Articles filed under Politics

Huffington Post
Since 1968, the Republican Party has repeatedly capitalized on controversial Democratic stands to win over swing voters - stands on civil rights, women's rights, busing, affirmative action, gay rights, crime and the use of force.

In the current election cycle, the shoe is on the other foot. The swing electorate appears, for the moment, to be leaning Democratic.

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McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — When President Lyndon Johnson signed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, he said to an aide, ``We just gave the South to the Republicans.''

Indeed, Democrats lost their hold on the old Confederacy over the next decade, turning it into a bastion of Republican strength, first in presidential elections and later in congressional elections.

Now, another Texas president might well ask whether his Republican Party just gave away another section of the country, the Southwest and Mountain West.

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ABC News
The Democratic presidential candidates have erased and reversed Republicans' historic edge in raising money for campaigns, reflecting growing enthusiasm among Democrats and adding to the GOP's already considerable burdens going into 2008.

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Seattle PI
The 2008 presidential election isn't just about Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John McCain and the rest of the gang. They're about shaping an entire administration, and as we consider our future president, we need to remember that their choice of running mates -- no mere second bananas -- is quite important.

Case in point: Vice President Dick Cheney is possibly the most powerful -- and dangerous -- figure in American politics.

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Huffington Post
Why is Ann Coulter so focused on John Edwards? It could be all sorts of reasons, but here are a few possibilities, along with some words of comfort for Ann Coulter.

Reason 1. John Edwards is Christian, and says Jesus wanted us to help the poor and powerless. This apparently runs counter to her theory of what is needed to get to heaven.

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Washington Post
Fred Wood, a Marietta, Ohio, retiree, voted for George W. Bush in 2000 and John F. Kerry in 2004. In last year's midterm elections, he voted Republican for Senate and Democratic for governor. Is he on the fence for 2008? "You bet I am!" he said.

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McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON - A New Mexico lawyer who pressed to oust U.S. Attorney David Iglesias was an officer of a nonprofit group that aided Republican candidates in 2006 by pressing for tougher voter identification laws.

Iglesias, who was one of nine U.S. attorneys the administration fired last year, said that Albuquerque lawyer Patrick Rogers pressured him several times to bring voter fraud prosecutions where little evidence existed. Iglesias believes that he was fired in part because he failed to pursue such cases.

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The Nation
At first sight, the only applicable description of the first US Social Forum would be chaos. Disarray. Utterly overwhelming. Ten thousand people mill about the Atlanta Civic Center and its environs, trying to choose between dozens of workshops, issue-themed tents, merchandise and information tables, meetings, and plain old socializing.

It is a scene perhaps best captured in fragments rather than full sentences. Organizers. Housing. Immigrant workers. Vision. Prison abolition. Puppets. Speeches, newspapers, fliers, banners, flags, books, shirts. Laughter. Dance parties. Water. Media. Fundraisers. Collaboration. Resisting state and interpersonal violence. Imagining.

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New York Times
WASHINGTON, June 29 — After a string of Republican defections this week — on Iraq, immigration and domestic eavesdropping — President Bush enters the final 18 months of his presidency in danger of losing control over a party that once marched in lockstep with him.

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USA Today
WASHINGTON — Democratic presidential candidates Thursday called for ending tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans in a debate focusing on domestic issues related to minorities.

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Washington Post
Et tu, Mitch?

For practical purposes, President Bush's domestic agenda was canceled at 11:22 yesterday morning when Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate Republican leader, approached the front of the chamber to vote on the immigration legislation the president had championed. McConnell caught the clerk's attention, pointed his index finger downward, walked away silently, and smiled.

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Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON — President Bush began the week struggling to salvage his most important foreign and domestic initiatives: the war in Iraq and an overhaul of the nation's immigration laws.

He ends it closer to losing both than at any time in his presidency.

And in a remarkable reversal for a president who once commanded nearly unflagging loyalty from lawmakers in his party, those most responsible for his setbacks are Republicans.

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New York Times
WASHINGTON, June 28 — For 90 minutes Thursday night, eight Democratic candidates debated before an audience made up largely of one of their party’s most reliable and liberal constituencies — African-American voters — and used the stage to urge a revitalization of domestic programs that they said had faltered under President George W. Bush.

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Washington Post
Tonight's Democratic debate at Howard University was more a series of mini stump speeches than an actual give and take between the candidates.

The two leading candidates -- Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and Barack Obama (Ill.) -- nicely distinguished themselves, scoring two of the most memorable moments of the night. Clinton drew a standing ovation in response to a question on the problem of HIV/AIDS in the black community; Obama's early acknowledgement that only by the work of many African American before him was he able to stand on the stage was poignant and powerful.

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Guardian
A presidential election poll suggesting Democratic voters would prefer former vice-president Al Gore to any of the declared contenders, including frontrunner Hillary Clinton, has highlighted continuing dissatisfaction among supporters of both main parties with the choice of candidates to succeed George Bush.

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Huffington Post
Faced with crumbling Congressional favorability ratings, House and Senate Democrats have begun a full-scale campaign to pin responsibility on the GOP for the failure to either enact key domestic legislation or to stem the bloodshed in Iraq.

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MSNBC
June 27, 2007 - Do you remember when candidate George W. Bush berated Al Gore during the 2000 presidential debates for alleged funny business in his fund-raising? Bush said, “You know, going to a Buddhist temple and then claiming it wasn’t a fund-raiser isn’t my view of responsibility.” It was a direct attack on the honor of a fellow Southerner, and Gore wasn’t taking it. “You have attacked my honor and integrity,” the vice president shot back. “I think it’s time to teach you a few old-fashioned lessons about character. When I enlisted to fight in the Vietnam War, you were talkin’ real tough about Vietnam. But when you got the call, you called your daddy and begged him to pull some strings so you wouldn’t have to go to war. So instead of defending your country with honor, you put some poor Texas millworker’s kid on the front line in your place to get shot at. Where I come from, we call that a coward.

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CBS News
Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards said Wednesday that conservative author Ann Coulter's attacks are personally hurtful and it's important that he respond to them.

While Edwards made his first comments to The Associated Press in response to Coulter's suggestion that she wished he would be "killed in a terrorist assassination plot," his campaign was also using her remarks to bring in donations in the final week before his next fundraising deadline.

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CQ Politics
Although the 2004 presidential election was relatively close, those color-coded maps of voter preference showed most of the nation as a sea of Republican “red” — a graphic representation of President George W. Bush’s dominance in the sprawling but sparsely populated rural areas of the United States.

That was then. But in the past three years, Bush’s standing in rural America has slipped — raising questions whether the 2008 nominee of his Republican Party will be able to repeat the dominance Bush enjoyed in those regions in his 2000 and 2004 presidential victories.

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Washington Post
There are two ways to predict the winner of the 2008 presidential race: Check the polls or read some history. The polls tell you that with George Bush's approval ratings abysmally low; with the war in Iraq becoming increasingly unpopular; with the GOP lacking a dominant candidate; and with the party divided over immigration, social issues and even religion ( Mitt Romney's Mormonism), the next president is bound to be a Democrat. History begs to differ.

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Los Angeles Times
FIRST GUN CONTROL, now fuel economy. Congressional Democrats still have a lot of work ahead to get their groundbreaking bills past both houses and the president's desk, but you can't say they're not leading a radical change in direction.

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Boston Globe
WASHINGTON --President Bush's congressman said Saturday that the administration and Republicans put a higher priority on tax cuts than on veterans' health care.

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Washington Post
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- Why can't the left get any respect?

Whenever you use the word "left" in American politics, you feel almost compelled to add quotation marks. Today's left is not talking about nationalizing industry, abolishing capitalism or destroying the rich. What passes for "left" in American politics is quite moderate by historical standards.

Still, cliches die hard, so you hear such 20-year-old questions as: "Are Democrats moving too far to the left?" or "Will Democrats abandon the center?"

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One Thousand Reasons
Why did the Democratic Congress betray the voting public?

Betrayal is often a consequence of wishful thinking. It's the world's way of delivering the life lesson that it's time to shed the vanity of one's innocence and grow-the-hell-up. Apropos, here's lesson number one for political innocents: Power serves the perpetuation of power. In an era of runaway corporate capitalism, the political elite exist to serve the corporate elite. It's that simple.

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New York Times
He was loud, he was blustery and he was clear: our country is being overrun by Mexicans. To back his bark, he wrote, “Whatever It Takes,” as subtle as a cactus poke. He had money, and he had the power of office, a 12-year incumbency.

In the end, J. D. Hayworth, a Republican, was kicked out of his Congressional seat here last year. In the glossy white suburbs of Phoenix, immigrant-bashing backfired.

(Paid Subscription Required)

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Huffington Post
Behind every campaign lies a vision of mind -- often implicit, rarely articulated, and generally invisible to the naked eye. Traces of that vision can be seen in everything a campaign does or doesn't do.

The vision of mind that has captured the imagination of Democratic campaign strategists for much of the last 40 years -- a dispassionate mind that makes decisions by weighing the evidence and reasoning to the most valid conclusions -- bears no relation to how the mind and brain actually work. When campaign strategists start from this vision of mind, their candidates typically lose.

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The Nation
How scared are the folks over at the Republican National Committee as they head toward an election cycle in which their party's hold on at least one branch of the federal government – which they've enjoyed for all but two years since 1981 – could end?

Faced with the prospect that both the presidency will fall to the Democrats in 2008 as the Congress did in 2006, the RNC is scared to the point of delusion.

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Christian Science Monitor
Washington - Hillary Clinton got booed again.

At the annual Take Back America conference of liberal activists Wednesday, Senator Clinton did not get the rousing reception that her nearest competitors for the Democratic presidential nomination did the day before. And when she got to discussing Iraq – specifically, when she stated that "the American military has succeeded" and "it is the Iraqi government that has failed" – a handful of activists took to their feet, waved signs, and booed.

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The Nation
Last summer, when she criticized the idea of setting a timetable to withdraw US forces from Iraq, Hillary Clinton was met with a chorus of boos at the annual Take Back America conference.

This year was supposed to be different.

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Washington Post
It was a casual shot across the bow, a shrugged comment last week from Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott (R-Miss.): Advocates of an immigration overhaul would have to "deal" with talk-radio hosts who he said don't know what is in the legislation but want to kill it nonetheless.

The return fire to that passing comment has been withering, as some of the nation's most prominent conservative talkers turn on a man they once defended adamantly.

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The Swamp
Liberals are getting their party on this week over at the Washington Hilton, where the attendance is at the annual Take Back America is at an all-time high and attendees feel like, well, they might actually take the country.

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AlterNet
Election 2006 was properly reported as a Democratic landslide that changed control of the U.S. senate and the House of Representatives. But most reporters and pundits missed a story on one of the most profound turnarounds delivered by voters in over a decade: in Kansas, a place that has been called "The Reddest of Red States", there was nothing short of a progressive revolution.

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Baltimore Sun
Here's a bold prediction: Evangelicals will present few if any obstacles for the Democrats in next year's presidential race, but may prove problematic for the Republican nominee.

I'm not suggesting that a majority of evangelicals will vote Democratic next year. What I am saying is the 2008 presidential race could be a turning point for evangelical politics in America.

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New York Observer
Despite President Bush’s rock-bottom poll numbers, a horrendously mismanaged war and a growing awareness that the President has betrayed them on a host of issues from immigration to government spending, conservatives seem unwilling to recognize their own role as “enablers” of a failed President.

And even worse, they seem ready to repeat their mistake in selecting a 2008 champion.

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Salon
At an AFSCME forum this morning, Chris Matthews said he was going to ask five Democratic presidential contenders a question posed by a member of the union: "What is your specific exit strategy for bringing American troops home from Iraq?" He ended up asking four of them; Barack Obama, the last candidate to speak to the group, answered the question before Matthews could ask it.

This is what the candidates said:

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Daily Kos
Fox News continues to sniffle over its inability to lure Democrats in for their scheduled beating. In the meantime, Republicans aren't scared of Fox News -- they're scared to leave Fox News. Like George Bush, the Republican candidates have become so used to soaking in a pool of admiration, and being fed juicy grapes by right wing radio and tv pundits, that they're not so anxious to get out of the bath. Out there in the real world, there are scary voters. And for these guys, even Republican voters are scary.

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In These Times
Ronald Reagan was a saint, a commanding leader, the gold standard of principled conservatism against whom all current and future Republicans should be measured. This is the new mantra coming out of the Republican race for the presidency as the current crop of candidates scramble, quite understandably, to distance themselves from the walking disaster that is George W. Bush.

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Washington Post
There's the brand, and then there's the product. At the moment, the Democratic brand is pretty good while the Republican brand is badly scarred. But when it comes to product, Democrats still have a lot of development work to do. As they toil away, Republicans will be working just as hard to soil the Democratic name.

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Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The new Democratic-led Congress is drawing the ire of voters upset with its failure to quickly deliver on a promise to end the Iraq war.

This is reflected in polls that show Congress -- plagued by partisan bickering mostly about the war -- at one of its lowest approval ratings in a decade. Surveys find only about one in four Americans approves of it.

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Newsweek
Iraq is President Bush's war, but the Democrats are quickly getting tagged with some blame for it. One of the reasons Congress is in such bad odor—less popular even than Bush in recent polls—is that Democrats look feckless on how to proceed in Iraq, and not just because they lack the votes to cut off funding. Are they neo-isolationists, determined to exit the region as soon as possible? Democrats like Pennsylvania freshman Rep. Patrick Murphy, who saw ground action as an Army captain, insist not. They want to get out of Iraq and get tough on Al Qaeda at the same time. But the idea isn't getting through.

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AlterNet
The façade of conservative political dominance is crumbling. The disintegration runs deeper than public disaffection with the Bush administration’s catastrophic failures and is more fundamental than the political realignment of the 2006 election. The notion of America as a "conservative nation" was always more fiction than fact, but the nation’s rejection of President Bush’s brand of "you’re-on-your-own" conservatism and wedge-issue divisiveness is so broad that today the façade is simply unsustainable.

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New York Times
TIPTON, Iowa, June 16 — Four years ago — facing what seemed to be a certain defeat in the Iowa Democratic caucuses — John Edwards recast his presidential campaign with weeks to go before the vote, unveiling an emotionally powerful speech about poverty that he delivered relentlessly across the state. Mr. Edwards came within a few thousand votes of victory. To this day, he tells associates he would have won with another week.

This year, Mr. Edwards has picked up where he left off in 2004.

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Guardian
The American debate, as ever, sets a shining city on a hill and calls it Las Vegas. The question is not only who America needs for its next president - it's who is worth a flutter. Place your bets, please. Can Hillary find the human warmth to win a few primaries? Will Obama cut the mustard in Mississippi? Is John Edwards a busted flush? But this time, perhaps, the game is different. This time all normal bets are off.

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Christian Science Monitor
Detroit - After watching New York Sen. Hillary Clinton (D) juggle pointed questions before nearly 1,000 union members here earlier this month, it was easy to imagine how she might pull away from her rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination. But it also was possible to see how she might stumble on the way.

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Washington Post
Even political junkies already are beginning to tire of the presidential campaign debates, and we still have more than six months before the first primary. This month's mass questionings in New Hampshire looked like police-station lineups -- the long parade of candidates repeating their alibis, trying to avoid gaffes or blunders that might get them in trouble.

If ever America needed a genuine political debate, now is the moment.

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Washington Post
Sen. Barack Obama has a new tag: "Renegade."

That's what Secret Service agents are calling the Illinois Democrat, in the time-honored tradition of giving "secret" code names to presidential candidates and other protected dignitaries. As is custom, the Obama moniker reflects something of the man himself (though he might prefer "progressive" or "independent").

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Guardian
She's ahead in the polls and on course to become the Democrats' presidential candidate for 2008. So it is no surprise that a right-wing smear campaign is gathering speed to derail Senator Hillary Clinton's bid for the White House. Conservative groups and political figures are planning a film, books and a concerted media campaign to demonise Clinton, who is already one of the most polarising figures in American politics.

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Newsweek
June 15, 2007 - The left wing of the Democratic Party is back from the wilderness. They’re revved up and ready to take the best shot they’ve had in a long time at putting someone simpatico in the White House. Progressives are driving the debate in Congress and in the country, pulling the party’s presidential candidates to the left on issues like the war in Iraq, universal health care and an Apollo-like program for energy independence.

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AlterNet
Call it the Leslie Nielsen effect. Your first attempt at a show-biz career fizzles out and dies, but your failure is so quirky and charming that it wins you a whole second career. Think Robert Goulet, Bill Shatner, even John Travolta. America loves a brave second act, particularly one that doesn't mind doing a take or two with egg still on his face.

What the Zucker brothers did for actors, the neocons are now doing for politics.

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Washington Post
The great drama in American politics today revolves around the question: What is the Republican Party?

We think we know. Republicans are the party of business and of evangelical Christians, of better-off voters and people who hate taxes, the party of conservatism and the South, the party that wants to be aggressive in the battle against terrorism.

But the instability in the Republican presidential campaign, the longing for a Fred Thompson candidacy and the sharp split over immigration all point to an identity crisis at the end of the Bush era.

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The Nation
Could it possibly get any worse for George Bush?

Could he possibly be any less popular?

Yes, if diehard Republicans start to abandon him.

And that, according to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, is what is now happening.

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The Nation
When will Democratic leaders stop dissing their base? David Obey is making a habit of it.

Earlier this year, the Wisconsin veteran, who heads up the House Appropriations Committee called anti-war workers, "idiot liberals" for calling for a cut off in funds for Bush's Iraq disaster.

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Tom Paine
The façade of conservative political dominance is crumbling. The disintegration runs deeper than public disaffection with the Bush administration’s catastrophic failures and is more fundamental than the political realignment of the 2006 election. The notion of America as a “conservative nation” was always more fiction than fact, but the nation’s rejection of President Bush’s brand of “you’re-on-your-own” conservatism and wedge-issue divisiveness is so broad that today the façade is simply unsustainable.

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San Francisco Chronicle
WHAT IF Al Gore had won the 2000 presidential election but died in office? Would President Joe Lieberman have been worse than George W. Bush? His recent actions suggest that he could have descended even lower in his illogical and immoral responses to the tragedy of 9/11. Although now an independent, Lieberman provides a cautionary tale for folks who talk of backing "any Democrat" who can win.

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Washington Post
Capitol police set up roadblocks and swarmed the corridors yesterday when President Bush stopped in for lunch with Senate Republicans, but the show of force seemed to miss the point: The biggest threat to the president's well-being probably came from his lunch partners.

Of the 48 members of the Senate GOP caucus, only seven voted to take up the immigration legislation that the Bush administration negotiated. Adding insult to injury, seven members of the caucus broke with Bush on Monday to join a Democratic effort to condemn Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

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The Nation
None of us will soon forget that terrible Tuesday in November 2004 when the exit polling said one thing and Ohio said another, when values was the thing, Karl Rove was a genius, and a permanent Republican majority loomed large. What a difference two years makes.

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Boston Globe
WASHINGTON -- A new political group recently asked Mitt Romney to promise not to wiretap Americans without a judge's approval or to imprison US citizens without a trial as "enemy combatants." When Romney declined to sign their pledge, the group denounced him as "unfit to serve as president."

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Washington Post
These are tough times to be a Republican. An unpopular president, an unpopular war and a trio of ideologically impure 2008 front-runners have left the party in a funk. And running through it all is one debilitating weakness: The GOP no longer has a unifying populist cause.

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Pottersville
You’ve got to wonder what they’re after besides brains (preferably still in the cranium of a Republican, anybody with an “R” after their name who can run this country like a right-proper tyrant).

Up to a point, I can sympathize with these George W. Romero Republican voters. Their angst at finding a suitable candidate who doesn’t flip-flop like a flounder at the bottom of a rowboat and betray the neoconservative core principles of unbridled avarice / Christian snake-charming fundamentalism that secretly loathes the Jews / permanently settling in every other country in the Middle East that doesn’t similarly subscribe to the belief that Willie Pete is God. It’s a pre-election angst that, in an abstract way, is reflected by progressive America.

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Pottersville
Rich liberals who claim they’ll help America’s less fortunate are phonies.

Let me give you one example — a Democrat who said he’d work on behalf of workers and the poor. He even said he’d take on Big Business. But the truth is that while he was saying those things, he was living in a big house and had a pretty lavish summer home too. His favorite recreation, sailing, was incredibly elitist. And he didn’t talk like a regular guy.

Clearly, this politician wasn’t authentic. His name? Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

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Washington Post
Just when it seemed George W. Bush's sinking prestige with his Republican base had bottomed out, his stock hit new lows. The president's seeming indifference to the sentencing of Scooter Libby was bad enough. But it coincided with Bush's apparent determination to retain his friend Alberto Gonzales as attorney general against congressional pressure to depose him.

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New York Times
The breakthrough on the “grand bargain” on immigration a few weeks ago had brought new life to a White House under siege, putting a long-sought goal suddenly within reach. After many grim months, there was almost giddiness at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

But that early euphoria only made the grand bargain’s grand collapse on Thursday night all the more of a blow, pointing up a stubbornly unshakable dynamic for President Bush in the final 19 months of his term: With low approval ratings and the race to succeed him well under way, his ability to push his agenda has faded to the point where he can fairly be judged to have entered his lame duck period.

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Washington Post
Anger and frustration with the president have produced an unusual turn of late. Numerous people have been moved to remark, "I'm beginning to miss Nixon," or, "I wish we could have Nixon back" -- this usually followed by, "He was so progressive on domestic policy."

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McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON - A voter fraud case brought by the interim U.S. attorney in Kansas City, Mo., just five days before last year's pivotal congressional elections was rejected by a Missouri prosecutor as being too weak and as inappropriate to pursue so close to the elections.

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Washington Post
The argument among Republicans over whether President Bush should grant Scooter Libby a quick pardon amounts to a battle between the past and the future.

The Republicans most eager to end the Libby case immediately are those who were most deeply invested in the Iraq war and were willing to do whatever was expedient to commit American troops to a venture they were certain would turn out well.

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US News & World Report
An exhaustive study of the lobbying styles of President Bush and his father, former President George H.W. Bush, suggests that the current president will have difficulty pushing legislation in his final year and a half because he ignored Democrats during his first six years in office.

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New York Times
WASHINGTON, June 6 — President Bush has pardoned 113 people during his presidency, including a Tennessee bootlegger and a Mississippi odometer cheat.

But none has drawn the public scrutiny, nor posed the same political challenge, as the candidate that many conservatives hope will be Bush presidential pardon No. 114: I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, who was convicted of lying to investigators in the C.I.A. leak case and sentenced Tuesday to 30 months in prison.

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Guardian
We all know Christmas begins earlier every year, but imagine if it were to begin in May. And that's May the year before. This is what's happening with the presidential elections in the US. There are another 17 months until the actual vote next November, but the campaign is well under way. On Tuesday, I watched a television debate between 10 Republican contenders, following a similar one between the Democratic hopefuls last Sunday. At this rate, election fatigue will set in before we've even reached election year. Candidates are not merely nailing their colours to the mast; under media interrogation, they are compelled to take up detailed positions that they'll then find difficult to shift. This is not good for US policy.

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Washington Post
MANCHESTER, N.H., June 6 -- If there was an unexpected loser in Tuesday's Republican presidential debate, it was President Bush and his administration's record.

The Republican candidates offered repeated criticism of their Democratic opponents, but on issue after issue, they also shredded the president's performance over the past four years. Iraq? Badly mismanaged. Katrina? Bungled. Immigration? The wrong solution. Federal spending? Out of control.

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Huffington Post
If Sunday night's debate improved Hillary Clinton's chances of capturing the nomination, poll results released Tuesday suggest that she and other "centrists" are losing the very independents they need to win the general election. Congressional reluctance to take decisive action on Iraq is driving these critical voters away from the Democrats - and they're taking the party's base with them.

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OpEd News
As the would-be presidents continue to polish their messages we begin to see a clear delineation between the parties. Two nights ago we saw the democrats speaking about ending the endless war campaign of George Bush, concentrating on our own problems in THIS country. Talking about long-forgotten priorities such as healthcare, education and civil liberties. Supporting the troops by insisting they come home alive.

Then the nine neo-cons and Ron Paul took the stage tonight and presented the other side.

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The Nation
Tuesday night's Republican presidential debate was, for the most part, a polite affair. Candidates frequently spoke of how much they agreed with their opponents. They acknowledged that, despite differences on issues as fundamental as abortion rights, they would back one another against any Democrat in November, 2008.

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ABC News
In an arena that normally serves as the home of the hockey rink for the Saint Anselm College Hawks, the 10 declared Republican White House hopefuls threw elbows at one another, skated around issues, and attempted to score at their third official GOP presidential debate.

And while Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., found himself under attack for his support of a controversial Senate immigration reform bill, by far the most-derided people of the night were President Bush and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y.

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Boston Globe
MANCHESTER, N.H. --President Bush drew sporadic, startling criticism Tuesday night from Republican White House hopefuls unhappy with his handling of the Iraq war, his diplomatic style and his approach to immigration.

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CQ Politics
Republican Party strategists, even under expected circumstances, knew they faced a difficult imbalance in the 2008 lineup of Senate races. The GOP have 21 seats to defend to just 12 for the Democrats.

Moreover, the political landscape in those 33 states looks forbidding, at least at this early stage of the 2008 campaign cycle.

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After CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer's dismal performance at Sunday night's Democratic presidential "debate," there is no certainty that any of the right questions will be asked tonight when Blitzer leads the Republican presidential contenders through two hours of talking points.

But there are several questions that surely ought to be the first ones asked of the Republicans who seek their party's nomination to replace the most unpopular Republican president since an impeachment-threatened Richard Nixon.

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Huffington Post
When Joe Lieberman was re-elected to the Senate in 2006, as an "Independent Democrat," he chose to sit with the Democratic caucus in the Senate, resulting in Harry Reid (D-NV) being elected, counting the vote of Bernie Sanders (I-VT), as Democratic Majority Leader. Alas, in a 51-49 split institution, the effect has been that the senator from Connecticut holds a sword over the heads of Democrats. This has meant, in the words of an eminent expert on the Senate, "his fundraisers are well attended" by supporters of both parties.

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Pottersville
Al Gore is earnestly talking about the long-term implications of the energy and climate crises, and how the Arctic ice cap is receding much faster than computer models had predicted, and how difficult and delicate a task it will be to try and set things straight in Iraq.

You look at him and you can’t help thinking how bizarre it is that this particular political figure, perhaps the most qualified person in the country to be president, is sitting in a wing chair in a hotel room in Manhattan rather than in the White House.

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Salon
The great fraud being perpetrated in our political discourse is the concerted attempt by movement conservatives, now that the Bush presidency lay irreversibly in ruins, to repudiate George Bush by claiming that he is not, and never has been, a "real conservative." This con game is being perpetrated by the very same conservatives who -- when his presidency looked to be an epic success -- glorified George W. Bush, ensured both of his election victories, depicted him as the heroic Second Coming of Ronald Reagan, and celebrated him as the embodiment of True Conservatism.

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Informed Comment
The Democratic Party candidates for president debated on Sunday evening. Iraq dominated the first half of the debate. Shorter versions:

Biden: We can't get out of Iraq because we don't have the votes to end the war in the Senate. Since Congress cannot force Bush to withdraw, we have to vote money to support the troops while Bush unilaterally keeps them there. We need a new president to get the troops out.

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The Nation
Maybe the Democratic presidential candidates should rethink their decision not to debate on the Fox New Channel. It couldn't be worse than the theater of the absurd CNN organized Sunday night at New Hampshire's St. Anselm College – which, it should be noted, was co-sponsored by an even more aggressively conservative media outlet than Fox: the rabidly right-wing Manchester Union-Leader newspaper.

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Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Hustler magazine is looking for some scandalous sex in Washington again -- and willing to pay for it.

"Have you had a sexual encounter with a current member of the United States Congress or a high-ranking government official?" read a full-page advertisement taken out by Larry Flynt's pornographic magazine in Sunday's Washington Post.

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New York Times
On a Thursday afternoon in early May, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton rose before a nearly empty Senate chamber and proposed that Congress undo one of the most significant acts in its recent history: the authorization of the Iraq war. In remarks lasting just two minutes, she spoke bluntly: The “authorization to use force has run its course, and it is time to reverse the failed policies of President Bush and to end this war as soon as possible.” She added, “If the president will not bring himself to accept reality, it is time for Congress to bring reality to him.”

This was Clinton’s latest and boldest attempt to distance herself from her own vote for the Iraq war in October 2002 — a vote she has described as “probably the hardest decision I have ever had to make.”

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Independent
Anti-abortion campaigners in the US will tell you their crusade is about the sanctity of life. But really it is about upholding a singularly unhealthy tendency in American public life - the exploitation of a divisive social and ethical issue to further the ambitions of a single political party whose agenda doesn't necessarily reflect the interests of the anti-abortion campaigners at all.

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Informed Comment
It is no surprise that Al Gore is attacking Bush in his new book, of course. Nor is it a surprise that Gore accuses Bush of ignoring all reasonable evidence in both making the decision to invade Iraq and in deciding to do nothing about global warming.

What is important about what Gore is saying is his focus on how the pollution of America's information environment by 1) corporate media consolidation (all television news is brought to Americans by five private corporations, the CEOs of which all vote Republican) and 2) government propaganda (i.e. lies purveyed to Americans using the money and resources of Americans).

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Slate
Imagine the National Rifle Association's Web site suddenly disappeared, along with all the data and reports the group had ever posted on gun issues. Imagine Planned Parenthood inexplicably closed its doors one day, without comment from its former leaders. The scenarios are unthinkable, given how established these organizations have become. But even if something did happen to the NRA or Planned Parenthood, no doubt other gun or abortion groups would quickly fill the vacuum and push the ideas they'd pushed for years.

Not so for the American Center for Voting Rights, a group that has literally just disappeared as an organization, and for which it seems no replacement group will rise up.

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Huffington Post
I mean, please. Let's get real. Of course he's running.

Are we to believe that a man who has spent most of his life in public office, like his father before him, is happy to turn away at the very moment the country -- nay, the world -- is clamoring for him to step into the breach?

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Salon
June 2, 2007 | WASHINGTON -- The antiwar, pro-gold, libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul tells me he would rather be riding his bicycle than speaking to another reporter on a Thursday afternoon. "My vice is that I'm obsessed with exercise," says the Republican congressman from Texas.

But running for president does not exactly disagree with him.

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USA Today
NASHVILLE — Former vice president Al Gore said Friday that he still hasn't ruled out a presidential bid in 2008, but he doesn't expect to run and might not possess the skills necessary to be elected president now.

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Salon
Where, oh, where won't those insidious leftists strike next?

The Drudge Report and the conservative Washington Times are both highlighting a new study from the conservative Young America's Foundation, which purports to show that, in the words of spokesman Jason Mattera, "college administrators are using commencement ceremonies to send their students off with one more predictable leftist lecture." And while it does appear to be true that more liberals spoke at commencement this year than conservatives, just a cursory look at YAF's study shows that the disparity is nowhere near as wide as the group pretends.

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Washington Post
Al Gore has been in town launching his new book, "The Assault on Reason," and you could have predicted the buzz: Is he about to jump into the race? What you probably wouldn't have predicted is the counter-buzz that Gore, poor fellow, is just too ostentatiously smart to be elected president.

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Washington Post
So when Democratic presidential candidates get together, they argue about who has the best health-care plan. When Republicans have a big discussion, it's about torture and who'll use it when.

Okay, okay, Republicans had their chat about torture in one debate in response to a hypothetical question. Still, the contrast points to one of the strangest qualities of the 2008 presidential campaign: Our two political parties and their candidates are living in parallel universes. It's as if the candidates were running for president in two separate countries.

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Harpers
Among the army of columnists that populate the American print world, George Will is my favorite Tory. I use “Tory” in the best sense – in the sense that Samuel Johnson and Dr. Arbuthnot were Tories, for instance. In an English way that lays a proper value on tradition and the cultural accomplishments that have gone before us. In a way that longs for a thick chop and pint of ale.

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Thomas Paine's Corner
With the 2008 election approaching fast, I find myself with the same unsettled feeling I had in the last presidential race to the bottom. Perhaps it is because I feel that the age-old maxim, “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” is as true for today as it was in 2004. Fact is, if we do not wake up quick, and start pressing the current Democratic Party frontrunners Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama, to be more leftist, or in other words to be more like Presidential candidate Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), then we can hope for little substantive change in the next administration.

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Boston Globe
WASHINGTON --A half dozen federal investigations into the activities of Republican lawmakers are raising new worries for GOP leaders who hope to regain the House majority they lost last fall.

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New York Times
WILMETTE, Ill., May 29 — Through four elections, Debbie Thompson has supported Representative Mark Steven Kirk, a Republican and staunch backer of the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq.

But Ms. Thompson, a mother of two from this affluent suburb of Chicago, says her views on the war have evolved, and she now wants Mr. Kirk to change, too.

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CQ Politics
No one would mistake Peter A. DeFazio for a supporter of the Iraq War. One of the House’s most liberal members, the Oregon Democrat voted against authorizing the war in 2002, and this year he’s been a reliable vote for measures to withdraw U.S. troops. When Democratic leaders agreed last week to give President Bush a war funding bill without withdrawal timetables, DeFazio was an instant “no” vote.

But even DeFazio hasn’t been immune to complaints from the party’s liberal base.

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New Yorker
The West Wing of the White House tends t have a funereal stillness, even in the bes of times, which these are not. The President’ aides walk the narrow corridors with pensiv expressions and vigilantly modulated voices. B contrast, Karl Rove’s office has an almost part atmosphere. Rove, the President’s chief political adviser—the “architect,” Bus has called him, of his 2004 victory over John Kerry—has been a man of constan troubles: Valerie Plame troubles, U.S. Attorney-firing troubles, and, most of all collapse-of-the-Republican Party troubles. Yet his voice is suffused wit bonhomie, his jokes are bad and frequent, his enthusiasm is communicable; h resembles an oversized leprechaun, although one with unconcealed resentment and a receding hairline

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Newsweek
June 4, 2007 issue - They'd come to pay their respects to the past, but the talk soon turned to the future. The country's leading conservative Christians convened in Lynchburg, Va., last week to bury the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the televangelist who, decades ago, fused politics and religion and helped define the GOP as the party of the faithful. Now, as the mourners straggled out of the church, some wondered aloud about the 2008 presidential election. Did any of the 10 Republican candidates deserve their coveted blessing?

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Boston Globe
WASHINGTON -- In defending the Iraq war, leading Republican presidential contenders are increasingly echoing words and phrases used by President Bush in the run-up to the war that reinforce the misleading impression that Iraq was responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

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Salon
May 25, 2007 | In a political showdown, stupidity can be even more crippling than timidity. Unfortunately, congressional Democrats have displayed both as they backed down from their confrontation with the Bush White House over the war in Iraq.

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New York Times
WASHINGTON, May 25 — After five months in power, Congressional Democrats headed home for their Memorial Day recess with only a few signature accomplishments on the domestic front, notably an increase in the minimum wage, and the prospect of returning to a renewed struggle with the Bush administration over the war in Iraq.

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AlterNet
For the organizers of Al Gore's one and only gig in Northern California promoting his new book, it was a little like that children's classic, "A Fish Out of Water," in which a boy overfeeds his goldfish and it grows and grows, outswelling its bowl, then a vase, then a bathtub.

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Huffington Post
Today is the day House Democrats are expected to vote on Iraq - except, news out of Washington this morning says the leadership has come up with a nifty little trick to try to prevent the public from seeing who voted for giving Bush a blank check, and who voted against it. If you thought Democrats were behaving like cowards by caving into a President at a three-decade low in presidential polling and giving him the very blank check they explicitly promised not to give him during the 2006 election, you ain't seen nothing yet. We are watching the rise of the Dick Cheney Democrats - that is, the rise of Democrats who endorse governing in secret and hiding the public's business from the public itself.

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Huffington Post
I saw Al Gore talk at a book signing for his book, The Assault On Reason, in Marin County (north of San Francisco) this evening. He was supposed to talk for a short time, take questions and sign books, but he just got going an gave one of the most inspired, intelligent and I think historically important articulations of the current threat to the American experiment and our democracy that I have heard.

He was just on fire.

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Anti-War
For some, patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. For others, it means dissent against a government's abuse of the people's rights.

I have never met a politician in Washington or any American, for that matter, who chose to be called unpatriotic. Nor have I met anyone who did not believe he wholeheartedly supported our troops, wherever they may be.

What I have heard all too frequently from various individuals are sharp accusations that, because their political opponents disagree with them on the need for foreign military entanglements, they were unpatriotic, un-American evildoers deserving contempt.

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Truthdig
For more than three decades, the Rev. Jerry Falwell guided the white evangelical masses of the South into the Republican Party, culminating in the most outwardly pious presidency in modern American history. Having first gained notoriety as a hard-line segregationist in rural Virginia, he won power as the televised prophet of a partisan gospel. Scarcely had he gone to his ultimate reward, however, before his friends and allies threatened to dismantle that legacy—and the dominance of the party to which he had devoted his ministry.

The late preacher can hardly be blamed for the ruinous condition of the Bush administration and the Republican Party. But with the tandem rise of Rudolph Giuliani, a pro-choice Catholic, and Mitt Romney, a highly flexible Mormon, Falwell’s old flock is feeling deeply alienated. Within days after his death, the leaders of the movement he symbolized began to proclaim a message of dissension.

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The Nation
As a group of self-posturing macho men not afraid of a little torture, the Republicans do seem to have a habit of trying to take advantage of people when they are literally on their sick beds. Newt Gingrich handed his first wife the divorce papers while she was in the hospital recovering from cancer. Tom Delay and Bill Frist sought, and fortunately failed, to score political points over Terri Schiavo. And now we've learned that Alberto Gonzales made a hospital call to get warrantless wiretaps OK'd.

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USA Today
NEW YORK (AP) — Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards on Wednesday repudiated the notion that there is a "global war on terror," calling it an ideological doctrine advanced by the Bush administration that has strained American military resources and emboldened terrorists.

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Baltimore Sun
Why are so many Democrats feeling uneasy about the 2008 elections? Every indication is they're going to win big. Republicans in Congress are sure doing their part to keep Democratic hopes high. Hardly a day passes without the GOP leadership blocking some initiative people desperately want - such as ending the hated Iraq war or refusing to allow the government to negotiate lower drug prices.

You might think they're tanking this election - that they don't want to win. And you could be right.

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Huffington Post
As Congress appears poised to give George Bush a victory on the Iraq War, Al Gore's new book presents the powerful and authentic voice of the true Loyal Opposition.

Gore's book is a sweeping indictment of George Bush, Washington during the Bush years, and the media that often acts like Pravda failing to present the public with a full two-sided debate.

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McClatchy Newspapers
CHARLOTTE, N.C. - Laura Belin plans to take her children to a Memorial Day parade Monday. There, at the urging of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, she expects to join others protesting the war in Iraq.

"Everyone knows that we're going to have to start getting our troops out," said Belin, 38, who's from suburban Des Moines, Iowa. "And we need to start getting them out now."

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In These Times
A lot of ink has been spilled and many hands wrung over the Democratic “netroots”—those citizens who blog, make online campaign contributions and “friend” their chosen candidate on MySpace. Washington-based media types are perturbed by the scrutiny and competition. Politicians want to harness these partisans to spread their message and, more importantly, serve as an ATM to bankroll their campaigns.

Most netroots activists, however, don’t live in Washington nor do they give a hoot what its wise men—or even most members of Congress—think they should be doing.

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Washington Post
Boy, it would be fun if Al Gore changed his mind and ran for president -- fun for the voters, anyway. Imagine a candidate whose preelection book is devoted in large part to an attack on the media for waging war on reason.

Politicians, it is often said, never win by attacking the media. That's simply not true. Conservatives have been attacking the media for decades, to good effect from their point of view. Their intimidation sometimes worked -- go back to the coverage of the 2000 Florida recount if you want to see media bias. When intimidation fails, they declare inconvenient facts to be merely "liberal" opinions.

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Pottersville
What do you get when you pour 800 pounds of semi-congealed bacon grease into an all-you-can-eat buffet muu-muu, mixing in a generous dollop of pedophilia and right-proper Christian hypocrisy? Former South Dakota Republican State Rep. Ted Klaudt, that’s what.

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ABC News
When former Vice President Al Gore hosted "Saturday Night Live" in December 2002 he appeared in a skit that compared his vice presidential selection process from two years before to the dating reality TV show "The Bachelor." In one scene Gore appeared in a hot tub with a faux Joe Lieberman, both of them shirtless, drinking champagne, arms locked, romance in the air. Anyone then looking for clues to see if Gore would run for president in 2004 probably had no trouble discerning that an exploratory committee was not in the cards.

Almost five years later, Gore still says he has no plans to run for President, but his latest book, "The Assault On Reason," is so searingly critical of the Bush administration it's hard to discern what his plans may be.

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CQ Politics
There is nothing like defeat as a catalyst for change in the life of political parties. Stung by the loss of Congress and dealing with a president in a tailspin, the Republican Party is now engaged in a bruising battle to loosen its longstanding ties to social conservatism and reshape its image for mainstream voters.

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USA Today
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Bush's desk kept piling higher with bad news.
There were personnel problems that went from bad to worse, uncertainty in an Iraq war showdown with congressional Democrats, the impending departure of his favorite foreign ally.

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New York Times
WITH the death on Tuesday of the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the Baptist minister and founder of the Moral Majority, and the announcement on Thursday that Paul D. Wolfowitz would resign from the presidency of the World Bank, two major figures in the modern conservative movement exited the political stage. To many, this is the latest evidence that the conservative movement, which has dominated politics during the last quarter century, is finished.

But conservatives have heard this before, and have yet to give in.

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MSNBC
May 18, 2007 - He may too liberal on social issues to win his party’s nomination, but Rudy Giuliani has figured out the formula for victory in ’08. Elect a Republican, he says, and the country will stay on the offense against terrorists. Elect a Democrat, and America will go back to playing defense in a kind of pre-9/11 oblivion. Maybe Iraq has taken us beyond that kind of cartoonish contrast, but it’s worked before, and Democrats could blow the next election if they allow themselves to look weak.

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Washington Post
House Republicans, fighting to remain relevant in a chamber ruled by Democrats, have increasingly seized on a parliamentary technique to alter or delay nearly a dozen pieces of legislation pushed by the majority this year.

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Washington Post
President Bush's embrace of compromise immigration legislation has split the Republican Party, as several GOP presidential candidates quickly came out against the deal and the conservative base reacted with fury.

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McClatchy Newspapers
COLUMBIA, S.C. - When Republican presidential candidates debated this week over which one has the best conservative credentials, not one mentioned George W. Bush as a model.

Indeed, just seven years after he won his party's nomination and the White House vowing to put his "compassionate conservative" stamp on the movement of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, Bush instead leaves the Republican Party with an identity crisis, struggling to answer the question: What exactly is a conservative in the coming post-Bush era?

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Pottersville
I’ve been looking at the race for the Republican presidential nomination, and I’ve come to a disturbing conclusion: maybe we’ve all been too hard on President Bush.

No, I haven’t lost my mind. Mr. Bush has degraded our government and undermined the rule of law; he has led us into strategic disaster and moral squalor.

But the leading contenders for the Republican nomination have given us little reason to believe they would behave differently. Why should they? The principles Mr. Bush has betrayed are principles today’s G.O.P., dominated by movement conservatives, no longer honors. In fact, rank-and-file Republicans continue to approve strongly of Mr. Bush’s policies — and the more un-American the policy, the more they support it.

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Washington Post
It isn't always easy to notice, but this year's Republican presidential campaign has become the occasion for the collapse of conservative orthodoxy.

In Tuesday's Republican presidential debate in South Carolina, every leading candidate declared independence from some piece of dogma or another -- even as all of them clung for dear life to the word "conservative." They sounded like religious doubters who compensate for their ebbing faith by shouting ever more fervently: "I believe!"

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Time
Let's say you were dreaming up the perfect stealth candidate for 2008, a Democrat who could step into the presidential race when the party confronts its inevitable doubts about the front runners. You would want a candidate with the grass-roots appeal of Barack Obama—someone with a message that transcends politics, someone who spoke out loud and clear and early against the war in Iraq. But you would also want a candidate with the operational toughness of Hillary Clinton—someone with experience and credibility on the world stage.

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Washington Post
Even as the capital buzzed with word of the tense meeting last week between President Bush and a group of House Republicans who worry that his handling of the war will damage the GOP's future, there was another White House meeting the same day that slipped by largely unnoticed.

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US News & World Report
Congressional Democrats are dismissing GOP claims less than five months into the 110th Congress that they are not making good on their promises for swift legislative action on several fronts.

While the Democratic agenda has been somewhat idled by the focus on the war supplemental spending bill, lawmakers say that they have made significant progress on the budget, lobbying reform and raising the minimum wage. On Tuesday, Sen. Harry Reid led the counterattack on the GOP, calling criticisms absurd because it is unrealistic to think that Congress can act fast on legislation.

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Boston Globe
SAM BROWNBACK
"The other thing we have to do: a much more aggressive political solution on the ground in Iraq. . .

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AlterNet
The various and sundry Republican presidential contenders will be stumbling over one another tonight -- as they debate in South Carolina -- and in the days ahead to curry favor with the religious right by expressing their sorrow at the passing of the Rev. Jerry Falwell.

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US News & World Report
What a shame President Bush doesn't listen more to GOP Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska instead of Vice President Cheney and his obstinate advisers on Iraq.

Hagel has largely been a voice in the wilderness in his party, but his views on Iraq are spreading to other worried Republicans in Congress. They realize Bush's unwillingness to change course is a pending disaster for them in next year's elections.

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Washington Post
The Fix is a firm believer that only by understanding past elections can we hope to make accurate predictions about future contests.

Third Way, a centrist Democratic group, has produced a study of the 2006 electorate that goes a long way to explaining where Democrats made gains last November and how (and whether) they can make those trends durable through 2008 and beyond.

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Huffington Post
At the moment, everyone is giving advice to the Democrats about how to beat the Republican spinmeisters. Even Republican spinmeisters. On the latest Real Time with Bill Maher, it was GOP language guru Frank Luntz dishing out advice to me, Paula Poundstone, and anyone else who would listen.

Frank is the supreme reality reframer who took the estate tax and turned it into the "death tax," turned school vouchers into "opportunity scholarships," and turned drilling for oil in a wildlife preserve into "responsible energy exploration."

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New York Times
WASHINGTON, May 13 — If elected president, Senator Barack Obama said Sunday, he would seek to repeal President Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and use the money to pay for health care, but he did not suggest he would raise other taxes to pay for expanded services.

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One Thousand Reasons
It may not be borne out by research and data, but it seems as if in recent years Americans have become more civil to each other. For instance, in New York City, once a benchmark for rudeness, it's now common to hear "pardon me" and "sorry" issuing from the mouths of New Yorkers navigating past each other on the streets or in the subways.

When asked, those living and working in New York even stop to give directions. In fact, it's not hard to imagine a tourist, when asked about New York's infamous reputation, reply: "New Yorkers rude? That's what they mean by an urban myth, right?"

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US News & World Report
Laboring to produce an Iraq bill that will pick up some Republican support, congressional Democrats must also worry about backing from another constituency: the online activists who are becoming the voice of their party's base. With House passage of a bill last week to authorize Iraq war funds on a half-now, half-later schedule, the liberal MoveOn.org is skeptical. Says Executive Director Eli Pariser: "Any money for the Iraq war should come with a hard-and-fast deadline for ending it."

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Boston Globe
COLUMBUS, Ohio --Hillary Rodham Clinton criticized President Bush on Saturday as running a "government of the few, for the few and by the few."

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Pottersville
OF course you didn’t watch the first Republican presidential debate on MSNBC. Even the party’s most loyal base didn’t abandon Fox News, where Bill O’Reilly, interviewing the already overexposed George Tenet, drew far more viewers. Yet the few telling video scraps that entered the 24/7 mediasphere did turn the event into an instant “Saturday Night Live” parody without “SNL” having to lift a finger. The row of 10 middle-aged white candidates, David Letterman said, looked like “guys waiting to tee off at a restricted country club.”

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New York Times
OF course you didn’t watch the first Republican presidential debate on MSNBC. Even the party’s most loyal base didn’t abandon Fox News, where Bill O’Reilly, interviewing the already overexposed George Tenet, drew far more viewers. Yet the few telling video scraps that entered the 24/7 mediasphere did turn the event into an instant “Saturday Night Live” parody without “SNL” having to lift a finger. The row of 10 middle-aged white candidates, David Letterman said, looked like “guys waiting to tee off at a restricted country club.”

(Paid Subscription Required)

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Financial Times
Talking to Fox News, the conservative broadcaster, on his visit to Baghdad on Thursday, Dick Cheney said: “We didn’t get elected to worry just about the fate of the Republican party. Our mission is to do everything we can to prevail ... against one of the most evil opponents we’ve ever faced.”

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CounterPunch
From time to time events ecclesiastical eclipse things political. It's happened before and will happen again.

"I was led to believe really, that Reagan was possessed by demons. Frankly, I do believe Reagan at that time as much as Bush today was indeed possessed by the demons of manifest destiny. - Fr. Miguel d'Escoto

The Ronald Reagan library was the perfect location for the recent Republican presidential debates. The gruesome words of the Republican presidential candidates seemed to come from a séance communing with Reagan's departed spirit.

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MSNBC
WASHINGTON - 501(c)(4) — it’s the most potent little algorithm in politics right now.

A 501(c)(4) is the Internal Revenue Service term for a tax-exempt organization “primarily engaged in promoting in some way the common good and general welfare of the community.”

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MSNBC
WASHINGTON - Two retired Army major generals with experience in Iraq will appear in television commercials critical of President Bush's handling of the war, with the spots targeted at key Republicans in the House and Senate.

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Salon
World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz wants the world to believe that he is the blameless victim of a "smear campaign" orchestrated by his political enemies. But in light of the resignation from the bank, reported today by the Wall Street Journal, of one of his top aides, Kevin Kellems, one could come to another conclusion. The neocon chickens are coming home to roost.

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Newsweek
Susan Eisenhower is an accomplished professional, the president of an international consulting firm. She also happens to be Ike's granddaughter—and in that role, she's the humble torchbearer for moderate "Eisenhower Republicans." Increasingly, however, she says that the partisanship and free spending of the Bush presidency—and the takeover of the party by single-issue voters, especially pro-lifers—is driving these pragmatic, fiscally conservative voters out of the GOP.

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Newsweek
May 5, 2007 - It’s hard to say which is worse news for Republicans: that George W. Bush now has the worst approval rating of an American president in a generation, or that he seems to be dragging every ’08 Republican presidential candidate down with him. But According to the new NEWSWEEK Poll, the public’s approval of Bush has sunk to 28 percent, an all-time low for this president in our poll, and a point lower than Gallup recorded for his father at Bush Sr.’s nadir.

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Guardian
Campaigning in Oklahoma the other day, the Republican senator John McCain was asked what should be done about Iran. He responded by singing, "Bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran", to the tune of the Beach Boys' Barbara Ann. (Join the hilarity and see for yourself on YouTube.) How can any thinking person disagree? I mean, any country with a president who doesn't shave properly and never wears a tie deserves what's coming to it - a lot of American bombs, with a few British ones thrown in to ensure we don't miss out on the ensuing upsurge in terrorism.

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New York Times
Evolution has long generated bitter fights between the left and the right about whether God or science better explains the origins of life. But now a dispute has cropped up within conservative circles, not over science, but over political ideology: Does Darwinian theory undermine conservative notions of religion and morality or does it actually support conservative philosophy?

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New York Times
Thursday night’s debate among 10 Republican presidential candidates encompassed all the usual issues and then some, but some of its most striking moments centered on two topics: abortion and evolution.

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Truthdig
MSNBC sets the record straight on some of the errors and misrepresentations from the first Republican debate: More than a few thousand soldiers have been injured in Iraq, you can’t flip-flop on abortion like Bush 41 if Bush 41 never flip-flopped, and Bill Clinton didn’t gut the Army—he modernized it with bipartisan support.

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The Nation
Before the GOP candidates auditioned for the Republican nomination, the Campaign for America's Future held a great debate between the American Prospect's Bob Kuttner and the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol on an apt subject: "Can Conservatives be Trusted to Govern?"

Kristol had the misfortune of standing behind a podium with a large red "Con" sign. That pretty much summed things up. "I feel that I'm here to adopt that poor orphan," he joked at the beginning.

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Reuters
SIMI VALLEY, California (Reuters) - Republican White House contenders offered strong support for the military effort in Iraq but voiced qualms about the Bush administration's management of the war during a quiet first debate on Thursday.

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The Nation
Simi Valley, California

The first Republican presidential debate of the season has now sputtered to an end at the Reagan Library here on the outskirts of L.A. and the scorecard is in.

The undisputed loser: George W. Bush.

The winner: All of the eight rival Democratic candidates.

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Pottersville
It doesn't augur well for Bush’s sterling legacy when GOP presidential wannabes mention St. Ronnie almost three times for every time they mentioned Bush in Thursday night’s debate (20-7).

Paul Krugman warned us back on March 18th that Republicans would leapfrog over Bush backwards and spring toward Reagan for guidance and inspiration. And, as Krugman wisely counseled, Reagan was no fucking picnic in the park.

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Seattle PI
President Bush's budget-busting, spendthrift tactics have robbed the GOP of its claim to the title, "Party of Fiscal Conservancy."

Now the perverse antics of some high-level Bush appointees and his party's power elite are lifting the cloak of "family values" from the GOP, too.

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The Nation
On Wednesday, John Edwards continued his frontal assault on President Bush's Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), telling a Portland audience that he opposes the policy and the "Bush language" that justifies Iraq, torture and Guantanamo. Edwards is not only trying to distinguish himself from the Democratic frontrunners, who said they "believe there is a war on terror" in response to a simplistic question at last week's debate. The Edwards campaign is also taking the battle directly to Republican candidates, pressing MSNBC to ask a similar question at tonight's GOP debate:

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Washington Post
President Bush is at odds with the American public and a restive congressional majority over the Iraq war, and even some Republicans talk about imposing new requirements that could trigger a troop withdrawal.

It's time to play the Qaeda card.

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USA Today
WASHINGTON — The political landscape for the 2008 presidential election is shaping up with a decided tilt in the direction of Democrats.

Long before either party has settled on a presidential candidate, fundamental factors that lay the groundwork for next year's election — from anti-war sentiment to a drain in GOP-leaning voters to the simple patterns of history — are creating significant hurdles for the Republicans who hope to succeed President Bush.

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NBC News
WASHINGTON - The GOP enters its first debate with a fundamental problem: it no longer agrees on the definition of conservative.

Writing about the problems facing the Republican Party this year has the feel of a broken record. But on the eve of the party's first presidential primary debate it's worth exploring just how bad this identity crisis facing the GOP really is.

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Time
Campaign-hardened Republicans used to treat the phrase "global war on terror" so casually, even affectionately, that they talked about "the G-WOT," after the four-letter abbreviation used in White House calendars to denote Iraq messaging meetings. Democrats embraced it, too, with John Kerry asserting during his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention: "We are a nation at war, a global war on terror."

But increasingly the phrase is being regarded with hostility by many Democrats, who view it as little more than propaganda, and with a degree of skepticism by some Republicans, who consider it tired and vague.

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Huffington Post
There is no real name for the movement that took over America six years ago and continues run it. That's part of the reason for its success. Its very vagueness makes it hard to attack. In actuality, it is not a single entity. It is made up of three main parts.

Corporatism, which is based on the belief that whatever makes money is good -- and should not be restrained.

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Washington Post
Niccol? Machiavelli, the 16th-century political realist and schemer, would relish the intricate calculations the three leading Democratic presidential candidates are required to make.

Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards need to do two things simultaneously: persuade the intensely antiwar majority in the Democratic Party that they despise President Bush's Iraq policies and demonstrate that they would be resolute in dealing with America's foreign foes. Over the past week, that foreign policy dance has produced some riveting moments.

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Washington Post
Brushing aside White House opposition, Republican leaders in Congress said yesterday that negotiations on a second war spending bill should begin with benchmarks of success for the Iraqi government, and possible consequences if those benchmarks are not met.

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NY Sun
As senators Clinton and Obama crisscross the country seeking the Democratic presidential nomination and sharply criticizing President Bush, they have been collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars from donors who funded one or both of Mr. Bush's campaigns for the White House.

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New York Times
SAN DIEGO, April 29 — When John Edwards attended the California Democratic Party convention as a presidential candidate four years ago, he was heckled with shouts of “No war” as he struggled to defend his support of the Iraq invasion. That tense weekend in Sacramento crystallized how divided Democrats were over a war that overshadowed the presidential race of 2004.

Mr. Edwards returned to the convention here on Sunday, this time as a presidential candidate firmly opposed to the war.

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The Nation
The most significant moment in last week's Democratic presidential candidate debate came during the evening's most simplistic question. Moderator Brian Williams asked for a show of hands on whether the candidates "believe" there is a Global War on Terror, yielding a four-to-four split. It was a silly choice, since Williams was technically asking if the candidates believe that Bush's foreign policy exists, but it could still spark an important discussion. John Edwards was the only one of the "top three" candidates to vote no, which swiftly brought him praise, scorn and ridicule.

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Salon
April 30, 2007 | Nebraska Republican Chuck Hagel, who is otherwise a rock-ribbed red state conservative, has been called a "defector" and "defeatist" for clashing with President Bush on the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretaps and the war in Iraq. Most recently, he has inspired GOP ire by siding with Senate Democrats who want to set a timetable for redeploying troops from Iraq. On Thursday, Hagel again voted with Senate Democrats when they passed the final version of a bill that tied funding for the war with bringing soldiers home. Nebraska's Republican attorney general has said he is seriously considering challenging Hagel in the 2008 Senate primary because many Nebraskans were unhappy with the senator's criticism of the president.

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Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON — President Bush's unpopularity and a string of political setbacks have created a toxic climate for the Republican Party, making it harder to raise money and recruit candidates for its drive to retake control of Congress.

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Huffington Post
Another GOP hypocrite bites the dust. Joining a dishonor roll that includes anti-child predator predator Mark Foley and anti-homosexual homosexual Ted Haggard is Deputy Secretary of State Randall Tobias, a pro-abstinence zealot who couldn't abstain from enjoying the services of D.C. Madam Jeane Palfry's escort service.

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One Thousand Reasons
"Demagogue" is often applied to one who spouts spurious oratory that nonetheless is emotionally stirring. We think of people such as Hitler, Mussolini, or the American neofascist Father Coughlin when we use words such as 'demagogue' or 'demagoguery'. These three men had an oratorical gift, which is why I never feel totally comfortable referring to the inarticulate Bush as a 'demagogue', most notably when he speaks off the cuff. In either case, his language is nonetheless often marked by some of the classic devices of demagoguery.

Such is the case when Bush takes a shot at those who question his reasons for the so-called 'war' in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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Rolling Stone
Moving Up:

• John Edwards. He came off as poised and polished and the most authentic of the candidates, answering the questions, faithfully, as asked. He seemed much more relaxed and confident than the man he’s got to overtake, Obama. He got some of his freshness back tonight.

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New York Times
ORANGEBURG, S.C., April 26 — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton was professorial and emphatic as she spoke Thursday night about health care, Iraq and whether Wal-Mart was good for America (a “mixed blessing,” she decided) .

Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, by reputation a dynamic performer, was reserved and cautious as he talked about a donor with a shady past, how he would respond to a terrorist attack on American shores and his biggest mistake (not doing more to stop Congress from intervening in the Terri Schiavo case, he said).

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Washington Post
The first Democratic presidential debate was largely a polite affair as the candidates chose to turn their rhetorical fire on President Bush rather than each other. The pointed moments were occasional and usually involved the two longest shots in the field -- Rep. Dennis Kucinich (Ohio) and former Sen. Mike Gravel (Alaska).

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MSNBC
Since some indeterminable hour between the final dousing of the pyre at The World Trade Center, and the breaking of what Sen. Barack Obama has aptly termed “9/11 fever,” it has been profoundly and disturbingly evident that we are at the center of one of history’s great ironies.

Only in this America of the early 21st century could it be true that the man who was president during the worst attack on our nation and the man who was the mayor of the city in which that attack principally unfolded would not only be absolved of any and all blame for the unreadiness of their own governments, but, moreover, would thereafter be branded heroes of those attacks.

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Baltimore Sun
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. // Walking along President Clinton Avenue toward the William J. Clinton Presidential Center, which looms over the Clinton School of Public Service here in Little Rock - which, at this point, may as well be renamed The Town That Clinton Built - makes one pause to reflect upon the fact that American politics has changed so drastically in just 10 years.

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Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON — As congressional Democrats move to force President Bush to veto a war spending bill that would start a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, they are simultaneously pursuing a carefully crafted offensive aimed at another target: Republican lawmakers.

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Salon
The Republican candidates are slugging it out, talking tough about cracking down on gay Mexican wetback couples who are stealing our guns and leaving us defenseless against big government, decrying the evils of taxation. Meanwhile an ancient Republican dropped by my house on Monday to sun himself on my porch and announce over coffee that he is now an independent. He is disgusted with the Current Occupant over Iraq and much more, including taxation. Unlike the Occupant, he does not think of taxes as a sacrifice but simply the dues you pay as a member of society, and the haves pay more than the have-nots because they have more to lose should anarchy ensue. And he was brought up to believe that more is expected of those to whom much is given.

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Washington Post
A senior Democratic leader, in a speech today at the Brookings Institution, will tie together a long series of Bush administration scandals, controversies and missteps into what he argues is a campaign to turn the government into an appendage of the Republican Party.

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MSNBC
WASHINGTON - A little-known federal investigative unit has launched a probe into allegations of illegal political activity within the executive branch, including a White House office led by President Bush's close adviser, Karl Rove.

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Los Angeles Times
VICE PRESIDENT Dick Cheney recently attacked my 1972 presidential platform and contended that today's Democratic Party has reverted to the views I advocated in 1972. In a sense, this is a compliment, both to me and the Democratic Party. Cheney intended no such compliment. Instead, he twisted my views and those of my party beyond recognition. The city where the vice president spoke, Chicago, is sometimes dubbed "the Windy City." Cheney converted the chilly wind of Chicago into hot air.

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Salon
April 23, 2007 | SPARTANBURG, S.C. -- Maybe it's the legacy of Lee Atwater. Maybe it's some lingering Confederate spunkiness. It might even be all the sweet tea. But one thing is unmistakably true: Republican Party politics in South Carolina is a down and dirty affair.

"We tried to explain to the folks in Boston early on that it's a little different here," says Terry Sullivan, a veteran political operative who is running former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney's presidential campaign in the Palmetto State. "It's kind of a knife fight."

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New York Times
President Bush is taking every opportunity to rail against the troop withdrawal deadlines in the war-spending bills that Congress is readying for passage. He warns that Congressional attempts to set deadlines will harm the troops in Iraq, because a political fight over timetables will delay money needed for the frontlines.

The assertion is completely contrived.

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New York Times
There are two ways to describe the confrontation between Congress and the Bush administration over funding for the Iraq surge. You can pretend that it’s a normal political dispute. Or you can see it for what it really is: a hostage situation, in which a beleaguered President Bush, barricaded in the White House, is threatening dire consequences for innocent bystanders — the troops — if his demands aren’t met.

(Paid Subscription Required)

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Washington Post
The abrupt resignations last week of two Republican House members from their sensitive committee assignments have thrust lingering legal and ethics issues back into the limelight, potentially complicating GOP efforts to retake Congress next year.

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Washington Post
Democratic Party strategists have received the results of an in-depth survey by Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry's former presidential pollster, Mark S. Mellman, that attempts to explain why the party's donors are so energized, giving presidential candidates more than twice as much as the Republicans seeking the White House are getting.

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US News & World Report
Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg tells U.S. News that President Bush's arguments in favor of his Iraq policy have been effective only with conservatives so far, not with a wider audience of Americans.

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Washington Post
When his party controlled Congress, Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) was a mannered backbencher, seemingly in no rush to fill the shoes of one of his predecessors in a suburban Atlanta district, the firebrand Newt Gingrich.

But in the minority, the bookish physician has transformed himself into a Republican guerrilla warrior, a near-constant presence on the House floor, gumming up the works with parliamentary objections, verbal volleys and partisan maneuvering.

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Washington Post
With the presidential contest well underway, the 2008 political profiles of our two parties, which alter a bit during each four-year cycle, are already taking shape. The Democrats have turned to a new version of their favorite sport, intraparty class warfare. The Republicans, meanwhile, are drifting farther and farther away from their countrymen -- and not just over the war in Iraq.

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Slate
Why is it so easy to get guns in America? Cho Seung-Hui purchased one of the pistols he used to shoot 50 of his classmates, a Glock 19, at a shop in Roanoke, Va., after showing an ID card and passing an instant background check. He appears to have gotten the other gun he used, a Walther P22 semiautomatic, legally as well. In the Commonwealth of Virginia, guns are about as difficult to come by as Mexican food in Mexico.

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CounterPunch
Neoconservatives have turned the Republican Party into a Brownshirt Party.

Look at the evidence. While real patriots flee the party, the remaining supporters cling to power by asserting dictatorial dominance for President Bush.

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USA Today
WASHINGTON — Even though Texas votes Republican in presidential elections, it's still lucrative ground for Democrats when it comes to campaign cash.

A USA TODAY analysis of first-quarter fundraising reports shows that Texans donated nearly $4 million to Democratic presidential candidates, much of it to former North Carolina senator John Edwards, who has strong ties to the state's trial lawyers. GOP White House contenders, led by former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, took home $4.4 million from Texas.

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Guardian
Even as George Bush's Baghdad surgers pursue displaced Sunni insurgents into northern Diyala and Salahuddin provinces, ever more vicious guerrilla warfare is roiling the home front. Hand-to-hand combat between testy White House Republicans and emboldened Democrats threatens to overshadow events on the ground in Iraq - and may prove decisive in a way the president's 28,000-troop reinforcement cannot.

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Los Angeles Times
MCCOOK, NEB. — In early February, the war in Iraq came home to this small railroad town on the Nebraska prairie where farms begin to give way to high plains.

Seven thousand miles away on a Baghdad street, a bomb exploded beside Army Sgt. Randy J. Matheny's armored vehicle, killing the 20-year-old McCook High School graduate and stunning his small hometown.

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New York Times
Normally, politicians face a difficult tradeoff between taking positions that satisfy their party’s base and appealing to the broader public. You can see that happening right now to the Republicans: to have a chance of winning the party’s nomination, Republican presidential hopefuls have to take far-right positions on Iraq and social issues that will cost them a lot of votes in the general election.

But a funny thing has happened on the Democratic side: the party’s base seems to be more in touch with the mood of the country than many of the party’s leaders. And the result is peculiar: on key issues, reluctant Democratic politicians are being dragged by their base into taking highly popular positions.

(Paid Subscription Required)

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MSNBC
NEW YORK - Democrats running for president seem to find Fox News Channel as ripe a target as President Bush, a development with dangerous implications for both the network and the politicians.

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USA Today
WASHINGTON (AP) — Democrats know they might lose this month's showdown with President Bush on legislation to pull troops out of Iraq. But with 2008 elections in mind, majority Democrats says it is only a matter of time before they will get their way.

Senior Democrats are calculating that if they keep the pressure on, eventually more Republicans will jump ship and challenge the president — or lose their seats to Democratic contenders.

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Boston Globe
THREE TIMES in my political adulthood, we have seen the exhaustion of a conservative ideology and presidency. Under Presidents Nixon and Bush II, the ingredients were corruption, corporate excess, and overreach of presidential power. During the 12 years of Reagan and Bush I, the hallmark was the failure of conservative economics.

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Washington Post
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) today condemned the Bush administration as callous and incompetent managers of the public trust as she outlined a broad agenda she said was designed to restore public confidence and turn government into a partner of working families.

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Huffington Post
The president attended the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast this morning in DC, and addressed his ongoing (and alleged) desire to establish a "culture of life" in America. As is too often the case, Bush's rhetoric and our reality were very different things.

"Renewing the promise of America begins with upholding the dignity of human life," Bush said.

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GALLUP NEWS SERVICE
PRINCETON, NJ -- Recent Gallup polling continues to show a favorable political environment for the Democratic Party. Democrats maintained a significant advantage in partisan identification throughout the first quarter of 2007. Additionally, by a sizable margin, Americans say they would rather see the Democrats than the Republicans win the 2008 presidential election. A ray of hope for Republicans exists in that their leading presidential contenders are currently viewed more positively by Americans than the leading Democratic presidential contenders. Also, the Republican candidates are highly competitive with the Democratic candidates in head-to-head match-ups.

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