you don't want to do that... you shouldn't kill the goose that's laying golden eggs.

But what if there are glimmers of toxic poisons inside those glittery shells that will...

I am often asked the difference between being a Governor and a Senator. As Governor, if you want to increase revenues, you increase taxes. As Senator, if you want to increase revenues, you cut taxes -- stimulate the economy.

By law, the Secretary of the Treasury...

Okay, I had some help. But without me and lots of like minded right wing religious ideologues who put theological "principles" ahead of governing, the Republicans might be set to win again this year.

I dropped out of the Evangelical right in the mid 80s and became a movie...

In a revelation bound to send shock waves through the already battered, bruised, and flailing McCain campaign, Joe Six Pack and Joe the Plumber have confided to friends that they have fallen in love and intend to marry. The two Republican campaign symbols met at a recent rally and...

Election 2008 Haiku
by Gary R. Cohan, M.D.

Hillary had it
But a cruel fate intervened.
Her own husband's mouth.

Hothead POW
Veers off wildly to the Right.
And disappoints all.

"Terrorist," Ayers,
"Socialist," "Muslim," "HUSSEIN."
Futile...

There's nothing new about Republicans claiming that a significant portion of their fellow citizens are somehow not "real" Americans. It was a familiar refrain when this cartoon ran in 2002 (earning me a denunciation as a sneering elitist from noted populist Ann Coulter, who...

My dad was a plumber. My dad was a Republican. And if my dad were alive today, he would never vote for John McCain.

My father would respect McCain's service, I have no doubt. But he would be a little angered, I think, by McCain's attempt to connect to the...

There has been a tremendous amount of art and music inspired by Barack Obama's message of Hope and Change. Last week I chronicled the story of Shepard Fairey's Obama 'Hope' poster. Today I bring you the latest work from Fairey -- "Vote For Change" viral video postcards. In...

Offering a sharp contrast to the general gloom on Wall Street today, retail stocks soared on the news that Gov. Sarah Palin (R-Alaska) plans to buy a new outfit for Election Night.

Major retailers had been plummeting all day but staged a stunning comeback when Gov. Palin told a reporter...

These are two ads we put together at The Young Turks that we think Obama should run against McCain and Palin. So, we will be running them free of charge on our XM show, our web show and on our You Tube channel.

For the first ad...