Kevin Drum

ZOMG!!!….VOTER FRAUD!!!….A nonprofit organization that employs people to register voters in Virginia noticed that three of its workers in Hampton Roads appeared to be faking names in order to make their daily quota, so they turned them in to authorities. And what was the response of the chairman of Virginia’s Republican Party? He warned people […]

TED STEVENS….Alaska senator Ted Stevens has been indicted on corruption charges: From May 1999 to August 2007, prosecutors said Stevens concealed “his continuing receipt of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of things of value from a private corporation.” The indictment released Tuesday said the items included: home improvements to his vacation home in Alaska, […]

QUOTE OF THE DAY…. From Steve Pearce, a Republican House member from New Mexico who is running for the Senate: “At a time when we’re facing $4 gasoline, I think that you need people who’ve been in the energy industry to tell us what to do.” Uh huh. And when it comes to diet advice, […]

HARNESSING THE POWER OF THE NET….I missed this yesterday, but Dan Drezner went directly to the source and discovered how Justice Department officials vetted potential DOJ employees using the awesome power of the Nexis news database. Here’s the search string they used: [first name of a candidate] and pre/2 [last name of a candidate] w/7 […]

KIRKUK….The New York Times account of the bombing in Kirkuk on Monday is devastating: Just after 11 a.m., a suicide bomber blew herself up, killing at least 17 demonstrators and wounding 47 others, according to Iraqi security officials. No one claimed responsibility for the bombing, which bore the hallmarks of Sunni Arab extremists. Nonetheless, many […]

McCAIN’S PRIORITIES….“Will McCain Abandon Cap and Trade?” asks Matt Yglesias. The short answer, of course, is yes. The slightly longer answer is that I think the question is ill formed. Cap-and-trade is one those enormous, mega-complex, special-interest magnets that’s almost impossible to pass no matter how committed you are to it. Getting it through Congress […]

MAYBERRY MACHIAVELLIS….Monica Goodling has long since admitted that she used political considerations to hire career lawyers in the Justice Department, and a couple of months ago the Inspector General compiled statistical evidence showing that this was pretty clearly Bush administration policy. So in a way, today’s followup report is anticlimactic: it tells us that the […]

DRIVING….Here’s the latest from the Department of Transportation: total miles driven in May were down 3.7% from last year, the first significant May decline since they started keeping records in 1983, and even bigger than April’s 1.6% drop. What’s interesting, though, is that this change isn’t as sudden as it sometimes seems: it’s actually been […]

TO THE STOCKS!….John McCain is going to prevent oil companies from pocketing the proceeds of his gas tax holiday by publicly shaming them into passing the savings along to consumers? You betcha. I guess he came up with that idea because it’s worked so well with other huge industrial corporations in the past. And while […]

LIES, DAMN LIES, AND TAXES….I confess that I’m not quite as bent out of shape as some people about Michael Scherer’s article in Time this week that describes Obama’s and McCain’s tax plans. Yes, Scherer is more nebulous than he needs to be, but at the same time, it really is true that the plans […]