Ambinder has a smart take on the “oh-we-wouldn’t-use-Obama’s-drug-use-against-him-but-those-big-bad-Republicans-might!” strategy that was sent up the Clinton flag pole (that’s what she said, heh-heh) yesterday: By publicly raising some as-yet unanswered questions about Obama’s use of cocaine as a teenager, Billy Shaheen virtually guarantees that Obama will never be asked those questions or that if he is [...]

Another election season dawns … One thing you learn from covering campaigns is to be pretty, uh, flexible in your travel expectations. In the last cycle, there was the hotel that the Dean campaign stayed in in South Carolina where the breakfast buffet featured … Twinkies. And the one in Dubuque where the Kerry campaign [...]

When I first saw this in my mail box, I was really excited — and a little surprised — to see what, exactly, Biden might have to say about today’s big Huckism (“Mormons believe Jesus and the Devil are brothers”). I mean, Joe Biden, expert on foreign policy AND theology!

Mark Blumenthal has a long, wonky, but worthwhile post examining the relative strategies and quality of Iowa pollsters. Key finding: The point here is not so much to guess at which poll has the “right” demographic mix, the right percentage of first-time caucus goers or even about how many Iowans will caucus. Again, knowing with [...]

With apologies to Karen… The rumors of discord in the Clinton campaign. Well, yeah, things seem to be going slightly south–but just slightly. Obama has, if not mo, then minimentum…although his trajectory is especially surprising in New Hampshire, where the Clintons’ long history and the local Shaheen machine seemed to put HRC in a strong [...]

This one, back on A4 of the Washington Post, suggests that waterboarding is not just being used as a questionably effective tool for intelligence gathering: The top legal adviser for the military trials of Guantanamo Bay detainees told Congress yesterday that he cannot rule out the use of evidence derived from the CIA’s aggressive interrogation [...]

This is just too hilariously baroque for words.

Yglesias is absolutely right about this. The Iran NIE may stand as the Bush Administration’s–unwitting, unwilling, kicking and screaming–foreign policy “triumph” of the year…and an advance indication of how the world might respond to a new, more reasonable Administration. But the fact that the UN is still moving ahead with a new sanctions regime is [...]

The reports on ABC and in the Washington Post quoting, on the record, a former CIA interrogator of Abu Zubaida perfectly reflect why there is so much ambivalence in the land about extreme interrogation methods, what constitutes torture and whether torture administered by Americans should ever be permitted under any circumstances. Former CIA officer John [...]