[ Posted Tuesday, August 7th, 2007 – 15:35 UTC ]
[This is the second part of a two-part article. The first part ran yesterday, and looked at the plausible scenarios for Democrats in the early primaries.]
OK, on to the Republican race. For this race, I am first going to provide you with polling data from all the early primary states, and then (just because it's easier for me to stomach), I'm going to address the question of: Which GOP presidential candidate would be the best for any generic Democratic candidate to run against? In other words: Who are Democratic partisans going to be rooting for to win the GOP nomination?
Republicans, it should be noted, are pretty dispirited going into this campaign. They feel the weight of the Iraq fiasco, they feel the weight of the fact that they've got a pretty disappointing field, and they feel the weight of President Bush dragging them ever downwards. In other words, Republicans are not happy campers when they think about the 2008 campaign.
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[ Posted Tuesday, August 7th, 2007 – 06:00 UTC ]
[ Posted Monday, August 6th, 2007 – 13:17 UTC ]
Much like the Iraqi Parliament, our own Congress has just departed on their own month-long vacation. So begins the dog days of summer political news. Which means it's a good time to take a look at next year's presidential primaries -- now only five months away.
On the Democratic side, there is a wealth of good candidates to choose from. Even the longshots and dark horses look pretty good at this point. On the Republican side, there is much consternation over their choice of candidates. Republicans are going through the same agonizing choice that Democrats faced in 2004: which candidate will be the most "electable" come next November? This triangulation, in essence, concedes that you will be running an "underdog" campaign, admitting that the other side's candidate will be stronger. This, it should be noted, didn't exactly work out real well for Democrats in '04.
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[ Posted Saturday, August 4th, 2007 – 09:00 UTC ]
About the Cartoonist | Reprint Policy
[Note: I'm going to try running these standalone cartoons every Tuesday morning, and every Saturday. Tuesday is usually a light day for me, and the weekends have never had any posts, so hopefully this schedule will work out for everyone.]
[ Posted Friday, August 3rd, 2007 – 17:05 UTC ]
What if the core issue in the warrantless wiretapping arguments currently raging is one that nobody has mentioned? What if the real secret that has yet to be exposed is a logical next step in technological wiretapping capabilities, but one that our legal system has never been faced with before? What if -- in essence -- computers are the ones deciding which calls to tap, rather than NSA agents or judges?
Before I get started here, let me state for the record that everything in this article is pure and utter speculation. I do not have access to anything other than publicly available documents. I have no secret sources. I do not claim anything I say here is the truth -- merely rampant speculation and educated guesses.
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[ Posted Thursday, August 2nd, 2007 – 15:32 UTC ]
Back in the dim and distant past of 1992, it seemed both the Republican and Democratic parties had worked out a backroom deal: "Let's just not mention the deficit in the presidential campaign this year." Neither party saw it as a winning issue, and so they both apparantly agreed to ignore it completely.
Enter a quirky Texan with a lot of money to spend named H. Ross Perot. He forced the issue into the campaign in a big way. He started renting television time in half-hour chunks and giving what were essentially infomercials on the subject of the deficit. He forced Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush to confront the issue. And he also got almost one vote in five on election day.
About the Cartoonist | Reprint Policy
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[ Posted Wednesday, August 1st, 2007 – 04:11 UTC ]
While everyone watching the news from Iraq is focused on whether the "surge" is working or not (in anticipation of General Petraeus' upcoming report to Congress), there are powerful undercurrents at work in the region which may do more to define the future of Iraq than any upcoming "the-glass-is-half-full" report in Washington, D.C.
The biggest, and most disturbing, of these is the fact that Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki seems to be losing whatever tenuous grip he holds on the reins of government. Boycotts of the Iraqi Parliament are threatened from almost every side, it seems -- Shi'ite, Sunni, and Kurd. As if this weren't bad enough, Maliki also faces an open revolt from within his own Dawa party. And at the same time he seems to be advocating kicking Petraeus out of his country.
While the story which the mainstream media seemed to pay attention to this week from Iraq was that the Iraqi Parliament was taking a month off for vacation (incidentally and completely ignoring the fact that our own American Congress -- and probably President Bush -- will also be taking the entire month off), the real story may be that the Iraqi Parliament may not even have a post-vacation government to come back to.
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[ Posted Tuesday, July 31st, 2007 – 15:15 UTC ]
"Ad hoc, ad loc, and quid pro quo.
So little time! So much to know!"
-- Jeremy Hillary Boob, Ph.D.
[From the movie Yellow Submarine]
Although this article has an admittedly... um... titillating (OK, I just couldn't resist) headline, it is not, in fact, about Hillary Clinton's breasts. It's not even primarily about news articles about said cleavage, either. It's really about what happens afterwards -- how Democratic candidates are using such attacks to raise buckets and buckets of campaign cash. This tactic has been masterfully used in the past by Republicans, but it seems Democrats have learned the trick as well this year. Good for them!
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[ Posted Tuesday, July 31st, 2007 – 06:00 UTC ]
[ Posted Monday, July 30th, 2007 – 15:53 UTC ]
Photo Credit: By Saul Loeb -- AFP
Photo found on Yahoo News
From today's "White House Watch" blog by Dan Froomkin at washingtonpost.com:
If [new British Prime Minister Gordon] Brown was deferential, Bush was playful -- from the very beginning of the visit. When Brown arrived at Camp David on Sunday, Bush invited him into a golf cart labeled 'Golf Cart One' on the front. The president started to head off but then threw the cart into a 360-degree turn, smiling mischievously for the cameras, before speeding off.
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