Online Journal of Politics and Foreign Affairs
With the Iowa battle over, the Romney campaign is bringing out its big guns in New Hampshire, and that includes the guy who beat Romney in the Granite State four years ago: DES MOINES — Senator John McCain of Arizona is expected to endorse Mitt Romney Wednesday in New Hampshire, giving the former Massachusetts governor [...]
President Obama is being attacking from the right for following through on a policy decision made by his Republican predecessor.
It looks like House Republicans will be taking a much different path in the debate over the war in Libya than the one being called for by Senator John McCain and some other Senate Republicans: Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) isn’t swayed by movement in the Senate to back U.S. military involvement in Libya, saying Wednesday [...]
Contrary to what Senator McCain, seeking realism in military policy does not make one an isolationist.
Well, I guess you have to give John McCain some credit for loyalty, if not common sense: Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has said he thinks Sarah Palin could defeat President Obama in next year’s presidential election, but he’s far from certain that she will actually jump into the race. The GOP’s standard-bearer in 2008 also [...]
Rick Santorum, may have made the dumbest comment of the Presidential campaign so far: Here’s Santorum: HH: Now your former colleague, John McCain, said look, there’s no record, there’s no evidence here that these methods actually led to the capture or the killing of bin Laden. Do you disagree with that? Or do you think [...]
John McCain thoroughly dismantles the argument that Osama bin Laden’s capture vindicates the use of so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
This tweet from Senator John McCain back in August 2009 came across my timeline this afternoon thanks to someone’s ReTweet: How times have changed.
Despite the Defense Department releasing its study showing that the effects of allowing gays to serve openly would be minimal, Senator John McCain isn’t convinced.
John McCain announced yesterday that he would not be running for President again: NASHUA, N.H. — If John McCain hadn’t made it clear before, he’s leaving no doubt that the presidency is a dream gone by. Addressing a veterans rally for a Republican Senate candidate in Nashua on Saturday, the Arizona senator was reminiscing about [...]
The prospect of repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell before the November elections is in doubt thanks to a threatened filibuster led by Arizona’s John McCain.
On a night where high-profile establishment candidates in Alaska and Florida, John McCain cruised to victory over challenger J.D. Hayworth, 56.4% to 31.8% (source). Meanwhile, Governor Jan Brewer crushed all comers in a 4-way race, winning 81.8% of the vote. Also in AZ, son of Vice President Dan Quayle, Ben Quayle, leads a crowded field [...]
After surviving the worst of a hard-fought primary campaign against J.D. Hayworth, Senator John McCain is probably pretty pleased with himself right now.
Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey was interviewed on CNBC today and someone asked him about his former colleague J.D. Hayworth, who is running against John McCain for the Senate: Ouch, that one’s gotta sting. Incidentally, despite initially looking to be in a good position to beat McCain in next Tuesday’s primary, it now seems [...]
For much of the summer, it seemed like John McCain might be in for the battle of his life in the Republican primary against former Congressman J.D. Hayworth. With less than a month to go before the vote, it looks like McCain has nothing to worry about: Senator John McCain has opened a 20-point lead [...]
Senator Jon Kyl is distancing himself from earlier comments that he made accusing the President of holding border security “hostage.”
As the political battle over the repeat of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell goes down to the wire, two Republican Senators threatened last night to filibuster the military spending bill that the repeal is attached to: Armed Services Republicans threatened Wednesday to filibuster the defense authorization bill if it comes to the floor with Democrat-backed language [...]
In a surprising 11th hour development, the Joint Chiefs are insisting Congress hold its horses on allowing gays to serve openly in the U.S. military. The Hill‘s Eric Zimmerman (“Joint Chiefs, McCain oppose ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ compromise“): Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is circulating a letter from the Joint Chiefs of Staff opposing the plan [...]
President Obama is sending an additional 1200 soldiers to the Mexican border, a dangerous and token effort to placate Americans frustrated over illegal immigration. Randal Archibald, NYT (“Obama to Send Up to 1,200 Troops to Border“): President Obama will send up to 1,200 National Guard troops to the Southwest border and seek increased spending on [...]
A new poll in the Arizona Senate GOP primary seems to indicate that John McCain may not have as much trouble in 2010 as previously believed: The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Likely Republican Primary Voters in Arizona finds McCain with 52% of the vote to challenger J.D. Hayworth’s 40%. Two percent (2%) prefer [...]
Two prominent Republican Congressmen have come out against reading Miranda rights to American citizens suspected of terrorism. Congressional Republicans want to know whether the Pakistani-born American arrested in the Times Square car bombing plot was read his Miranda rights, with Sen. John McCain saying it would be a “serious mistake” if the suspect was reminded [...]
“Hardball” host Chris Matthews likened the Republican Party’s quest to nominate more conservative politicians to Josef Stalin’s murder of twenty million innocent people. Geoffrey Dickens has the transcript: MATTHEWS: Coming up what happens to Republicans who don’t march to the right wing tune? Well they’re getting purged. This is Stalinesque, this stuff. [...] MATTHEWS: Chris [...]
Scott Brown was elected to be the final vote against ObamaCare but he never got the chance. Now, some of his erstwhile supporters are having second thoughts. Republican folk hero Sen. Scott Brown is being taunted by triumphant Democrats – and slammed by irked conservatives – after the historic health-care bill he was elected to [...]
When President Obama invited Republican Congressional leaders to join him for a televised health care summit, they reasonably feared it was “a trap” in which the contrast between the contrast between a smooth talking Commander-in-Chief and Podunk legislators would make them look small. Clearly, Obama intended it as a PR gambit that would showcase him [...]
Ron Paul beat out Mitt Romney in the 2010 CPAC straw poll, with Sarah Palin finishing a distant third. Jonathan Martin and Jessica Taylor of Politico note that the reaction to the announcement was less than polite. Rep. Ron Paul, the libertarian-leaning Texas Republican who ran a quixotic bid for the Republican presidential nomination in [...]
Matt Lewis notes that “the Conservative Political Action Conference is coming up this week” (tomorrow, in fact) and declares “As always, it will be interesting to see who wins this year’s coveted CPAC Straw Poll.” Apparently, Taegan Goddard agrees in that he’s holding a straw poll on the straw poll. I’m not sure why. The [...]
Sam Wurzelbacher, briefly the face of Americans angry about potential tax hikes, has turned his ire against those who made him famous: John McCain and Sarah Palin. FDL’s Blue Texan and The Hill’s Eric Zimmerman are spreading the word throughout the blogosphere but Pennsylvania Public Radio’s Scott Detrow had the scoop. Wurzelbacher touched on several [...]
National Journal‘s Ron Brownstein sees the recent bout of gridlock in the United States as a sign of a more fundamental shift in how our government operates. Obama’s first year demonstrated once again that in this deeply polarized political era, big legislative crusades aimed at big national problems produce only big political headaches. President George [...]
In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court today ruled that the right of corporations to engage in political speech, including campaign and issue advertising, is protected by the First Amendment. AP, “Justices Block Key Part of Campaign Law” The Supreme Court threw out a 63-year-old law designed to restrain the influence of big business and [...]
A curious piece by Politico’s Ben Smith, “Game over: The Clintons stand alone,” begins: A new book is out with a highly critical but unsourced portrait of Hillary Clinton. This familiar occurrence — it’s happened too many times to count over the years — has usually been greeted with an equally familiar response: A fast [...]
Former McCain campaign manager Scott Schmidt tells “60 Minutes” that Sarah Palin’s “Hey, can I call you Joe?” opener to the vice-presidential debate was not, as widely suspected, as attempt to throw the self-important senator off his game but rather a reaction to her having repeatedly calling him “O’Biden” in debate prep. This anecdote is [...]
Daphne Evitiar doesn’t seem to note anything unusual about this: Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) sent a letter to President Obama today asking him to halt the transfer of six Guantanamo detainees to Yemen. The request, they say, is in light of the danger they’ve apparently just now realized [...]
Earlier this week, Julian Sanchez penned a piece titled “The Politics of Ressentiment” to explain the Sarah Palin and Tea Party phenomena. It challenges Conor Friedersdorf‘s notion that Palin’s “exaggerated victimhood” as part of a phenomenon he himself dubbed “the politics of schadenfreude — the strategy of deliberately drawing political support from the perception that [...]
Al Franken was presiding over a sleepy session of the Senate yesterday afternoon and took what AP calls “the unusual step” of denying unanimous consent to allow Joe Lieberman to finish his remarks. Franken was presiding over the Senate Thursday afternoon as Lieberman spoke about amendments he planned to offer to the bill. Lieberman asked [...]
Shockingly, John McCain is working to make life difficult for the man who beat him last November. Barack Obama began his presidency with an open hand toward the man he had just defeated in a race that was at times bitter. “There are few Americans who understand this need for common purpose and common effort [...]
In a move that has been coming for nearly two years, Charles Johnson has issued a manifesto explaining “Why I Parted Ways With The Right.” For those who don’t know, Johnson is the founder and principal author of Little Green Footballs, one of the oldest and most popular blogs. He was an elder statesman in [...]
Barack Obama has been president for just under 10 months but he’s added two trillion to the national debt and will double it by the end of the decade. CBS’ Mark Knoller: This latest milestone in the ever-rising journey of the National Debt comes less than eight months after it hit $11 trillion for the [...]
Daniel Larison is a bit too charitable here in assessing Mike Huckabee’s finish in last year’s presidential primaries: While Huckabee was officially the second-biggest vote-getter in the primaries last year, he achieved this mostly through perseverance and concentrated support from evangelical voters. Had Romney continued to compete and waste his money on what would still [...]
Michael Goldfarb wrote a piece for the Weekly Standard blog with the provocative title “Rent-a-General Jim Jones,” arguing that the man who spent four decades serving his country as an officer in the Marine Corps, rising to Commandant and then Supreme Allied Commander, is a partisan stooge for the Obama administration. A friend emails to [...]
Bruce Bartlett explains why he’s not a Republican anymore using a time-honored refrain: He didn’t leave his party; his party left him. While he now considers himself an “independent,” he’s more than non-partisan; he’s “anti-Republican.” Why? I still consider myself to be a Reaganite. But I don’t see any others anywhere in the GOP these [...]
Amidst the blogospheric solidarity for the Iranian protestors, it’s worth pointing to news that has been overshadowed by those events: The UN and OSCE monitors are leaving Georgia. Despite declarations that “we’re all Georgians now,” the fact of the matter has been from the beginning that neither the United States nor Western Europe had any [...]
Ana Marie Cox interviewed John McCain this afternoon and reports via Twitter that “if he were POTUS, he would have already ordered Joint Chiefs of staff to investigate efficacy of DADT.” DADT is, of course, the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy on gays in the military that has been in place since the early days [...]
Marc Ambinder has compiled a list of “The Six Top Conservatives Obama Listens To.” As several of those who saw the link via Twitter have noted, arguably none of them are conservatives: The Mainers, Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe Dick Lugar John McCain David Brooks Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith A perfectly fine list [...]
A Gallup poll released yesterday finds that, “More than 6 in 10 Republicans today are white conservatives, while most of the rest are whites with other ideological leanings; only 11% of Republicans are Hispanics, or are blacks or members of other races. By contrast, only 12% of Democrats are white conservatives, while about half are [...]
Politico’s Mike Calderone has noticed quite a few Republicans blogging at the left-leaning Huffington Post lately. While its namesake founder posits that” is a reflection of our traffic, our brand, and the fact that we are increasingly seen … as an Internet newspaper, not positioned ideologically in terms of how we cover the news,” a [...]
I stumbled on these at Daylife whilst looking for a photo to illustrate my “Obama Foreign Policy: Bush 2.0?” post: It’s a nice reminder as we head into the Memorial Day weekend that partisan politics is but a small part of life and that the things that unite us are much more important and powerful [...]
Ben Smith quotes lawyer A.B. Culvahouse explaining legal obstacles to Joe Lieberman’s having been John McCain’s running mate. “Five states have sore loser statutes … [making] it very difficult for someone who’s not a member of the Republican Party to become the vice presidential nominee if they only switch parties to become a Republican shortly [...]
The editorial board at The Economist (which apparently considers itself a “newspaper” despite coming out weekly in magazine format) praises President Obama for having “already done some commendable things” in the foreign policy arena but charges that, domestically, “His performance has been weaker than those who endorsed his candidacy, including this newspaper, had hoped.” They [...]
