Archive: 2008

Read more

Chris Kromm is the Executive Director of the Institute for Southern Studies and the publisher of Southern Exposure. A former community organizer, Kromm also writes for the Institute’s blog, Facing…

Read more

Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska has recently been the subject of a number of unflattering news accounts. An oligarch close to Valdimir Putin, Deripaska is a former metals trader who “survived…

Read more

Tom Edmonds, a GOP consultant interviewed here the other day, predicted that young voters would stay home on Election Day, which might allow John McCain to pull off an upset…

Read more

From the New York Times: MIAMI — As Mr. McCain enters this closing stretch, his aides — as well as some outside Republicans and even a few Democrats — argue…

Read more

From the Los Angeles Times: Elwyn Tinklenberg is living the long-shot candidate’s political dream. There weren’t enough chairs for the volunteers crammed inside the four-room campaign office Wednesday morning. Every…

Read more

From the Associated Press: There have been predictions all year of a record black turnout for Obama. The first actual figures suggest that wasn’t just talk: In North Carolina, blacks…

Read more

The latest polls show Obama just ahead among rural swing-state voters and in Montana, and closing in ….. Arizona?…

Read more

A bit more than a year ago, my mother-in-law moved to a small town north of Anchorage that has been much in the news lately. Her immediate complaint was that…

Read more

Gross National Product: Malta: $5.49 billion Madagascar: $5.37 billion Cambodia: $5.34 billion Spending on Fall 2008 U.S. Elections: $5.3 billion Burkina Faso: $5.24 billion Mali: $5.12 billion Nicaragua: $4.97 billion…

Read more

If it were your ambition to convince a friend that her deeply held belief, cherished since childhood—say, that apple cider is undrinkable, undigestible, and unbearable—is dangerously off the mark, you…

Read more

Several weeks back I reported here on claims from sources that a friend and donor of Senator Norm Coleman had previously bought him suits at Nieman Marcus in Minneapolis. After…

Read more

We now are entering into the last fortnight of the 2008 Presidential Campaign. This period often marks the final descent into demagoguery, character assassination and hysteria as appeals are launched…

Read more

Colin Powell and Ken Adelman have endorsed Obama, and that’s supposed to be reassuring? Normally I’d take an endorsement by one of those guys and run in the other direction.…

Read more

I’m discussing my new book, Turkmeniscam: How Washington Lobbyists Fought to Flack for a Stalinist Dictatorship, all week at TPM Cafe. Others taking part in the conversation are Stephen Walt,…

Read more

A letter in response to yesterday’s post, which cited GOP consultant Tom Edmonds arguing that youth turnout for the presidential election would be smaller than expected. Your 10/20 post entitled…

Read more

Caught in the Web, 1860. Governments around the world attempted to slow the global financial catastrophe. Der SpiegelNYTThe stock market in Iceland reopened after a three-day suspension and immediately plunged…

Read more

“A lexicographer has godlike powers,” wrote Guy Davenport in an an essay on America’s last and greatest such household deity, Noah Webster (1758-1843). Lexicographers, Davenport continued: can, like Johnson, define…

Read more

This is astonishing. The state where the Obama campaign has been carpet bombing the airwaves most vigorously this past weekend was West Virginia. If you watched TV over the weekend…

Read more

I just ran an interview with GOP media consultant Tom Edmonds, who thinks McCain still has a shot at winning the election. I had tried to contact a few other…

Read more

Barack Obama is ahead in every national poll by a seemingly comfortable margin. He’s shattering all records for political fundraising, is attracting huge crowds to his rallies, and the pundits…

Read more

Read more

Saturday the New York Times alerts us to a new opinion issued deep in the bowels of the Bush Justice Department. The decision emanates from the Office of Legal Counsel,…

Read more

The quality of mercy is not strain’d, It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest; It blesseth him that gives and him…

Read more

If man does not acknowledge his status as creator, his freedom over the historical flux, his right and duty to challenge the inherited traditions of the community, his obligation to…

Read more

Read more

From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: The men are shown with sex toys around their necks, doing skits in blackface, dressed in wigs and women’s clothing and consuming copious quantities of alcoholic…

Read more

Earlier this month, AIG executives headed to a luxury spa in California to decompress after the company received an $85 billion federal bailout. How else does AIG spend its money?…

Read more