“A billion here and a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.”  —attributed to Everett M. Dirksen, Republican who represented Illinois in the U.S. Senate from 1950 to 1969 A WEEK BEFORE HE SLIPPED ON ICE and broke his arm and a month before the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War, Defense Secretary […]

Read more

Coming Attractions?—The only thing standing between David Bossie’s film Hillary, the Movie and box-office success is the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, which prohibits him from advertising it. “I can advertise if I don’t use Hillary’s name [or image],” Bossie told an audience of fifty at a free screening at the American Conservative Union’s CPAC convention in Washington, […]

Read more

Editor’s note: As the most compressed, earliest, and most costly primary cycle in the history of the nation’s presidential elections narrows the field to two Democrats and one or two Republicans, with the Rev. Mike Huckabee competing for the vice presidency, one potential independent candidate waits in the wings. He is the current mayor of […]

Read more

Big Tent, Big Fight—Conservatives are struggling to come to terms with a presidential candidate who doesn’t share the nativism of Tom Tancredo, voted against tax cuts, sponsored campaign-finance reform law, and once demonstrated an indifference to abortion and an animus to the leaders of the Christian right. The attacks on John McCain began before he […]

Read more

Refrigerator Note—At a House Armed Services Committee hearing on January 17, committee chair Ike Skelton (D-MO) told Lt. General James Dubik and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Mark Kimmitt that he wanted “some sense of a timeline” on Iraq. Iraq’s Defense Minister had told Skelton that Iraq’s army would be able to handle internal security […]

Read more