• “Who doesn’t like a melancholy Ronald McDonald in an Economist chart?” [A Hamburger Today] • “For $30,000 the city will put your company’s name on a bullet-proof box that encases the [security] camera. Haven’t got that much cash? The city offers lower rates for small company logos or even an individual’s name. … The [...]

Old hacks never die, they just mangle more cliches: “There is going to be a time in everybody’s career where something happens that is a real pickle. They are going to be in some kind of jam or problem and you can never lie,” said Fleischer. “You don’t have to answer every question. You can [...]

This is what puts the “genius” in “evil genius”! HERSH: There was a dozen ideas proffered [from Cheney's office] about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build — we in our shipyard — build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put [...]

Daniel Larison, guesting for Sullivan, puts words to my own growing feeling of unease about this election: Back in January, the media criticized McCain for his lies about Romney, but ultimately forgave him on the twisted grounds that he doesn’t enjoy lying, and so he remained their hero. The same will happen concerning McCain’s lies [...]

One of the big tests for our nation this election will be whether we (the press, the campaigns, the voters) can handle the complex powder keg that is race in a responsible way that improves us all. The last 24 hours have not been promising. First Obama says something he has said before, in various [...]

In the grand cosmos of political polling organizations, Quinnipiac is one of the better ones. So it’s worth taking a look at its new summer snapshot of three battleground states–Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. The poll was conducted over a full week (July 23-29), about half of which fell during Obama’s overseas trip. Quinnipiac’s pollsters, Peter [...]

I try to stay out of the vice presidential speculation because (a) I am historically awful at speculating and (b) it is the most over-covered aspect of any given presidential campaign, given the relative unimportance of the choice, usually, to the political process. But the vice president has become a very important player–in the last [...]

The first thing college kids learn, after the thing about the beer bongs, is they must have a thesis in their papers, a unifying idea that unites all the words that follow. The same is true for presidential campaigns. There needs to be a unifying idea, an argument, one that is not just suited to [...]