After seven years of the Politics of Terror, and with only three months left to go, they decided to make one last play for power. The original bailout plan presented by Hank Paulson was to be the final Shock Doctrine maneuver of the Bush/Cheney Presidency. As with 9/11, the Administration...

Those of us who analyze health policy and trends for a living have struggled to follow John McCain's health plan through its many seemingly-improvised changes. First he was taxing health benefits through both payroll and income tax. Then he said he only intended to apply income tax, which meant that...

Why, hello there, folks! May I call you "folks"? I'll be your pilot today. What? Am I "qualified" to fly this jalopy? You betcha! Why? Because I'm a mom, that's why. No, I don't know what all these switches and handles and whatnot are. I don't CARE what they are,...

It was creepy to watch Sarah Palin ignore Gwen Ifill's questions and repeat the same scripted answers over and over, as if she were oblivious to her physical surroundings. Even creepier was the fact that so many Republicans interviewed afterward seemed to do the same thing, each robotically repeating the...

A lot of Democrats are saying they wish Obama had "shown more fire" and hammered McCain aggressively last night. It doesn't really matter, though, because it won't happen. That's not who the man is. The overall verdict is that he did well, but there's room for improvement.

Here are...

The experience of being an American citizen has degraded over the last eight years. So has the experience of being a consumer. Whether we're dealing with a government that lies us into war or a credit card company that places us in phone-menu hell, we're confronting the same phenomenon: a...

It's going to come up again and again in the next two months. McCain - and the woman he says is the most knowledgeable person he knows about energy - are going to repeat that Republican mantra: "Drill, baby, drill."

The phrase has a lot going for it. It's...

We've just seen the end of a four-day orgy of lies and gratuitous, harsh, baseless attacks. There's nothing like watching mean white people get all hepped up on Bloody Marys and Ovaltine and then attack anybody who doesn't look or act like them. (Anybody miss Rep. Westmoreland's "uppity" comment...

Sarah Palin addressing Alaska Independence Party convention

The words of founder Joe Vogler are proudly displayed on the Alaska Independence Party's website (at least as of this writing): "I'm an Alaskan, not an American. I've...

There are good reasons why pundits shouldn't talk about Sarah Palin's pregnant daughter¹, or any other politician's child for that matter. It's already bringing out mean-spiritedness on the right. And for the left, it's the wrong scandal.

Check out this blog post from conservative commentator Robert Stacy McCain...

Population of Alaska: 670,053. Population of Columbus, Ohio: 730,657.

Try to replace Hillary Clinton with someone who's spent less than two years running a place less populated than Jacksonville? That's the kind of thinking that led the GOP to replace Thurgood Marshall with Clarence Thomas thinking nobody would notice....

Sixteen years since that first Presidential campaign, and Bill Clinton still knows how to stage a comeback. During Hillary's campaign he seemed to take on the role typically filled by a Vice Presidential candidate. He hit her opponent over and over, hard - so hard, in fact, that it hurt...

All this talk of PUMAs and resentful Clinton backers in Denver is being exaggerated by a press corps hungry for drama. But underneath the talk is some real resentment on the part of "PUMAs" and other, less vocal Clinton backers. (There may be a lot of GOP disinformation work fueling...

Me neither.  So I made up a few.  Try some of your own -- and yes, I know he may have more than seven houses.  Some say it's as many as twelve. He doesn't know.

But don't you think seven's a funnier number? So here we go (with apologies...

"FightTheSmears.com"? Not good enough. It's time for "StartSomeShit.Com."

History doesn't just repeat itself. For the Democrats it's like a broken record. Once again the party's blowing a healthy lead by being reluctant to engage its opponent. It's Groundhog Day starring Michael Dukakis, and Obama's VFW speech yesterday could have...

The media made a major issue out of insisting that Barack Obama reject Louis Farrakhan's endorsement - an endorsement he never sought from a person he had consistently criticized. When moderators brought the topic up yet again during a debate, Hillary Clinton pointedly demanded that Obama formally "repudiate and denounce"...

(Caution: Irony alert.)

Okay, I know it's a surprising conclusion, but hear me out.

As far back as April of 2001, the man some call "The Architect" wrote in a memo to Paul Wolfowitz that the anthrax vaccine was "a political problem for us." That's right. Rove was worried...

Serenity? Yeah, that would be good. Some sense of what happens when I die? That would be nice, too, as the decades whirl by. But there's a world on fire out there -- and anyway, some of us aren't made for the monastic life. These election years are especially challenging:...

The Internet's had some great successes on behalf of Barack Obama. But net-savvy Democrats are being beaten by the simplest of all online technologies, and nobody to my knowledge is designing a response.

Building on models like MoveOn to Facebook, the Obama campaign and its supporters have raised huge sums...

This morning I wrote (in "Monster") that Sean Hannity et al. might bear some share of moral responsibility for the killings in Knoxville. Sadly for everyone concerned, that may be true.

This evening we learn from the Knoxville News that officers entering the home of murder Jim...