Real Clear Politics has Barack Obama leading in Pennsylvania by an average of 11 points, so why is John McCain betting on an upset there, of all swing states? It seems that Gov. Ed Rendell is among the Democrats who are nervous: He has asked the Obama campaign to send its big guns back to the Keystone State.
A new report from Pew suggests that this election has the potential to make 2000 look organized. With new voter ID laws, record turnout, wrongfully purged voter rolls, new machines and more, it could be a tense night, even if the outcome is decided early.
Here’s one way to get U.S. troops out of Iraq: The tediously negotiated status-of-forces agreement between the U.S. and Iraq has met yet another snag. The current legal justification for the occupation of Iraq is about to expire, and the U.S. is eager to pass new guidelines, but the Iraqi Cabinet is hitting the brakes.
Rep. Michelle Bachmann was cakewalking to re-election in her Republican-leaning Minnesota district until she told Chris Matthews the media should investigate anti-Americanism in Congress. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee calls that a “$1 million mistake.”
A key overlooked fact about the much-ballyhooed “surge is working” argument in Iraq is that the U.S. military actually paid some former insurgents $10 a day to help American troops keep the peace in parts of the country. But what happens when that setup changes in volatile regions like Anbar?
Barack Obama will spend Thursday and Friday off the campaign trail in order to visit his ailing grandmother, Madelyn Dunham. Obama was raised in part by his grandparents, and has credited his grandmother with teaching him “values straight from the Kansas heartland.”
The New York Times’ conservative stalwart William Kristol should receive some kind of award for being wrong with such baffling consistency while still retaining his job. Not only has he been credited (if that’s the right word) with steering John McCain toward picking Sarah Palin and waving his proverbial pompoms for the Iraq invasion, but he has just let fly with another doozy in his latest column.
The already confusing and highly charged situation in Zimbabwe has become more tense since Sept. 15, when President Robert Mugabe agreed to share power with opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who was to assume the position of Zimbabwe’s prime minister.
Ben Bernanke doesn’t really care if you call it a recession or, in his words, “a very serious slowdown in the economy.” Whatever it is, the chairman of the Federal Reserve thinks a new stimulus package is needed to get those terrified Americans dipping into their mattresses and buying things again.
Colin Powell said Sarah Palin was one of the many reasons he decided to endorse Barack Obama. According to an ABC News-Washington Post poll, he has plenty of company. Fifty-two percent of likely voters question John McCain’s judgment because of his running mate choice.
Following his paradigm-shifting endorsement of Barack Obama on Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” which also inevitably represented a slap to the Bush administration he once served, Colin Powell’s announcement has (thus far) been met with resounding silence from his former White House colleagues.
There’s one thing Democrats and Republicans in Congress agree on these days: When it comes to raising hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out banks or stimulate the economy, better to go further into debt than cut costs or raise taxes.
John McCain’s robocalls, which are bombarding swing-state voters with the message that Barack Obama “worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers,” are reportedly scaring children who make the mistake of answering their phones. Sarah Palin, who may or may not realize she’s on a sinking ship, says she disapproves of the robocalls.
Cuba may have just hit the oil jackpot, with a revised estimate of its reserves doubling. That means the small island nation has about as much oil as the United States. American conservatives may soon have to choose between their love of oil and the half-century-old embargo that would keep Cuba’s petroleum away. How do you say “drill, baby, drill” en Español?
The Obama campaign announced early Sunday morning that it had raised $150 million in September, more than doubling the previous single-month record of $66 million, set by Obama in August.
Not a moment too soon, here’s FactCheck.org’s assessment of the recent hullabaloo over ACORN, the beleaguered community organization that has been yanked into the epicenter of the election battle since Team McCain seized upon it as a Campaign Talking Point™.
So much of politics has to do with timing. Why, mere weeks ago it seemed as if the McCain campaign might pull off a wild-card win, riding high on the excitement generated when Sarah Palin burst onto the scene, ready for her close-up. Or was she?
Barack Obama drew the largest crowd of his presidential campaign, 100,000 people, on Saturday at a rally in St. Louis. The Illinois senator had been behind in the race in Missouri until very recently.
The Los Angeles Times randomly contacted dozens of voters who were recently re-registered as Republicans and found that over 80 percent of them didn’t know they had joined the party’s ranks. How did this happen? Looks like a GOP contractor called Young Political Majors, or YPM, had something to do with it. Update: The cops are on it.
Tens of thousands of Iraqis, with remote guidance from Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, joined in a demonstration in Baghdad on Saturday to implore the Iraqi parliament to reject a security pact with the U.S. before the year’s end.
Thus far this election season, we’ve witnessed a number of scare tactics cooked up by conservatives hoping to scare the bejeezus out of voters who might even consider choosing Barack Obama over John McCain, and the fun isn’t over yet.
Sarah Palin commented on Thursday night in Greensboro, N.C., that the “real America” and the “best of America” can be found in the country’s small towns. It may not be surprising that, by Friday, her Democratic vice presidential rival, Joe Biden, had picked up on that remark.
By way of a response to the McCain camp’s claims about Barack Obama’s ties to ACORN, Obama’s campaign has put in a request to Attorney General Michael Mukasey to “turn over any investigations of voter fraud or voter suppression to Special Prosecutor Nora Dannehy, the same special prosecutor recently appointed to investigate the U.S. attorney firing scandal,” according to CNN.
As John McCain and GOP operatives rattle their sabers about ACORN’s alleged “voter fraud” tactics, tag-team investigators Greg Palast and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have released some truly scary findings, in the latest Rolling Stone, from their investigation into Republican efforts to steal the 2008 presidential election.
If you thought the United States’ $700-billion bailout would quell the global financial crisis, think again. The German parliament just approved a $675-billion bailout of Germany’s financial markets, a plan that is part of a coordinated European response to volatile global and regional markets.
Chevron in the White House
