John McCain’s campaign is now accusing Jamie Rubin of lying about McCain’s position on dealing with Hamas. Fascinating. And I suppose Rubin was manipulating McCain’s mouth when, at Davos in 2006, the Arizona Senator said that we would have to “deal with” the new Hamas government, “one way or another.” I mean, it’s there on [...]

Fascinating response to David Brooks’ neuroscience piece earlier this week from an actual neuroscientist! The statement: “meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings,” seems particularly odd. If you remove the word “mysteriously” this is actually a good summary of the materialist model of neuroscience. Yes – everything we [...]

Democratic pollster Paul Maslin has reduced the coming Obama-McCain contest to 17 key states, and then gamed out routes for Obama victory. For those who like to play the numbers game early, this article in Salon is essential reading. Here is his conclusion: States that strongly favor Obama (“strongly” in the context of close states, [...]

This was supposed to be John McCain’s green week, when he went to the Pacific Northwest, hung out with the forest people, and made clear to America that he is not George Bush. Yesterday’s Back-To-The-Future prediction that the war in Iraq would be essentially won by 2013 was icing on the cake. Then George Bush [...]

Here is what Barack Obama said in South Dakota. Here is the McCain campaign’s response. So, which of these responses is hysterical? I suspect the purple, perfervid tone of the McCain campaign will not hold up very well in the fall. P.S.–Once again, McCain’s spokesman indulges in a tactical, umm, mistake: waving the bloody shirt [...]

Michelle Cottle’s oral history of the Last Days of Disco: “Devastating vulnerabilities such as Obama’s associations with Wright and Ayers were not unearthed by the campaign’s vaunted research team in time to be fully taken advantage of–despite being readily available in the public domain.” “Harold Ickes’s encyclopedic understanding of the proportional delegate system was never [...]

On the heels of the California marriage decision, this from the head of the RNC, via Politico: Donatelli: “Sometimes the generic brand does it for Republicans or Democrats, based on the circumstances. But this time it’s a very challenging environment and it’s not enough just to kind of go down the litany of issues. I [...]