And so, on page A3 of the Washington Post, appears my favorite political story of the day – about the link between South Carolina’s feared and (in some quarters) revered GOP hitman, J. Warren Tompkins, and the creation of an anti-Fred Thompson website called PhoneyFred.org. Tompkins is serving as Mitt Romney’s top South Carolina adviser [...]

This just in from Time.com editor Josh Tyrangiel: Dear Swampland readers and commenters, We hear you. For 9 months we’ve let Swampland’s comments sections unspool with the libertarian fervor of a John Stuart Mill dream-sequence. But after noticing that in recent weeks our most loyal readers have grown frustrated with troll incursions ruining otherwise intelligent [...]

I never saw any political operative happier than the time I was out having a drink with a staffer from a “rival campaign” and, when the bartender collected our tips, he thanked us and spontaneously made a joke about how “a few more like this, and I’ll be able to afford a John Edwards hair [...]

John McCain is a clever guy, more capable of wordplay than your average politician. But lately he’s been bedeviled by double meanings that aren’t necessarily his intention. Exhibit one: his latest book, “Hard Call,” whose title has been invoked as a (sarcastic) comment on his Iraq position as much as a statement about the decisions [...]