Anyone who takes a politician’s statements literally over and over again is either a hopeless optimist or a fool. Or likely both in the case of John McCain supporters upset over the cottage industry in misquoting his statement about being just fine with American involvement in Iraq for 100 years. Back on January 3 at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire, McCain said that he could see a 100-year American presence in Iraq like the U.S.’s presence in Japan and South Korea “where Americans...

I was saddened to learn of Charlton Heston’s death right after seeing a rerun of Stardust: The Bette Davis Story, a Turner Classic Movies documentary on the life of the extraordinary if troubled actress. While any comparison between the gorgeously handsome Heston and the gorgeously strange Davis may seem inapt, one leaped out at me: As actors, Heston did pretty well with what he had through a career of big but not particularly challenging roles in which he repeatedly played to Hollywood stereotypes...

There is a ticking time bomb in the John McCain campaign and the sooner that Barack Obama can turn his full attention to exploiting it the bigger and consequential the explosion should be for this phony maverick. The presumptive Republican nominee supposedly swore off lobbyists after the Keating Five scandal nearly destroyed his political career, but they continue to have him by the short and curlies. Phil Gramm, who is co-chair of McCain’s campaign, is not just another lobbyist. He is the...

As someone who has been critical of the refusal of Hillary and Bill Clinton to release their tax returns, their decision to finally do so begs the question of why they waited so long, creating yet another controversy for Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign that seems to have been unnecessary. Or was it? The big news out of the release is that the Clintons are very wealthy, earning more than $109 million in the past eight years. That doesn’t exactly enhance Mrs. Clinton’s standing among blue-collar...

Do presidential candidates have a right to keep certain personal information private? Probably, but that does not include their medical records and tax returns. This makes the peregrinations of John McCain and Hillary Clinton so vexing, inevitably raising questions about what they may be trying to hide. Although McCain made 1,500 pages of medical and psychiatric records available in 1999 during his first presidential campaign, he has thrice rebuffed efforts by The New York Times to do so this time...

DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING Jr. (January 15, 1929-April 4, 1968) EXCERPTS FROM HIS LAST SPEECH (FULL TEXT, VIDEO) . . . Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty, and say, “If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, I will be happy.” Now that’s a strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land. Confusion all around. That’s a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only...

Tune in today at 1 p.m. EST for a Moderate Voice co-bloggers’ scrum. Michael Stickings and Shaun Mullen will be the guests of co-blogger Jazz Shaw and Ron Beasley on their Mid Stream Radio program. The topic will be the major political stories of the week. Click here to listen and call in.

Based on an interview with a dairy cow, among others, I predicted about a month ago that Barack Obama would sneak by Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania, yet another state seemingly tailor made for the one time shoo-in for the Democratic presidential nomination. Well, all of the polls show Obama narrowing what had been a 20 percentage point gap to only a few points, or in one case actually leading Clinton, with 19 days to go for what could and arguably should be her death knell. The Keystone State would...

I promised TMV reader and commenter Andy an update on my view in McCain: It’s Not the Sex Stupid, a February 22 post, that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s claim he was chastened by the Keating Five scandal and is an enemy of lobbyists is a fiction. I provide further evidence in the links below, but the short answer is that John McCain is so not over lobbyists that he has been hiring passels of them for key positions in his own campaign, most recently Doug Davenport. A charitable...

Jerry Zeifman has had it in for Hillary Clinton for years and claims that she was unethical and dishonest as a 27-year-old lawyer during the historic Watergate hearings and had to be fired. If his allegations gain traction, then she has a very big problem on her hands. I first heard of the allegations proffered by Zeifman, who was chief counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the 11 weeks of televised hearing hearings that were to lead to Richard Nixon’s downfall, during the Monica Lewinsky...

One of the stranger aspects of the blogosphere is how you get to know people that you’ve never actually met. Case at hand is Bill Roggio, a nonpareil military blogger who when not off hoofing around Iraq or Afghanistan lives an hour’s car ride away from me. We’ll surely meet someday, but in the meantime the always helpful and self-effacing Bill has been a terrific information source for me – and I am sure many other bloggers, too – by email and telephone. That is why I was delighted...

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Oops! It happened again – Chelsea Clinton was asked about the Monica Lewsinky scandal while stumping for her mother. There is some unanimity among mainstream media pundits and bloggers, including some who have been otherwise critical of Hillary and Bill Clinton, that such questions should be off limits. Their reasoning, such as it is, is that Chelsea was a teenager at the time, she surely has attained some sense of closure by now, and the whole subject is . . . well, yucky. I beg to differ –...

A smarty pants commenter or two took umbrage a couple of weeks ago when I said that it would only be a matter of time before taxpayers were asked to pay for the meltdown of Bear Stearns and other greed-inflicted Wall Street bigs who got scorched in the subprime mortgage and related disasters. Well, the time is now.

Sidd Finch was an incredible rookie baseball player who was training at the New York Mets camp in St. Petersburg, Florida in 1985. As described by legendary writer George Plimpton in Sports Illustrated, Finch (Sidd being short for Siddhartha, the Indian mystic in Hermann Hesse’s book of the same name) could pitch a baseball at 168 mph with pinpoint accuracy. The fastest previous recorded speed for a pitch was 103 mph. Finch had never played baseball before. He had been raised in an English orphanage...

T.E. Lawrence and John McCain are bona fide war heroes, but when it comes to Iraq, that’s where any similarity between the two men ends. Lawrence (top photo), one of the most astute observers of Iraq and the Middle East of any generation, knew impending disaster when he saw it and warned three years after the British occupation of Iraq commenced in 1917 (bottom photo) that it: “Is a trap which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. The [British people] have been tricked...

DOTTED LINE SHOWS WACKY DELAWARE-NEW JERSEY BORDER In a huge victory for environmentalists and my fellow First State citizens, Delaware won an historic Supreme Court fight with New Jersey today, probably killing a proposed nearly half-mile-long liquefied natural gas terminal on the New Jersey side of the Delaware River. The justices, in a surprising 6-2 decision, said Delaware can block the project even though it was proposed by energy giant BP for the other side of the river. Associates of mine...

I blew coffee through my nose when I read the details of the Bush administration “overhaul” of Wall Street regulation announced this morning. The so-called reforms, called the broadest since the Great Depression, would create a new regulatory maze but do virtually nothing to deal with the roots of the problem, which The New York Times charitably called an “alphabet soup of sophisticated financial products that have fueled the current financial crisis.” Indeed, the reforms do not rein...

Barack Obama bowled a 37 (not a typo) during a weekend presidential campaign stop in Altoona, Pa. “My economic plan is better than my bowling,” he told supporters.

Hillary Clinton says she will not allow the “big boys” to “bully” her out of the race, and I think she is absolutely right. Although it twigs me to no end that Clinton continues to play the gender card (when she or her surrogates are not playing race card), she has the right to soldier on despite the formidable obstacles standing between her and a presidential nomination that she long assumed would be hers for the taking. So I will say this: Let’s let things play out...

“I WAS BORN WITH MUSIC INSIDE ME” — RAY CHARLES It is a testament to the complexity of the brain that despite decades of research we still have relatively little understanding of why so many of us enjoy music so deeply and revel in its ability to alter our moods, trigger memories and even change our lives. That is just fine with me as someone who has never heard a kind of music that he didn’t like. Regular readers of my blog (the cats, my next door neighbor’s cats,...

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ANTI-AMERICAN DEMONSTRATORS IN BAGHDAD Although it at first may seem like a strange way to look at the latest round of bloodshed in Iraq, it’s all about Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki casting the first vote in that country’s much anticipated provincial elections. The result is a troubling new chapter in the Forever War: Basra city and parts of Baghdad are under siege, the seven-month ceasefire called by Moqtada al-Sadr is history and Iraq has entered a perilous new phase that no amount...

The power of endorsements have been something of an unknown quantity in the Democratic presidential campaign, but Barack Obama bagged a big and surprising one today when Bob Casey Jr., a U.S. senator and superdelegate, came out for him. Casey, the son of former Pennsylvania Governor Bob Casey and who is about as conservative on social issues as Democrats come these days, appeals to the white working-class men who have voted for Hillary Clinton in large numbers in previous primaries. Pennsylvania’s...

UPDATE The seven-month ceasefire brokered by anti-American radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr is, for all an intents and purposes, off. Times Online reports that neighborhood after neighborhood in Baghdad is being taken by militia gunmen, some with heavy fighting and others without a shot being fired. Meanwhile, The Washington Post reports that U.S. troops have taken the lead in fighting in the capital. * * * * * One, two or three years (pick one) after the Iraqi army was ready to stand up...