An apparent first from Republican challenger Van Tran in a nasty California House race:

Tran is sending out a scratch-and-sniff direct mail piece attacking [Democrat Loretta] Sanchez that features a hideous odor emanating from it.

Much like magazine perfume advertisements, the mailer says, “Open for a fragrance sample of

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To follow up on Mark’s Afghan update, we are in a strange phase of the war right now where news accounts–sometimes within the same outlet in the same week–paint contradictory pictures of whether we’re winning or losing. A few days ago we were hearing that peace talks with the Taliban were growing more serious, in part because we were …

Lots of people are picking up on this memorable statement by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell to National Journal:

The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.

Pretty clear, right? But there’s more to it. Later in the same interview (available online for subscribers …

Last week Swampland’s own Michael Scherer and White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer sat down to discuss President Obama — what he’s been trying to do in these final weeks before the election, how he’ll play the politics going ahead and what the administration wishes they could have done differently during the first half of …

A couple weeks back, on a lazy Friday, I heard someone on cable news say something about fine-print warnings on BlackBerrys that tell users not to put the devices within an inch of their bodies. It sounded odd to me, so I did a Google search, and low and behold, there it was. That afternoon I wrote an off-topic blog post sharing my …

My colleague will be too modest to brag, but a new GQ profile of Robert Gibbs singles out someone on Barack Obama’s reading list with whom Swampland readers may be famililar:

Obama does reserve a certain respect for opinion writers such as Tom Friedman and David Brooks of The New York Times, Jerry Seib of The Wall Street Journal, E.

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