Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer gleefully notes that Barack Obama is sporting a US flag lapel pin these days, just in time to appeal to more conservative voters in the general election. A Facebook friend, Amy Goldman, an embittered Hillary Clinton supporter who now is supporting John McCain, pointed earlier today to Krauthammer’s column on the subject and said simply, “the faces of obama. NO DEAL,” presumably meaning that Obama’s seeming lapel pin hypocrisy is one...

What if a thug government held an election and almost nobody voted? That appears to be what’s happening today in Zimbabwe. Violent intimidation by strongman president Robert Mugabe toward the supporters of Morgan Tsvangirai caused the insurgent candidate to withdraw from today’s runoff election several days ago. Besides wanting to protect his supporters from increasing violence, Tsvangirai’s motivation appeared to be force the international community, particularly leaders of other...

George Carlin, the undeniably clever comedian who, a decade into a career that was comprised of typical Borscht Belt schtick, took his comedy in a self-consciously countercultural direction, has died. It was probably inevitable that the decade that triggered Carlin’s comedic transformation would inspire some satirizing court jesters to express the antiestablishment feelings of millions toward the war in Vietnam, the struggle for civil rights, White House lies, and the everyday hypocrisies of...

With the probable continuation and escalation of violence and bloodshed in his country looming in the days ahead, it’s impossible to fault opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai for withdrawing from the runoff election for president in Zimbabwe. The withdrawal is certainly not because, as a Mugabe henchman said, Tsvangarai is “chicken.” He has soldiered on in spite of numerous incarcerations and beatings. Rather, his withdrawal confirms the sad state of affairs in Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe’s...

In the summer of 1968, at the Republican National Convention in Miami, having been governor of California, the only elected office he’d ever held, since January, 1967, Ronald Reagan announced that he was a candidate for his party’s presidential nomination. Although Richard Nixon won the nomination and the election, Reagan, who hadn’t entered a single one of the year’s thirteen primaries, performed respectably. What amazed me then and amazes me now is that Reagan, in spite...

First, there was the mountain. Hillary Clinton entered the race for the Democratic presidential nomination sixteen months ago with higher negative ratings and lower approval ratings than any major candidate in history. While hardcore Democrats liked the former First Lady, other Americans were more wary. Or even hostile. They were represented to me by the legion of progressive women anxious to vote for a Democratic nominee this year, who have told me, “I will never vote for Hillary Clinton....

Something of a media firestorm has greeted Senator Hillary Clinton mentioning the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy following his June, 1968 victory in the California primary. I, for one, don’t believe that Clinton meant to draw an analogy between Senator Barrack Obama and Bobby Kennedy, insinuating that because the Illinois senator evokes the same sort of passion as Kennedy, he may be an assassin’s target, thereby presumably giving the New York senator reason for staying in the race...

Senator Hillary Clinton has a point as it relates to the Michigan and Florida delegate-seating controversy. In fact, she has several points. Among them… Every vote should count. Michigan and Florida should be represented at the Democratic National Convention. Delegates ought to be seated by a formula reflective of the results in their states. These points reflect principles of the “Mom and apple pie” variety, ones to which most Americans would readily assent. If the senator were...

A politician lacking “vision” can be vulnerable. When Senator Ted Kennedy could give no succinct description of where he intended to lead the country if he were elected president, his 1980 bid to wrest the Democratic nomination from incumbent President Jimmy Carter was doomed. And George H.W. Bush, widely acknowledged as better prepared to be president than most previous chief executives was also seen as lacking in vision, even by his friends. As he prepared to run in 1988, hoping to...

Should Barack Obama choose Hillary Clinton to be his running mate? That’s no doubt a question the Obama campaign is asking right now. And clearly, the Clinton campaign wants the New York senator to be asked to serve as Obama’s veep. That’s part of why Clinton is continuing her campaign and why today she’s pressing fat cats and rainmakers for more money for pressing on. Even if the Clinton campaign can convince the Democratic National Committee to change the rules of the nomination...

Senator Hillary Clinton needed a decisive win in Indiana and a close run in North Carolina yesterday. That outcome wouldn’t have boosted her mathematical chances at the Democratic nomination for president. She still wouldn’t have been in a position to overtake Senator Barack Obama’s elected delegate lead prior to the Democratic convention. But such results would have bolstered the Clinton argument that superdelegates ought to ignore the verdict of voters in the preceding primary...

Last night, I met with a group of twenty adults from Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, the congregation I serve as pastor. We were discussing some of the common reasons people give for not associating with a local church. One of these objections was, “I once had a bad experience with a pastor (or a congregation).” I asked the class members to tell me how they might respond if a friend said this to them. Several answered and the gist of their responses was simple: “I...

Regular gas was $3.55 a gallon here in southeastern Ohio yesterday. Many people I know are curbing their summer travel plans. They’re even doing more planning when it comes to everyday errands, combining them so as not to waste gas. This, of course, as average fuel prices climb, is happening across the country and the three leading presidential candidates have noticed. They’ve also noticed that the big oil companies are reporting record profits. First, Senator John McCain and now, Senator...

Howard Kurtz writes: Barack Obama needed this like he needed a root canal. Just when the Jeremiah Wright furor seemed to be dying down, the ex-pastor is back and suddenly inescapable. On the tube with Bill Moyers. Speaking to the NAACP. Showing up Monday at the National Press Club. There it was yesterday, that endless loop of Wright shouting “God damn America” over and over. Yet another opportunity to talk about how he thinks the US of KKK-A created the AIDS virus to kill blacks. This...

In her book, The Guns of August, historian Barbara Tuchman, told the story of how, seemingly against its collective will, Europe moved inexorably toward World War 1. At one point, she recounted a conversation between an ex-chancellor of Germany and his successor. “How did it all happen?” the first man asked incredulously. “Ach,” said his successor, “if we only knew.” One can’t help but wonder if, come January 20, 2009, Democrats won’t be engaging in...

Happily, there will be no debate between Senators Clinton and Obama in North Carolina. Their twenty-one previous confrontations have, above all, proven the vacuity of the debate form as developed in the television age. We either need to get rid of debates altogether or radically change them. (In addition to reducing their number dramatically.) I would suggest the following format for future head-to-head confrontations between two candidates: First, get rid of anchors, moderators, or interlocutors...

The presidential election was held in Zimbabwe more than three weeks ago. While it’s widely rumored that strongman Robert Mugabe was ousted by voters, we don’t know for sure. That’s because his government has refused to reveal the results. Mugabe apparently intends to cling to power, continuing to exercise his reign of terror (and error), thuggishly intimidating opposition, and killing off the Zimbabwean economy, while claiming that all the bad stuff in his country is Britain’s...

Scorn has been heaped on ABC News anchors Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos for their work on this week’s debate between Democratic presidential contenders Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Obama, his supporters, and some pundits have been critical of the two for using more than half of the debate to pose what they regard as “gotcha” questions, rather than ones dealing with substantive issues. Stephanopoulos defended the approach taken by he and Gibson, saying, “We...

[UPDATE, CLARIFICATION: If the comments of GS below, are any indication, my meaning in this piece may be less than clear. So, a little disclaimer, as it appears in my response below: "We have a health insurance crisis in our country. It must be dealt with. it is a scandal that in a land of plenty, with the best health care professionals and technology in the world, anyone should suffer unnecessarily or not have access to health care. I never said anything to contradict that in this piece! "I was...

An eighty-six year old man told me on Sunday, “There has got to be a better way to pick a president than what we’ve got now.” He added, “It’s pitiful!” I think he’s right. Sean Oxendine is appalled by the Democratic nomination process, which he reports that one of his friends calls, “like the electoral college, but more random.” But, Oxendine says, the most disturbing element of this “process” is the impact of the order in which primaries...

Back in February, 2005, while guest blogging on MSNBC, Ann Althouse speculated about Condoleezza Rice as a candidate for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination. Those old enough to remember all the way back to 2005, may recall that there was something of a Rice boomlet at the time. As the early months of that year wore on, the newly-installed Secretary of State felt compelled to respond to questions about the possibility that she would be a candidate. Her schedule was scrutinized for events deemed...

Continuing, on my personal blog, to analyze some of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s public communiques from the standpoint of one Christian pastor, I found myself, as I wrote the third installment last evening, considering the super-heated discussions we have as the result of new media: For now at least, the mainstream media and the blogging world have, for the most part, left the Jeremiah Wright controversy behind. That’s too bad in a way and it showcases the problem with what has become not...

Heretofore unrevealed antisemitic and racist comments from former Obama pastor Jeremiah Wright received prominent play on Thursday night. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me, convincing me that tonight, I needed to react and analyze Wright’s various pronouncements from one Christian’s perspective: [Antisemitic] talk like this has no place in Christian discourse. In the most famous passage in the New Testament, Jesus told Nicodemus that God so “love the world,”...

It looks like I’m not the only one. The way I see it, on the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton cannot win the nomination and is unelectable…too many negatives…and Barack Obama has been rendered equally toxic by the Jeremiah Wright debacle. But those uncommitted superdelegates just might save the day for Dems, after all. Here’s how: The superdelegates could remain uncommitted through the first ballot of the convention. Neither Obama or Clinton would then have enough votes to...

I’ve written before about my long-ago acquaintance with Sherrod Brown, Ohio’s junior US Senator. Brown was a very young member of the Ohio House of Representatives when, in 1979, I spent a year as Supervisor of Pages. He was always personable and without pretense, in spite of having won election to the House at a very young age and his obvious intelligence, two things that could have made one so young a bit full of himself. Yesterday, after not running into Brown in twenty-eight years,...