Russ McBee

To no one's surprise, Sarah Palin abused her power as governor of Alaska: An Alaska ethics inquiry found on Friday that Gov. Sarah Palin, the U.S. Republican vice presidential candidate, abused her authority by pressuring subordinates to fire a state trooper involved in a feud with her family. After enduring eight years of the Bush mafia's ...

Rep. Wayne Gilchrest (R-MD) is finishing his final term in Congress, after losing his primary earlier this year. He's become disillusioned with his own party, and he has some less-than-charitable things to say about the GOP: We're in this bad place as a country because of the evangelicals, the neocons, the nasty, bitter and mean ... very clever ...

A group called Science Debate 2008 sent a list of questions about science and technology policy to Barack Obama and John McCain, covering such topics as science education, stem cell research, the politicization of science, space exploration, and numerous other topics. Both candidates responded to the list of fourteen questions; their answers are ...

Legend has it (according to Seutonius) that the Roman emperor Caligula ordained his horse Incitatus as a priest, and threatened to install that same horse as one of Rome's two consuls (who acted more or less as vice-emperors). Caligula was by all accounts completely insane, but his political promotions of Incitatus served to send a deliberate ...

This week's TennViews roundup of Tennessee liberal bloggers is three roundups in one: the first is on the Democratic National Convention, the second is on McCain's bizarre choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate, and the third is a roundup of everything else. Go here and see what everyone's been talking about this week.

John McCain made a stupefyingly wrong-headed strategic mistake today by naming Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential running mate. If McCain were elected, Palin would be one heartbeat away from the Oval Office, and given the fact that McCain turns 72 today, it is imperative that voters recognize that Palin is running for President just as much as ...

Since about February, I've done my level best to ignore this presidential campaign, and this week, I'm doing my best to ignore the Democratic Convention. The horrible choices of candidates and the scripted pageant happening in Denver have stripped this election of any optimism I might have once held about the next four years. The outcome of this ...

This is hilarious: A Tuesday fundraiser headlined by President Bush for U.S. Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign is being moved out of the Phoenix Convention Center. Sources familiar with the situation said the Bush-McCain event was not selling enough tickets to fill the Convention Center space, and that there were concerns about more ...

The New York Times story and this Washington Post story on the cozy relationship between John McCain and the lobbyist Vicki Iseman have resulted in a predictable deluge of manufactured outrage from the right wing noise machine. ''Manufactured'' is exactly the correct word: the story isn't just about McCain's relationship with a much younger woman; ...

On the subject of waterboarding, here's John McCain, who was tortured by the North Vietnamese, last October: Waterboarding is a form of torture no matter how it is done and should be a prohibited among U.S. military interrogation practices, Republican presidential candidate John McCain said today, taking issue with GOP rival Rudy Giuliani’s ...