That’s how it goes for Obama: on one day you pass a resolution against the proliferation of nuclear weapons and on the very next day you have to expose a nation for trying to proliferate those weapons. That’s how it was during Obama’s intense days at the UN and the G20 summits on September 24 [...]

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During Obama’s presidential campaign, he repeatedly promised that he would “change the culture of Washington” by fostering an attitude of shared legislative labor across party lines. And in the early months of his presidency, Obama has made a well-meaning, Lincoln-inspired effort to incorporate Republicans into his cabinet and to seek the counsel of moderate conservatives [...]

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Al Franken’s long-delayed arrival at the U.S. Senate is a milestone for the current Democratic caucus in the Senate – bringing the Democrats to an unfilibusterable 60 senators – but it is an even more important milestone in American political satire. The satirist’s role has traditionally been to comment upon, react to, and indirectly influence [...]

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The Iowa Supreme Court’s unanimous decision to legalize same-sex marriage in our state marks one of the proudest days in our history. Iowa can now legitimately claim to be on the vanguard of civil rights and human equality. And Iowa is a leader in the Midwest, proving that the perception that gay marriage is an [...]

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For the massive television audience on January 20th, 2009, Inauguration Day was a parade of odd and stirring images: from the quivering mass of a million and a half people packed into the mall, to Dick Cheney’s menacing emergence in a wheelchair, to the far-away look in Barack Obama’s eyes as he arrived on the [...]

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In retrospective narratives about Barack Obama’s path to the White House, the Iowa caucus is universally acknowledged as a pivotal moment for the success of his campaign. His win in Iowa is considered to have made a psychological impact on voters around the country and to have created a sense of confidence that he would [...]

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My friends, the American people have spoken and I concede that Barack Obama is the next president of the United States.
I’ve been looking forward to this: now that the race is finally over, I would like to take a moment for some straight talk.
My friends, in the 2000 presidential campaign I was devastated by the [...]

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The terms for the 2008 presidential election have been set: Barack Obama sets the agenda, determines the themes and introduces the vocabulary and John McCain responds by awkwardly and disingenuously parroting Obama’s agenda, themes and vocabulary. The most obvious and desperate example of this is the McCain campaign’s adoption of the “change” theme in the [...]

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George W. Bush’s ability to create chaos and violence has consistently trumped his capacity for diplomacy. Bush’s unique cocktail of petulance, arrogance and incompetence have produced a foreign policy characterized by the use blunt force (and borrowed money) on the one hand and a dismissive attitude toward diplomatic relations on the other. Two of the [...]

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George W. Bush has said that Jesus Christ saved his soul. He is mistaken.
On March 8, 2008, Bush used his veto power to kill a bill that was intended to make it illegal for the CIA to use torture to obtain information from detainees. Let’s put this clearly: Bush used his executive power to affirm [...]

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