That debate at Belmont University in Nashville, TN, was no town hall meeting. It was highly ritualized Kabuki Theater.
To begin with, instead of just letting the first 5,000 people to show up into the Curb Event Center and taking questions from the audience at random, The Gallup Organization hand-picked 80 uncommitted voters from the Nashville […]

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After meeting nearly around the clock for two days, a bipartisan group of Congressional leaders reached a tentative agreement with the Bush administration early Sunday morning on a compromise financial bailout bill that is less sweeping than the original proposal crafted by Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson, and includes more oversight, accountability and taxpayer protections. […]

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The right wing blogs had their tails in a knot over the weekend about a Missouri prosecutor claiming that “lies” against the candidate would be “prosecuted”.
Even Missouri governor Blout got into the act:
“What Senator Obama and his helpers are doing is scandalous beyond words, the party that claims to be the party of Thomas […]

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Sen. Barack Obama talks a good game when it comes to such issues as anti-discrimination, the value of military service and the importance of ensuring children get a high-quality education in public schools, but the choices he has made in his own life suggest that he doesn’t believe the stuff in his own stump speeches […]

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Willie has a folding table set up on the corner of 7th Ave. and 28th St. - at the crossroads where the Garment District, the Flower District and Chelsea commingle – from which he sells political buttons. Monday through Friday from about 10 am to 7 pm, you’ll find Willie, a tall, thin, middle-aged black […]

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Talk about putting lipstick on a pig, Sen. Barack Obama is begging former rival Sen. Hillary Clinton and other high-profile female surrogates, such as AZ Gov. Janet Napolitano and KS Gov. Kathleen Sebelius to hit the campaign trail in an effort to temper the fury of women voters who feel scorned when Clinton did not […]

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The Repubs were in fine fettle Wednesday night, showing off their sense of humor in back-to-back speeches packed with biting barbs, alliterative jibes and irony-laden vocal inflections by erstwhile presidential candidate and former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani (video) and vice presidential nominee AK Gov. Sarah Palin (video). Both speakers – especially Giuliani, who mugged his […]

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Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson notes that Spike Lee has taken to “grandiloquently divid[ing] American history into two epochs, “B.B.” and “A.B.” - Before Barack and After Barack.” With John McCain’s selection of AK Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate, Obama went from making history to being history in the span of 12 hours.
The […]

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On Tuesday, the 88th anniversary of women being granted the right to vote, Hillary Clinton was the living embodiment of the dream of electing a woman to the White House deferred as she pledged to support rival Barack Obama’s bid for the White House. On Thursday, the 45th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I […]

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Just how did Barack Obama (D-IL), a rather undistinguished IL state senator, get elected to the U.S. Senate, and without doing anything noteworthy in that august body, go on to capture his party’s nomination for president before even finishing out his first term in Congress? A combination of heartlessness and happenstance - and some say, […]

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To the anguished cries of, “No!,” Hillary Clinton (D-NY) released her delegates before Wednesday afternoon’s roll call vote – deliberately timed to be well out of the prime-time spotlight.  When it was NY’s turn to announce its delegate tallies – by alphabetical order 32 other states and territories had already done so – Clinton herself […]

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When Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) took the stage to deliver her remarks before the DNC, the enthusiasm of the crowd and the applause she got rivaled that of the iconic Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA), who perhaps delivered his last address to convention delegates on Monday.
Hillary gave one of the finest speeches of her political career. […]

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With Sen. Joseph Biden (D-DE) as Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-IL) running mate, you have a two-senator ticket - all talk, no executive action; no “favorite son” advantage in a key swing state with a huge chunk of votes in the electoral college; and a man whom voters resoundingly rejected when he was running for the […]

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 … But he’s going to make the media and punditocracy wait until he declares his choice via  text message on Saturday, after which he plans a joint appearance with his running mate at the Old State Capitol in Springfield, IL, where he announced he would run for president. [Update: It’s Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE), according […]

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After John McCain stole the show at Rick Warren’s “Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency,” Barack Obama’s moonbat and MSM supporters cried foul. They insisted that since McCain was en route during part of Obama’s interview with Warren, he could have been listening to the questions and answers.  
As “proof,” the conspiracy theorists pointed out […]

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Some would argue that journalism died in 2007 when “fake news” anchor Jon Stewart was ranked among the most trusted TV news anchors in the U.S. - along with that other fake news purveyor, Dan Rather (second item) in a poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. But “citizen journalist” Rick […]

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For people who pay attention to politics, the phrase “Chicago Machine Politics” means all the worst aspects of electioneering, corruption and dirty politics. Jobs are handed out as political favors, contributions are solicited in exchange for contracts, and government workers spend their times leading up to Election Day doing political work on behalf of […]

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Analyzing a spate of recent polls, political analyst Michael Barone finds that even with Obama’s whirlwind trip around the world and the MSM’s relentlessly favorable coverage of every breath he takes, every move he  makes and every vow he breaks (second item), “the basic dynamics of the race haven’t changed”:
[H]e doesn’t come close to maximizing […]

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By Stephen Marks, Special To The Stiletto Blog
Everyone’s complaining about how lackluster John McCain’s campaign has been. Well, I’m here to shake things up with the launch of a new 527, pH for America, and our first ad, “The REAL Barack Obama,” that will have liberals whooping and hollering “Swiftboat!” and “Willie Horton.”
The “pH” in […]

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Sen. John McCain’s campaign manager Rick Davis complained that Sen. Barack Obama was playing the “race card” when he predicted that the Republican attack machines would try to scare voters by pointing to Obama’s “funny name” and the fact that “he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills and the five-dollar […]

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Pundits are worried that voters have started getting the idea that Barack Obama is a rather arrogant and full of himself. It’s hard not to notice. He doesn’t just start many of his sentences in the first person or self-referentially, but repeats the “me, myself and I” two or three times. It’s either an odd […]

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 Citing President Bush’s agreeing to a “time horizon” for troop withdrawals from Iraq (second item) and the administration’s having authorized high-level talks with Iran and North Korea, The New York Times notes that McCain – who remains opposed to a timed withdrawal that is not based on conditions on the ground, as well as to […]

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After considering the possibility that “foreign leaders Barack Obama met with on his mid-campaign overseas trip were merely hedging their bets and don’t believe he will win the White House this fall” The Associated Press notes that many of them treated the candidate like a head of state:  
Jordan’s King Abdullah flew back early from Aspen, […]

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The American and European media have been ga-ga, gushing, cynical and sarcastic in covering Barack Obama’s Grand Tour of the Middle East and Europe – sometimes all at the same time.  
In a New York Times op-ed, Einstein Forum director Susan Neiman describes the unmistakably mocking tone several German news magazines took in their coverage […]

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One of the reason for much of the skepticism about global warming is the absolute craziness of fundamentalists in the church of global warming, who blame everything, and I mean everything, on the sins of greedy humankind.
One example can be found in last week’s Chicago Sun Times has an article saying that the latest threat […]

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Robert Novak touched off a frenzy of speculation with his scoop that “[s]ources close to Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign are suggesting he will reveal the name of his vice presidential selection this week while Sen. Barack Obama is getting the headlines on his foreign trip.” Some of the chatter naturally focused on the identity […]

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It’s not so much that Barack Obama is so perfect a being that he lacks the sorts of foibles comedians seize upon to mock mercilessly, it’s more that jokemeisters don’t want to navigate a minefield of hypersensitivity that could destroy their careers. The fact that Obama has proven as prickly and prissy as any other […]

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Barack Obama launched a Web site that fact-checks “smears” about him, his wife and his career. It remains to be seen whether this is an effective tactic against negative campaigning, but it certainly isn’t very funny.  
The New Yorker did much the same thing with its cover depicting President Obama - in full Muslim regalia […]

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The presidential candidate for change has adopted the twin themes of "hope" and "change" for his political campaign. These themes are the creation of David Axelrod, Barack Obama's senior campaign adviser. It was a stroke of brilliance to tap into the widespread disaffection with Washington D.C. and the growing irritation among normal citizens that they […]

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For someone who is selling himself as a “uniter,” Barack Obama has managed to create fissures and fault lines between and among every conceivable voting bloc – and has even divided spouses and families.
Case in point: Jesse Jackson père and fils having a public falling out over the elder Jackson’s having been caught on tape […]

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