Even as it begs for a big taxpayer bailout, GM is still spending billions on marketing, peddling its giant gas-guzzlers to Americans who want them less and less.

It's even got the cash to try and enlist college students in its efforts to greenwash. My intern, Meg Imholt, is...

For a generation, Walter Mondale's 1984 presidential campaign was cited as an example of how not to run for the White House as a Democrat: not only did Mondale run on a liberal platform, he even went so far as to promise to raise Americans' taxes, a promise that was...

In an article in today's New York Times, unnamed Obama advisers float a Tom Daschle trial balloon for Chief of Staff in an Obama administration; he's already been widely mentioned for other senior policy positions.

Appointing Daschle, who pulls in around a million dollars a year as...

The fundamental reason Obama had a hard time looking tough, passionate, and principled during the presidential debate, is that too often, this was a debate fought on conservative frames: who was more for oil drilling, more for coal, more for nuclear; who's for lower taxes; who's for a bigger military....

Photo: Chris Arnold, NPR

As if the Wall Street bailout couldn't get more obscene, Wall Street executives are now lobbying for huge fees from the government to manage some of the assets they're selling to the government; in other words, the taxpayer will take the...

You've got to hand it to Joe Lieberman. He has totally absorbed the "How to Be a Republican" training. For one thing, he seems to have learned a core GOP insight of which most Democrats remain ignorant: that for the overwhelming majority of voters, a candidate's character is far more...

Of course, Sarah Palin's no animal lover. She's put extraordinary effort into undoing federal wildlife protections for polar bears, beluga whales, and pretty much any other animal that gets in the way of the oil industry's plans.

But her wolf bounty really takes the cake for animal cruelty....

Tuesday night, we heard how great Hillary was, how much she's struggled for women, we heard how important health care is and how important breaking barriers is. But we didn't hear anything about what kind of person Barack Obama is and what kind of president (or Commander in Chief) he...

Virginia governor Tim Kaine had a tough task at his town hall meeting in Manassas in the Washington, DC, exurbs this weekend, where he was, in part, trying to prove to Obama that he could be an effective vice presidential candidate. Not only had he just said he favored so-called...

I have the reputation of being something of a Hillary-hater. It's understandable: the PAC I founded, Democratic Courage, ran the first anti-Hillary ad of the primaries. But for all my very public opposition to Hillary's presidential candidacy, the vice presidential picks being floated...

How is it that despite adulatory media coverage, long lines of volunteers at his campaign offices, and Americans deeply unhappy about the direction of the country, Barack Obama is rapidly losing support - and control of the agenda - to John McCain?

It's because Obama has reverted to the...

Under heavy pressure from lobbyists for Dominion coal, Virginia announced yesterday that it's going to permit the construction of a new coal-fired power plant, even though doing so clearly violates the law.

Just days after NASA's James Hansen testified that avoiding climate catastrophe will require immediately stopping...

As I reported last week, I'm in Appalachia, Virginia to attend a hearing by the Virginia Air Resources Board about whether or not Virginia will permit Dominion Power to build a dirty, coal-fired power plant. It's Eden in the Mountains here - miles and miles of green, forested mountains...

Virginia governor Tim Kaine set a new standard for politician mealy-mouthedness with a letter to his Virginia Air Board (tip of the hat to Raising Kaine for digging this one up). Although he asserts that his letter isn't about any particular decision, everyone outside the governor's office...

There's a massive silver lining to the Obama and McCain campaigns' escalating war to rid each other of staffers and advisors with ties to lobbyists and corporate America: suddenly, slaving away at a big law firm no longer seems like a path to power, but an express off-ramp.

When...

In his speech tonight, John McCain adopted the brilliant strategy of presenting himself as the candidate of responsible peace:

I disagreed strongly with the Bush administration's mismanagement of the war in Iraq. I called for the change in strategy that is now, at last, succeeding where the previous strategy had...

When the Senate is about to vote on a provision affecting the oil companies, John McCain has a certain favorite place he loves to be: his wife's private jet.

McCain has been "on the plane" for vote after vote that would have shifted billions in taxpayer subsidies from oil...

I was interning at Greenpeace's headquarters in Washington, DC. The news came over the wires that Dick Cheney would be speaking at a conference of the "Energy Efficiency Association," a front group for the oil, coal, and nuclear industries. My boss saw this as a perfect opportunity and sent me...

New Mexico congressional candidate Bill McCamley (who's running for right wing Republican Senate candidate Steve Pearce's seat), just came up with a very creative idea for taking the rug out from under self-financing candidates. In this case, the self-funded candidate in question is his...

In a just-unearthed 1995 interview, Barack Obama describes America as "a land of strangers" where, despite all the rhetoric about the "browning of America," the melting pot remains a far-off dream for most -- with different communities as foreign to one another as distant countries. He discusses how white executives...