The recent conflict in Georgia has brought attention back to a particularly telling moment in George W. Bush's presidency: his emotional friendship with slippery Vladimir Putin.  As Ron Suskind puts it in The Way of the World:

Let's assume, for a moment, that the McCain campaign is telling the truth about knowing that Bristol Palin was pregnant even before selecting her mother as a VP candidate.  Let's also assume they noticed that Governor Palin is, herself, a woman, and a woman who has five children, including one,… Read full post »

The rumor right now is that Tim Pawlenty, boyish governor of dapper Minnesota, is the favored candidate for being McCain's vice president.  He's apparently cancelled his appearances over the next two days, and his name has been popping up over and over and over again in the past two weeks.

But… Read full post »

There's a lot of talk about the viability of Joe Lieberman as John McCain's running mate. Here are the main arguments I've seen:

1. It would return McCain to the "maverick" roots he seems to otherwise abandoned, and would show him as a "post-partisan" leader in
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Friday is supposed to be the big day for the McCain VP announcement. All eyes are on the Dems right now, which means that McCain is getting a full week of radio silence in which to choose his running mate instead of days upon days of everyone going "No, not… Read full post »

Where do you hang out when your opponent is starting his convention? At one of your many houses, of course!

Is no one on the McCain campaign watching Meghan "Blogette" McCain?* Is this really the week that you want to put up a post… Read full post »

I hate Lou Dobbs. I'm using the word hate purposefully and with full understanding of its connotations, consideration that I feel Mr. Dobbs never has in his own utterances. I hate Lou Dobbs for his opinions, which I rarely agree with, but I also… Read full post »

John Podesta is on heavy repeat over on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 (which, by the way, at what point do we file a missing person's report on AC? Every time I tune in recently, it's somebody else) talking about how the McCain blunder yesterday will allow Obama to finally start… Read full post »

The Washington Post says Al Gore is going to speak Thursday night at the Democratic Convention, the same night Obama is accepting the nomination.  I know there will be mixed feelings about this, because some would argue that kind of prominence should have been given to Hillary Clinton, and some/…

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The Secret Service has asked for an extra $9.5 million to cover unanticipated costs in the campaign, such as Barack Obama accepting the nomination in front of 8 billion screaming fans at Denver's Mile High stadium (or whatever it's now called) and, undoubtedly, the… Read full post »

I am traveling today.  The frustrating thing about travel is that even if you do it well, you end up spending a lot of time waiting -- in lines, at gates, in hotel lobbies with coffee like punishment from above.  Things have gotten easier, of course, because there's less downtime than… Read full post »

In his statement yesterday about the conflict in Georgia, John McCain said something that really caught my ear (and no, it wasn't the part where he mispronounced the Georgian president's name three times):

"We must remind Russia's leaders that the benefits they enjoy from being part of… Read full post »

I am without e-mail today. For reasons passing my understanding but certainly earning my ire, my gmail account is "currently experiencing technical difficulties" and cannot be accessed. Google assures me that all of my information is safe... I just can't see it. (This of course means that in… Read full post »

Every newscast I watched today opened with a story about either the Olympics, the ongoing (really?) John Edwards affair bit, or the death of Isaac Hayes. All interesting pieces, in and of themselves, and not bad news fare for a Sunday afternoon -- except for one thing. There's this… Read full post »

Every fall in my grandparents' hometown, they had a parade and a small festival, called the Frolic. I went to high school in this town, and our band was engaged to march at each Frolic festival, up and down the three commerical blocks of Main Street while playing such hits… Read full post »