Washington Babylon

I spoke tonight with Casey Wallace, a lawyer at a prominent Texas law firm that filed a lawsuit Monday alleging that one of Senator Norm Coleman’s campaign donors, Nasser Kazeminy,…

Read more

A lawsuit filed in Texas earlier this week and now apparently withdrawn alleges that one of Senator Norm Coleman’s campaign donors, Nasser Kazeminy, aided the senator by hiring a firm…

Read more

From Politico: Aides to Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) scheduled pricey luncheons, roundtables, readings, VIP receptions and policy dinners with campaign officials and advisers, offering donors a taste of his potential…

Read more

Kent Moors is an expert on oil and natural gas policy, and a professor in the Graduate Center for Social and Public Policy at Duquesne University. He has been an…

Read more

From ProPublica: As Congress debated the historic financial rescue package on Oct. 3, the world economy was hanging in the balance. The House already had rejected Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s…

Read more

Washington, D.C., has only 0.2 percent of the U.S. population and three votes in the Electoral College but it turns out city residents, or at least a select few, have…

Read more

Ted Stevens was found guilty today of having “knowingly failed to list on Senate disclosure forms the receipt of several gifts and tens of thousands of dollars worth of remodeling…

Read more

Barring a complete failure of polling and political punditry (not an impossibility, of course), the outcome seems clear: Barack Obama is going to win the election. Over at FiveThirtyEight.com, John…

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Ed Pound at National Journal: In one of the most sensational stories of the presidential campaign, The New York Times published a 3,000-word, front-page article in February suggesting that…

Read more

From BAGnewsNotes–“Has McCain Been Suffering From What The DSM-IV Classifies As Caffeine Intoxication?” Is it just coincidence John McCain is often depicted with a jumbo-sized Starbucks in or at hand?…As…

Read more

From Politico: Joe the Plumber really is no fan of paying taxes. According to records from the Lucas County (OH) Court of Common Pleas found by my colleague Avi Zenilman,…

Read more