The Wall Street Journal has a piece (nicely paraphrased at the New York Sun for non-subscribers to the WSJ ) on the ties between a prominent adviser to Barack Obama and the CEO of Countrywide Financial Corp., a company at the center of the subprime lending debacle: James Johnson, one of three people tapped by Mr. Obama recently to oversee the search for his running mate, took at least five

The Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt renders a valuable service by wading through last week’s Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report which ostensibly flogs the “Bush Lied” theme, but in fact reports that Pres. Bush’s statements on Iraq’s nuclear weapons program, chemical weapons, biological weapons, production capability and mobile laboratories, weapons of mass destruction overall, ballistic missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles, support for terrorist groups other than al-Qaeda were all substantiated by the

Veteran political analyst Stuart Rothenberg agrees with my prior assessments that this year’s electoral map is unlikely to vary much from those of 2000 and 2004, but also notes the danger to Barack Obama of potential defections by downscale, older white voters: Even minimal defections from this group should cause concern among Democratic strategists, since the party has been able to count on this constituency in the past. In 2000,

The meteoric rise of Barack Obama will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.  And it has people trying to better understand The Chicago Way. It brought Andrew Ferguson to explore Hyde Park, which Obama called home for most of adult life (before investing in a property in the Kenwood neighborhood with Tony Rezko). Although Ferguson paints an accurate picture of how isolated Hyde Park

Allahpundit links to a Kos Kiddie re-raising the complaint about John McCain getting disability pay from his stay in the Hanoi Hilton. The more notable aspect of this (imho) begins with the fact that the Kos diarist is quoting a fresh post at AMERICAblog from John Avarosis.  The blog ranks in the Top 1000 at Technorati, much higher than a random Kos diarist. Even wackier is the conclusion of the Avarosis

The famous website claims he is, but Barack Obama’s bicycle could use a little work.

Earlier today, I considered — then discarded — the notion of blogging about the “Socialists for Obama” community blog at MyBarackObama spewing paranoid bile about “the Jewish lobby.”  The MyBO crew duly removed the post first noted by Doug Ross. But the MyBO people took longer to purge the post about “The Israeli Connection to 9/11”: And as I write this, the blog still has posted “An open letter to our

Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan has received at least his alloted 15 minutes to flog his book asserting that the establishment media were “complicit enablers” of President Bush’s agenda prior to the invasion of Iraq. While McClellan trades on the authoritah of his former post, Ari Fleischer — who was the actual White House press secretary during the period at issue — gives the chapter and verse demonstrating how sceptical the