After enduring the silly debate over who injected race into the presidential campaign, let’s look at some recent numbers that indicate how Barack Obama could win this close election.
In the battle to define John McCain, the man himself would have you call him “the original maverick.” Barack Obama, meanwhile, says McCain is running for George W. Bush’s third term. This identity struggle could determine the outcome of the election.
John McCain has found a theme he likes and he’s sticking with it: Barack Obama is popular and that’s bad. Much worse, apparently, than the Reagan-era economic philosophy the presumed Republican nominee is peddling.
Just as John McCain was catching flak for bolstering Paris Hilton’s bafflingly resilient showbiz career, another danger appeared on the horizon in the form of that purebred Hollywood golden retriever Gwyneth Paltrow, who’s turned up in a Democrat-sponsored PSA with an angular bob that could slice deli meat and a get-out-the-vote message for expat American voters.
In her video response to John McCain’s “celeb” commercial, the heiress unveils her own energy policy and threatens to paint the White House pink. Thanks again, Sen. McCain, for making this campaign about the issues. Or not.
He was born into a Cossack family, which was just one of many indications that life wasn’t exactly going to be conflict-free for Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who died Sunday. The Russian writer survived eight years in Stalin’s notorious gulags and became one of his country’s most controversial critical thinkers, a process that continued during the two decades he was forced to live in exile.
“Audition” details the life story, both in front of the camera and behind the scenes, of a pioneering journalist-entertainer who reported the news while making it in ways both admirable and troubling.
Once strongly in favor of Hillary Clinton, actress and chanteuse Barbra Streisand says her switch to supporting Barack Obama was instantaneous when Clinton pulled out of the presidential race, and that other Clinton supporters should back the Illinois senator instead of throwing their vote to Republican John McCain in protest.
In “Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies,” Barbara Slavin, a leading Middle East reporter for USA Today, offers a refreshingly nuanced and revelatory taxonomy of power within theocratic Iran that sheds light on its leaders and their ambitions.
The terrorists find all sorts of reasons to hate us. On Tuesday came word that the deadliest biological assault on the United States may be linked to the rejection of the terror suspect by a Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority sister decades ago.
With no end in sight in Afghanistan and Iraq, military recruiters must be prevented from using desperate and aggressive measures to lure our nation’s young people—the poorest and most vulnerable—into the line of fire.
The Chinese authorities’ anxiety that the Olympic Games will be a success reflects their need to find international confirmation of their general political and economic policies of the past 20 years.
An attack on Iran, which Israeli and Bush administration officials appear set to carry out if Iranian uranium enrichment is not halted, would ignite a regional war in the Middle East and lead to economic collapse and political upheaval in the United States.
I’m confident that Sen. Lindsey Graham and the rest of John McCain’s front-line surrogates know full well what messages they’re sending about Barack Obama and race. On the off chance that they—or, more likely, some of the white voters they’re trying to reach—don’t know text from subtext from context, here’s a deconstruction.
In this summer of our economic discontent, it isn’t necessary to manufacture a financial crisis or to make political hash out of discussing a nonexistent one.
Without a shot being fired, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has ensured that anyone who wants anything in the Middle East has got to talk to Syria. He’s done nothing—and he’s won.
An investigation by Mother Jones has turned up an interesting life—one Mary McFate, aka Mary Lou Sapone, who for years worked as a national figure in the gun-control movement and as a paid spy for the NRA. According to the mag, McFate held board positions in numerous activist groups while her alter ego has been known to infiltrate such organizations for a fee.
The government on Wednesday released some of the evidence collected against biological weapons researcher Bruce E. Ivins, who died of suicide July 29. Anonymous sources peppered media reports earlier in the week, saying that much of the case relied on circumstantial evidence. So far, those reports appear to have been correct.
While National Geographic may be the best magazine educating Americans about the horrors of the modern world, the organization also makes a point of highlighting positive earth news when it happens, such as the discovery that Congo may hold an additional 125,000 western lowland gorillas, which would double the known population of the critically endangered beast.
Tens of thousands of the desperately depressed sign up every year in the U.S. to have electricity-induced grand mal seizures even though nobody has ever figured out why the treatment works or how severe the associated brain damage is. The good news: You no longer have to be awake, and muscle relaxants now keep your bones from breaking.
The government of President Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdellah came to an end Wednesday in the West African state of Mauritania, as military officers arrested both Abdellah and the prime minister in a coup against a government denounced for its “corruption and ineptitude in handling rising food prices and oil revenues.” Sound familiar at all?
Osama bin Laden’s alleged driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, was convicted Wednesday by a military court on five counts of supporting terrorism. The decision was largely symbolic, since the U.S. had reserved the right, regardless of guilt or innocence, to detain Hamdan indefinitely. The ACLU called the verdict a “monumental debacle.”
McCain the Maverick? Not So Fast
