|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
By Emma Donoghue
$13.72
By Sherry Buchanan
$19.80
$22
|
|
|
|
|
By Marie Cocco — Conservatives fear a “period of unchecked left-wing ascendancy” should Barack Obama and the Democrats sweep in November, but the voters care more about competent government than ideology.
|
|
By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — John McCain’s debate performance almost certainly did him good among those whose votes he already has: very conservative Republicans who share Joe the Plumber’s view that Obama is some kind of socialist.
|
|
By David Sirota — No Republican says aristocrat like Sen. Gordon Smith of Oregon. And no Senate election could more intensely shift economic politics than his state’s.
|
|
By Joe Conason — For anyone who followed the story of how and why Sarah Palin fired her state’s public safety commissioner, last week’s release of a legislative investigation that found she had violated state ethics statutes was anticlimactic.
|
|
Sarah Palin was supposed to attract women to the GOP ticket, but her charm hasn’t worked with the Feminist Majority, which is running this ad to tell voters that “a McCain and Palin win hurts women.”
|
AP photo / Jim Mone
|
By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Are we witnessing the re-emergence of the far right as a power in American politics? Has John McCain, inadvertently perhaps, become the midwife of a new movement built around fear, xenophobia, racism and anger?
|
|
By Eugene Robinson — Can any Republican candidate claim with a straight face to represent the party of small government? For that matter, can any Republican candidate plausibly explain what the party is supposed to stand for these days?
|
AP photo / Jim Bourg, pool
|
By Scott Ritter — Ralph Nader is right: The two-party system is failing America. There isn’t time between now and Election Day to create a viable third-party candidate, and so the sad reality is one of two deeply flawed men, the byproduct of a deeply flawed political system, will serve as president for the next four or eight years.
|
|
A lobbying powerhouse with an emphatically pro-Republican political action committee is pounding Democratic Senate candidates for supporting legislation that would make it easier for workers to unionize. The ads portray Al Franken in Minnesota and Tom Allen of Maine as backing Big Brother-style surveillance of American workers.
|
|
By Arthur Blaustein — Many Americans believe, despite the current financial crisis, that Republicans are generally better at managing the economy. History tells a very different story.
|
|
By Marie Cocco — To understand where the presidential campaign is heading in the four weeks still ahead of us, look back 20 years. The remarkable transformation John McCain has undergone since 2000 is itself an unsettling tribute to the lasting poison Lee Atwater poured into the political waters.
|
AP photo / Susan Walsh
|
By Chris Hedges — The passing of the $850-billion bailout pulled the plug on the New Deal. The Great Society is now gasping for air, mortally wounded, coughing up blood. It will not recover. It was murdered by the Democratic Party.
|
commons.wikimedia.org
|
The Bloomberg news service counts 10 lawmakers who may be ready to switch their votes when the bailout proposal takes another run at the House of Representatives. The original measure failed by only 23 votes and has since been substantially fattened by the Senate.
|
collage: realclearpolitics.com / destination360.com
|
With several new polls showing Florida breaking for Barack Obama, the state’s GOP leadership convened a secret meeting of top party and campaign officials. Florida GOP Chair Jim Greer, who organized the powwow, said, “It was just to ensure the ship is on its proper course. ...”
|
|
By Joe Conason — The initial failure to pass bailout legislation reflected a political system as bereft of confidence as the financial markets.
|
|
By Marie Cocco — There is something about Sarah Palin that gnaws at me, and it isn’t that the Republican vice presidential nominee has wilted under the soft light shone upon her by CBS’ Katie Couric.
|
|
By Marie Cocco — Americans are reluctant to make John McCain pay for George W. Bush’s sins, but with so many crises on so many fronts, the country can’t afford to cut him any slack.
|
montage: White House / Wikimedia Commons
|
The Dow dropped more than 777 points on the news that the House had voted down the $700-billion bailout proposal, so why does our editor think it’s “a great moment for American democracy”?
|
White House / Eric Draper
|
When it came to a showdown in the House, the $700-billion bailout scheme was considered to be as toxic as the securities it was supposed to save us from. Democrats and Republicans broke ranks Monday to vote down the measure, 228-205, against the wishes of both parties’ leaders.
|
house.gov
|
Just a day after negotiations seemed to break down, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi struck a confident tone. So did Rep. Barney Frank, who threw in some of his patented sass: “Now that Sen. McCain is safely in Mississippi, we can get to serious work.”
|
|
By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — John McCain’s sudden intervention in Washington’s deliberations over the Wall Street bailout could not have been more out of sync with what was actually happening.
|
|
By Eugene Robinson — John McCain is rapidly making his temperament an inescapable issue in the presidential campaign. Does the nation really want so much drama in the White House?
|
|
In his third consecutive presidential campaign, Ralph Nader still believes the similarities between the major-party candidates outweigh the differences, a sentiment captured in this Nader campaign Web ad.
|
|
By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Unless something very strange happens, Congress will pass a massive bailout of the financial system by the end of this week simply because every other option is worse. But the content of the bailout package matters enormously.
|
|
By Joe Conason — With the markets in frightening turmoil and the public outraged by financial irresponsibility and excessive greed, John McCain has suddenly rediscovered the importance of strong, watchful government.
|
|
By Ellen Goodman — Three weeks after the nomination of the Candidate From Nowhere, one week after the robo-interview with Charlie Gibson and days after the “Saturday Night Live” skit, there is still a flood tide of women choking on the possibility that Hillary Clinton paved the way for Sarah Palin.
|
|
By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Americans don’t mind wealthy and even rapacious capitalists as long as they deliver the goods to everyone else. But when the big boys drag everyone else down, Americans rise up in righteous anger.
|
|
By Marie Cocco — The great lipstick-on-a-pig campaign imbroglio, if we are lucky, will mark the moment Republicans jumped the shark with their cries of alleged sexism toward vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin.
|
|
By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — It has been hard to remember lately that the country is in the midst of one of the most consequential presidential elections of our lifetimes.
|
|
By Eugene Robinson — There was a time when Republicans campaigned on their ideas, programs and values. This year—lacking ideas, programs or values—John McCain and Sarah Palin are running for the White House on an elaborate fictional narrative of victimhood.
|
|
By David Sirota — Stripping away the partisanship, passion and propaganda, what about the veracity of the claim that the GOP puts this country first? Well, let’s just say it’s a little dicey.
|
|
By Ellen Goodman — Let us remember that Republicans had long targeted working mothers as the centerpiece of the culture wars. Now their heroine is the in-your-face governor who once said: “To any critics who say a woman can’t think and work and carry a baby at the same time, I’d just like to escort that Neanderthal back to the cave.”
|
|
By Amy Goodman — The Democratic and Republican national conventions have passed, but controversy surrounds how they were funded and how they were run.
|
|
By Eugene Robinson — John McCain is no silver-tongued orator, as he proved in St. Paul, but it’s hard not to be stirred when he speaks of wanting only to serve a cause greater than himself—until you take a closer look and see that he’s running one of the most egocentric presidential campaigns in memory.
|
AP photo / Matt Rourke
|
By Chris Hedges — St. Paul is a window into our future. It is a future where constitutional rights mean nothing and where lawful dissent is branded a form of terrorism.
|
|
By Eugene Robinson — Talk about role reversal. The Republican Party, which scoffs at the nonsense of “identity politics,” has staked everything on the compelling life stories of its presidential and vice presidential candidates.
|
|
By Marie Cocco — Here is what we have gotten with John McCain’s vice presidential selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, picked in part for her extreme anti-abortion credentials: an exquisite endorsement of the pro-choice argument.
|
|
By Joe Conason — Families deserve privacy about family matters, but families that want absolute privacy should stay out of politics. The question that remains is what, if anything, Bristol Palin’s plight may portend for the rest of us.
|
|
Sarah Palin has been a one-woman soap opera the last few days, so when she strolled out onto that RNC stage Wednesday night without dragging a baby or a caribou carcass, she was already ahead of the game. Then she showed that she could handle the spotlight, casting herself as a small-town victim of the big-city media and relentlessly attacking Barack Obama.
|
|
Rudy Giuliani answered that question Wednesday with a despicable performance in front of the Republican National Convention. The former U.S. attorney said he learned as a lawyer “if you don’t have the facts, you gotta change ‘em.” Clearly, it’s a lesson he absorbed, filling his vindictive speech with distortions and cheap shots.
|
|
By Amy Goodman — Government crackdowns on journalists are a true threat to democracy. As the Republican National Convention meets in St. Paul, Minn., this week, police are systematically targeting journalists.
|
|
Leave it to the Grand Old Party to go from Martin Luther King to 9/11 in less than three seconds.
|
|
By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — By all rights, there should be a revolt at this week’s Republican convention against John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate—for the very same reasons so many Republicans opposed President Bush’s selection of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court.
|
AP photo / Haraz N. Ghanbari
|
Hurricane Gustav has given the Republicans the excuse they needed to keep the unpopular president out of his party’s big party. John McCain will be spared another awkward embrace while George W. Bush is off in Texas pestering survivors.
|
AP photo / Ted S. Warren
|
By Bill Boyarsky — In a speech that rose beyond the occasion, Sen. Barack Obama changed the dynamics of the presidential campaign. With fire in his eyes and politeness thankfully forgotten, he finally put Sen. John McCain on the defensive, most notably mocking the Republican’s claim that he’s best suited to be commander in chief.
|
news.aol.com
|
By John Cheney-Lippold — The McCain camp’s announcement Friday morning that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin will be the Republican vice presidential candidate is nothing more than a performance in the politics of cynicism, a cynicism that may prove to be somewhat of a strategic miracle for the Republicans as they try to follow the Democrats’ much-publicized rock concert, or national convention, in Denver this week.
|
commons.wikimedia.org
|
Although it’s currently the Democrats’ turn in the spotlight, California’s Republican governor stole a few headlines Thursday with the news that he may skip his party’s convention next week. The Golden State is still trying to work through a budget stalemate, and it just wouldn’t do to have the star governor basking in the warmth of Republican love while his state is in fiscal turmoil.
|
View the most popular tags overall?
|
|
Lock Up Washington
Newsletter 
Like Us
Follow Us
Get Our Feed
