In a 21st century update to the Republican war on "welfare queens," John McCain and running mate Sarah Palin have tried to brand Barack Obama's tax-cutting policies as "welfare" and "socialism." But as it turns out, it is Palin who has emerged as the welfare queen of the 2008 campaign. From her family's taxpayer-funded travel […]

For the second time in 48 hours, Sarah Palin praised the ultra hardline Republican platform which ignores John McCain's past stands on abortion, same-sex marriage and stem cell research. One day after a CBN interview in which she extolled the constitutional amendment banning gay marriage it calls for, Palin told James Dobson that her running […]

Back in 1992, Vice President Dan Quayle famously misspelled "potato" during a grade school spelling bee. Now 16 years later Alaska Governor Sarah Palin has just had her own Dan Quayle moment. Asked by a Colorado third grader what the vice president does, Palin revealed that she failed to read - or at least understand […]

Just three weeks after booting New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd from the campaign plane, Team McCain grounded Time magazine's Joe Klein as well. Apparently, when the going gets tough, John McCain tells the tough to get going. Unable to withstand Klein's documentation of the McCain campaign's descent into the gutter, the Straight Talk Express […]

As his appearance on Fox News Sunday showed once again, "Joe the Plumber" is John McCain's newest human shield. Wurzelbacher is just the latest prop rolled out to either lend McCain attributes he obviously lacks or to offer the supposed maverick a cloak of invulnerability to criticism. As it turns out, he joins a long […]

In much the same way that night follows day, a desperate John McCain predictably played the "socialist" card against Barack Obama. Ratcheting up his recent scurrilous attacks that Obama's tax cuts for working Americans constitute "welfare," McCain in his Saturday radio address followed running mate Sarah Palin and Ohio Senator George Voinovich in branding Obama […]

In his speeches and with his latest ad, John McCain is committing a double-fraud when it comes to tax policy. In a spot featuring ersatz plumber and BFN (best friend for now) Joe Wurzelbacher, McCain called Barack Obama's tax plan for working families "welfare." As his duplicitous spot reveals, John McCain apparently knows very little […]

In the wake of last night's third and final presidential debate, a media frenzy has surrounded John McCain's latest human shield, "Joe the Plumber." But while reporters and bloggers continue to plumb the depths of Republican Joe Wurzelbacher's voter registration, unpaid taxes, distant links to Charles Keating, business license and other miscellany, one useful nugget […]

For the past two weeks, the McCain campaign and its allies have been waging an aggressive smear campaign designed to portray Barack Obama as out of the mainstream on the issue of abortion. But with his dripping condescension about the "health of the mother" in Wednesday's final presidential debate, John McCain turned the tables on […]

On Wednesday, the New York Times performed an election year public service with an analysis that was part history lesson and part thought exercise. Taking the example of the S&P 500 going back to Herbert Hoover, the Times rightly concluded that the Democratic Party "has been better for American pocketbooks and capitalism as a whole." […]