Patriotism isn’t about colored ribbons or bumper stickers on your car. It isn’t about waving a flag or chanting “U-S-A” at a sporting event. It certainly is not about wearing an American flag pin on your lapel. These are all pleasing symbolic displays of patriotism, but they are not patriotism in and of itself.
Feeling [...]

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The New York Times has begun producing a useful debate transcript analyzer. The analyzer allows you to not only view the video and transcript of a debate, but also view how much time the candidates had to speak, how many words they said, and the order in which they spoke. This tool can be [...]

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The Reagan Library Republican Debate finished just a couple hours ago and even though there were four candidates on stage, CNN’s Anderson Cooper was primarily focused on John McCain and Mitt Romney. Mike Huckabee twice made the point that he was not getting nearly as many questions asked of him as of the titular front [...]

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Anderson Cooper, the moderator of the CNN/YouTube Republican debate, made a point of telling the candidates at the start that they were expected to address the questions asked and not drift off onto other subjects. “Americans put a lot of time into submitting these questions. We think they deserve direct answers. ” In that [...]

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Think American confidence in the presidency is low? The public is even less confident in Congress. And that is also a result of the President Bush’s leadership.
Gallup conducts an annual poll of American confidence in 16 different societal institutions ranging from the military to religion, business to labor, the medical system to HMOs, news [...]

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Jim Gilmore, Republican presidential candidate from Virginia, has withdrawn his candidacy for the nomination. He cites his late entry in the race and “front loaded nature of the primary schedule” for his withdrawal.
Notably, he comes right out and says that it takes “years of preparation to put in place both the political and financial infrastructure [...]

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Sara Taylor, White House Political Director from 2005-2007, serves as a prime example of the cancer that has taken hold within the Bush administration. I wrote previously about President Bush’s placing political loyalty over his loyalty to his constitutional oath. That attitude seems to have permeated the senior White House staff also. Ms. Taylor, [...]

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“Politics is the art of the possible” -Otto Von Bismark
There are growing number of folks with a full head of steam about impeachment. There’s impeachcheney.org. There’s impeachbush.org. The blogosphere is abuzz with the idea. The mainstream media is starting to discuss it. There’s actual articles of impeachment against Vice-President Cheney in the House, submitted [...]

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Our political leadership, congressional and presidential, has turned the most urgent and critical issue facing our nation into a an exercise in sound bite governance and diplomacy. “Cut and run” and “stay the course” compete with “bring the troops home” and “support our troops” as empty slogans masquerading as policy. The nation deserves a well [...]

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This on Think Progress:
Yesterday on MSNBC’s Hardball, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) defended Ann Coulter’s attacks on John Edwards, including that she wishes he “had been killed in a terrorist assassination plot.”
He said that Elizabeth Edwards’s calls to stop making “personal attacks” against her family were attempts to “silence conservative voices.” He added that Coulter “is [...]

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