Speculation about Hillary Clinton's successor in the Senate will soon be moot, but the debate about America's political dynasties is hopefully just starting. This year's newly open Senate seats were particularly revealing, with the leading contenders in New York, Delaware, Colorado and Illinois all including the kin of prominent politicians.

When a 19 year-old white supremacist recently gained a seat on the Palm Beach County Republican Executive Committee, the election created such an outcry that embarrassed local politicians used a technicality to block his seating. The entire process was buffoonish, although the views of the spawn of a grand...

You can disagree about the propriety of the auto industry bailout. You can disagree about free trade. You can disagree about a lot of things. But when you say gay people are pedophiles and rapists, that is not a simple disagreement: it is a stupid, hateful position that, say,...

The battle over the bailout of some segments of the US auto industry has become increasingly defined in terms of class, with the head of the United Steelworkers union accusing Washington of bailing out "those who shower before work but not those who shower afterwards," a sound bite eagerly...

For the past couple of decades, the consensus in the mainstream media was that the Democratic Party was in dire trouble: politically close to irrelevance and on the wrong foot demographically. Even Bill Clinton's eight years in power were considered a fluke: brought on by a third-party candidate, Ross Perot,...

During the recent presidential campaign, accusations of socialism flew from the Republican camp, with Sarah Palin the chief warrior against an evil she had likely not heard of until, say, early September (and this would include her many years in college studying, yes, journalism). Democrats reacted as if...

For many of us, 2008 will mark the last time we vote for a candidate who does not favor same-sex marriage. Hopefully, this will be because at least one candidate from a major party will support those rights, but we should also be prepared that, as in this year's presidential...

In a clear-cut case of wearing too many hats, Jeff Larson, until now mostly known as a guy who knows Karl Rove way too well, has been exposed as the man behind Sarah Palin's red leather top, and another $140,000+ of wardrobe changes for the vice presidential...

Senator Charles Schumer was on to something when he said a couple of weeks ago that John McCain is not "the most likable fellow." Schumer, whose hard work and salesmanship make up for his own likability challenges, was referring to one of McCain's now infamous debate performances. In truth,...

During John McCain's particularly erratic last couple of weeks, he turned into a 21st century Che Guevara, lashing out at Wall Street greed and falling just short of denouncing internationalist plutocrats. This newfound populism is so off the wall that even the Wall Street Journal has given up...

Less than five weeks before Election Day, Barack Obama is taking the fight to scarlet red Republican territory, adding several states won by George W. Bush to his list of potential takeovers. In the process he is contradicting both conventional wisdom and the many pundits who assumed the fight would...

Weeks of erratic behavior by John McCain were sealed by Friday's turning-point debate during which Barack Obama succeeded in reassuring voters that he is presidential, just as doubts about McCain's ability to run the country were rapidly growing.

This is a sea change in an election in which it...

In 10 days Sarah Palin's standing has crashed an awesome 24 points, with a clear majority now having a negative opinion of the Alaska Governor. This kind of free fall is more reminiscent of, say, Tom Cruise's cratering popularity after jumping up and down on Oprah Winfrey's...

The current economic meltdown, along with the energy, health care and transportation nightmares in the US, are not so much an indictment of a capitalist society, as they are of Republicans' duplicity in advocating for free markets when their main purpose is precisely the opposite: to ensure that economic power...

On a recent trip to Europe, I was asked several times how John McCain could get away with lying repeatedly about facts that were easily verifiable. Each time, I was stumped, realizing that the moral corruption that has settled on the McCain campaign appears invisible to about half the American...

After two weeks of party conventions which included The Maverick's bold, audacious cave-in to the religious right, we find ourselves in exactly the same place: Barack Obama leads John McCain slightly in national polls and more significantly in electoral college projections.

This is not surprising: McCain has been...

Asked about his position on same-sex marriage a year ago, John Edwards said that he "personally [does] not"support gay marriage, citing his religious beliefs as basis for his opposition. Even without the hindsight we have recently acquired about Edwards' own marriage, this was the response of a bigot.

Much has been said and written in the past six months about Barack Obama's need to attract white voters in sufficient numbers to be elected, first in the primary (done) and now in the general election. It is a truism that somehow got twisted into Obama having a "problem with...

When Barack Obama started running for president, he was widely described as arrogant for daring to take on the Clintons after just two years in the Senate, despite the fact that polling at the time showed him to be the only threat to Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary.

If you thought the Republican primary field was a bit of a joke, wait until you get a closer look at the front runners for the vice presidential slot: the names most mentioned include a failed VP candidate from another party, a "business leader" who was fired for poor performance,...