Chase Utley, as is his wont, tripled in what would prove to be the winning run against Atlanta tonight.  His arrival at the plate for the at-bat prompted the following exchange on the Braves network: Joe Simpson:  “I’d be careful on the the first pitch with this guy.” Skip Carey:  “I’d be careful on all the subsequent ones, too.”

The UN’s top nuclear watchdog, Mohamed ElBardei, tells Der Spiegel in an upcoming interview that the current trend of atomic proliferation is creating an unprecedented threat to world peace. Unilateral military actions, like Israel’s strike against Syria last fall, he says, are only making matters worse. By my count, Israel has stopped nuclear prolifieration in Iraq and Syria, which ElBaradei and the IAEA failed to do.  Moreover, the push for

Hillary Clinton has finally announced she is suspending her presidential campaign, and urging her supporters to back Barack Obama in the general election.  Yet her speech opened and closed with generous doses of gender politics. Back in February, when I first noted the similarities between Clinton’s increasingly losing run and those of Jesse Jackson, there were some who did not see the heavy gender angle and grievance politics over the disputed primaries

Inasmuch as it is a long-running joke here at pw for commenters to denounce themselves for politically incorrect viewpoints, it is worth noting that folks like Richard Clarke and Keith Olbermann would like to have a “truth and reconciliation commission process” established for the Iraq hawks from the Bush administration (for starters).  According to Clarke, we cannot let such people back into “polite society.”  Unlike unrepentant domestic terrorists like tenured

At the HuffPo, Andy Ostroy claims that the sleazy GOP attack machine is kicking into high gear against Barack Obama. He is quite upset that Sean Hannity was calling Obama “radical” on his radio show Thursday, but he seems even more upset by Hannity’s audience: Listening to Hannity’s program makes you wonder if he and his kool-aid-drunken listeners are not part of some twisted, brainwashed cult. They greet each other

The meteoric rise of Barack Obama will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.  And Obama’s growing relationship with Chicago’s Mayor Daley, as well as his endorsements of Democrats who champion the kind of patronage politics Obama used to denounce as the worst of the “old politics” (a charge Obama now answers by saying, “Sometimes you pay your debts”), has people trying to better understand The Chicago Way. This week,

At TIME magazine, Karen Tumulty has a piece titled “How Obama Did It,” which adds a few nuggets to the tale of the Obama organization (which the Washington Post this week suggested was untold, though pw regulars know better). The first nugget is one of Obama’s seemingly unlikely inspirations: When Betsy Myers first met with Obama in his Senate office on Jan. 3, 2007, about two weeks before he announced