With the presidential race looking like an un-dramatic Obama-Romney plod to November, the most memorable thing about Election 2012 may turn out to be anything but the candidates.

Instead, it seems poised to go down as The Year of the Super PAC.

Look the figures: Through last week, independent… Read full post »

When all the ballots were counted on Saturday, the Stephen Colbert-Herman Cain Train walked away with 6,324 votes, giving them a fifth place finish with about 1.1% of the total vote. While that is forty times the votes for Cain over his non-Colbert affiliated New Hampshire tally (according to Ba… Read full post »

Newt Gingrich is exploring the possibility of taking his battle to get his name on the Virginia primary ballot to the courts after failing to submit the required number of valid signatures ahead of the December 22 ballot - an event his national campaign director Michael Krull, with seemingly no sense… Read full post »

Namibia has a population of 1.8 million - about the same as Kansas City - and one… Read full post »

Throughout the 2008 presidential campaign and again during the bruising battle for health insurance reform, one of Barack Obama’s oft-told anecdotes was of his dying mother’s struggle with insurance in the final months of her life.

It was a story that came up in almost every… Read full post »

Rumor has it that New York City prosecutors are preparing to drop the charges against the now-former IMF chief, Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Last week, officials went to court to loosen the tight restrictions placed on Strauss-Kahn during a bail proceeding last month, citing new evidence that his accuser,… Read full post »

“What if nutritionists came up with a miracle cure for childhood malnutrition? A protein-rich substance that doesn’t require refrigeration? One that is free and is available even in remote towns like this one in Niger w… Read full post »

In the spring of 1865, assassin John Wilkes Booth was cornered by Union troops in a Virginia tobacco barn and shot dead. His body was loaded onto a ship and taken back to Washington, autopsied and incontrovertibly identified on the basis of a ragged neck scar and a… Read full post »

The White House today released President Barack Obama’s “long form” Certificate of Live Birth from the State of Hawaii, asserting that he was indeed born at the Kapiolani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital in Honolulu at 7:24 pm on August 4, 1961

The release of this document w… Read full post »

I met Geraldine Ferraro, just once and just briefly, at a political event in January, 2008.

She looked amazingly like she had twenty-five years earlier on the platform of the Moscone Center, when she had first flitted across my 12-year old consciousness: tiny but fierce, smart but approachable. She… Read full post »

As the bombs began falling on Tripoli this weekend, a cry was heard on blogs and op-ed pages and chat shows throughout the land: the President Barack Obama had been -- for want of a better phrase -- pussy-whipped into war by three women.

The emerging storyline is that Secretary of… Read full post »

Women’s rights activists in Cairo called for a “Million Woman March” in Tahrir Square on the centennial International Women’s Day.

It did not go well.

Some… Read full post »

 ^{What are these little birdies trying to tell us?}

Five thousand red-winged blackbirds fall dead from the skies over a short stretch of Arkansas highway. Another 500 in Louisiana. Another 50 in Kentucky. Hundreds more in Sweden and New Zealand.

An estimated 100,000 drum fish go be… Read full post »

It took me a while to figure out what it was about Melanie Thernstrom’s cover story in this week’s New York Times Magazine that seemed so off-putting.

“Their Bodies, My Babies” is Thernstrom’s account of her battle against infertility and her decision to hire two surroga… Read full post »

“Despite the aura of omnipotence most empires project, a look at their history should remind us that they are fragile organisms. So delicate is their ecology of power that, when things start to go truly bad, empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for th… Read full post »

I have been so angered over the TSA’s new strip-down-or-pat-down policy that I literally haven’t been able to blog these last few days.

I’m not a frequent flier, but I am always a citizen. And I have been frankly stunned by the sanguinity of so many Americans over what strikes… Read full post »

"After several days of deliberation and discussion, I have determined that suspending Keith through and including M… Read full post »

I’m beginning to think Tom Perriello has a stash of nudie pictures of someone within the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Blackmail is about the only thing that could explain his remarkable resurgence of the last 72 hours.

The incumbent Democratic Congressman from Virginia’s Fi… Read full post »

As if the people of Haiti didn’t have enough to worry about, this weekend news of a new and unexpected threat emerged from the country’s Artibonite River valley: cholera.

With public health officials working overtime to contain the outbreak and inform Haitians about the best ways to avoid… Read full post »