Never count a determined man out. John McCain was down for the count last summer. Broke and written off and flying coach. Now he’s taken Florida, and the Republican race to Super Tuesday has a whole new complexion.
Giuliani is headed for the sidelines. Mike Huckabee hanging in, maybe for a VP seat with Florida’s winner. [...]

The day after President Bush’s final State of the Union address, it’s hard not to think about this man’s legacy.
With grinding wars underway and the economy in trouble, the Republicans who would succeed Bush in the White House barely mention his name.
But they do talk about Ronald Reagan — almost ceaselessly. There was a time [...]

A week from tomorrow, coast to coast, and with everything on the line, the biggest day of presidential primary voting in American history will take place. On Super Tuesday, February 5th, nearly two dozen states are in play — and big ones.
The Democrats are thundering for the big day. Barack Obama is fresh off a [...]

Bill Clinton started out low-key in Hillary Clinton’s campaign — but no more. As Hillary and Barack Obama have gone to the mat in the heat of the primaries, the former President Clinton is all over this race — up to his elbows in the fight, throwing real punches.
Obama’s Iraq message? A “fairy tale.” A [...]

Martin Luther King Day has a little more heat on it this year than some. From the cauldron of presidential politics has spun the question: who mattered more in the earth-moving civil rights revolution of the 1960’s — Martin Luther King, or Lyndon Baines Johnson?
The preacher or the president? Crazy question, say those who were [...]

“Faith doesn’t just influence me,” Mike Huckabee told evangelicals last week. “It defines me.” And then he lost in South Carolina to John McCain.
In Nevada, labor lined up for Barack Obama, then Clinton took the vote. And Latinos carved their own way over political and color lines.
These are big players, speaking for the first time [...]

So, Michigan has spoken — to Republicans at least — and the word is Romney.
Mitt Romney needed it bad. And he got it. Michiganders went for the man who promised their jobs back, and not John McCain, who said some were gone for good.
But this Republican race is still a free-for-all. Next stop South Carolina, [...]

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was a field marshall in the Republican Revolution. Former senator Gary Hart was a Democratic contender for the presidency.
Now, they’re both saying the country is facing a crisis — and needs a radically new politics that blasts through partisan lines.
Gingrich is still conservative, but says Republicans have failed [...]

There was an amazing intergenerational moment on air last week, as former NBC TV news anchor Tom Brokaw faced cable talker Chris Matthews in the egg-on-the-face aftermath of the media’s New Hampshire miscall.
Clinton had won, not Obama as predicted, and Brokaw suggested that just maybe America’s political pundits were going to have to cool their [...]

It’s been a week for the political history books in the U.S., and a late stab at history in the Middle East.
New Hampshire voters had their say — and left the pollsters speechless. Now it’s a free-for-all: Clinton, Obama, Edwards, McCain; Romney, Thompson, Huckabee, “Rudy” — all still in this race.
Bush promises peace in the [...]

Only four days after the first votes, in Iowa, of Election ‘08, and one day before the New Hampshire primaries, Americans are in the thick of one of the most amazing political seasons in years.
But one thing’s been missing: the late-night laughs. Leno and Letterman sneaked back on last week. Tonight, Jon Stewart and Stephen [...]

Wow. This may not be the presidential campaign year many people expected.
Iowa has said its piece. And Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee have swept their parties’ first election year contests. Not the big-money Romney or the big name Clinton but an inspiring young African American Illinois senator, and an Arkansas governor and longtime Baptist preacher [...]

It is Caucus Day in Iowa — the first formal vote of Election ‘08 and the long race for the White House. If the Democrats’ complicated caucus procedure looks like a square dance, the Republicans’ is pretty straightforward — show up; vote.
But the GOP contest this year has been anything but a straight shot. Mitt [...]

And so at last, it’s all about Iowa, at least tonight, as Iowa voters line up in party caucuses for the first real votes of the ‘08 presidential campaign. In an extraordinary wide-open election season, candidates have thrown horse shoes and flipped burgers, cocked shotguns and kissed babies.
Now, Iowa stands to deliver a first verdict.
We [...]

And so it begins. At long last, the presidential candidates are in the starting gates in snowy Iowa and New Hampshire. But the first big votes of Election ‘08, this week and next, may decide… nothing.
Democrats could essentially tie! Republicans could fight all the way to the convention floor in September.
For the first time in [...]

Of all the presidential contenders in both major parties this election season, there is none that has hit with quite the crackle and jolt of Texas Congressman Ron Paul.
In debate after debate, his reedy East Texas voice has cut through the solemn pieties like Texas lightening, like Old Testament prophesy.
Nobody sees him winning, but Ron [...]

Benazir Bhutto was not just a beloved symbol of democracy to millions of Pakistanis. She was also the keystone of Washington’s long-shot plans for some kind of stability in Pakistan. She was the Bush administration’s last best hope for pulling Pakistan back from the brink.
Her very return to Pakistan two months ago was part of [...]

In the homestretch to Iowa and New Hampshire, former Arkansas governor and Baptist preacher Mike Huckabee has been the stunning wild card in the GOP pack. He’s spent next to nothing, turned his back on a generation of angry conservatism, and is now in striking distance of big wins in the Republican presidential primaries.
Here at [...]

Democrats in Congress wrapped up their first year in power this week, touting accomplishments on energy and the minimum wage — while the President got his way on the major issue of war funding.
Congressional investigators dove into CIA records on destroyed interrogation tapes.
The EPA put a roadblock in the path of California’s and other states’ [...]

In 2004, John Edwards was the optimist with the winning smile. Today, the former Senator from North Carolina still flashes that smile, but his combative talk on poverty and big business has remade his image as the Democrats’ fiery economic populist.
The message may be working: Running a close third in Iowa, where Edwards has staked [...]

Eight years ago, Arizona Senator and presidential candidate John McCain had it all: the war-hero biography, the rock-ribbed conservative credentials, and, most of all, the Straight Talk Express that charmed independents and the press.
This time, he was poised to be the Republican comeback kid. But his campaign faltered, and he’s been an also-ran in a [...]

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice already has a place in history. But there’s a lot of history left for her to make, and she’s out to make it count.
The risks are manifold. The challenges, some might say, insurmountable. Pressing for a Palestinian state and an Arab-Israeli peace. Stability in Iraq. The puzzle of Iran. Strengthening [...]

By guest host Jane Clayson
Like a revivalist preacher riding into town, Mike Huckabee — the former Baptist minister, Arkansas Governor, and long-shot Republican presidential candidate — is hogging the limelight, and sparking a lot of curiosity.
In new polls released this week, he has surged to the top of the GOP field in Iowa, and is [...]

It was the Double O Express, as Oprah Winfrey pumped up crowds for Barack Obama on Saturday from Iowa to South Carolina to New Hampshire.
For Hillary Clinton, the sight of Oprah and Obama drives home one of the great surprises — and ironies — of this historic campaign: that the first woman with a real [...]

Russians went to the polls yesterday and handed Vladimir Putin’s party, United Russia, a landslide victory in the parliamentary elections. It came as no surprise — for weeks, election watchers have pointed to massive voter intimidation.
Putin, as he asserts his “moral authority” to lead Russia, may be an old-style Russian strong-man — but his grip [...]

Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson and Mike Huckabee tried, in last night’s YouTube debate, to break out of the Republican pack.
They got aggressive, especially on immigration, but also on the economy, on foreign policy, on taxes and on trade. Romney played defense. Huckabee looked like a contender.
But with no clear frontrunner, and [...]

The last time Israelis and Palestinians sat down at an American conference table to talk peace — seven long and bloody years ago — the Middle East was a different place.
Today, as the old adversaries meet in Annapolis, Maryland — along with the U.S. and dozens of other countries, including most of the Arab world [...]

With President Bush’s popularity in a ditch, and Republicans in disarray, many Democrats on their party’s left feel their moment is now. Americans, they say, are ready to address inequality, to transform healthcare, to remake America’s image abroad — to embrace liberalism.
But what does that word, tainted by decades of abuse from the right — [...]

The polls still suggest that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee for president. She’s up by 23 points nationally, by 6 in Iowa, by 13 in New Hampshire, by 15 in South Carolina.
Yet, after a shaky performance — her first — in the last debate, pundits are pronouncing her vulnerable. Once seen as inevitable, [...]

Novelist, new journalist, and celebrity American thinker and brawler Norman Mailer died last Saturday in New York. He was 84 and, nearly to the end, a provocative, combative, relentless aspirant to literary greatness.
A kid from Brooklyn, he wrote his celebrated World War II novel “The Naked and the Dead” when he was just twenty-five. An [...]

It’s a funny week for Fred Thompson to be odd man out in the scrum of GOP ‘08 presidential contenders. Rudy Giuliani’s got evangelical Christian Pat Robertson blessing his candidacy. Mormon Mitt Romney has the religious right’s Paul Weyrich. Even John McCain has an endorsement from evangelical hero Sam Brownback.
But Fred Thompson — conservative former [...]

You want to know about anti-Americanism in the world? Here’s the unhappy conclusion of a big-time panel of Republican and Democratic heavyweights, out yesterday: “America’s reputation, standing, and influence are at all-time lows, and possibly sinking further.”
Never in our history, says the report, have we, as a nation, been so poorly regarded in the world. [...]

It’s the first Tuesday in November. A year from today, America picks a new president. Barack Obama may or may not be on that final ballot. The votes that will determine the fate of his candidacy start just weeks from now, in Iowa and New Hampshire.
That short clock is pushing new considerations of Obama and [...]

It is the biggest frontline U.S. ally in President Bush’s war on terror, and today Pakistan is in a state of emergency. Constitution suspended. Elections postponed. Supreme Court chief justice fired. Streets full of police. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of protestors and opponents of Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s military ruler, are under arrest.
Critics call it martial law. [...]

When it comes to network TV news, we are not in Kansas anymore. We’re far from the high, proud heyday. This weekend, NBC News anchor Brian Williams will host Saturday Night Live. We wonder if Walter Cronkite will be watching.
For a solid string of decades, the networks’ evening news was the glamorous national campfire, where [...]

Round seven in the Democrats’ drumbeat of presidential debates was a slugfest last night. The prime target: frontrunner Hillary Clinton. The attackers: just about everybody else on the stage.
The first primaries are just two months away now. No time to waste. Obama promised fireworks, but seemed mild on the attack. Edwards was on fire about [...]

Captain of the punditocracy Chris Matthews came up the hard way in Washington. The hard-charging host of MSNBC’s daily talk-fest, “Hardball,” started life in the nation’s Capitol as a Capitol Hill policeman — a starch shirt, gun-on-hip security guard.
But that was before he worked for Jimmy Carter and Tip O’Neill and, more lately, spent his [...]

When it comes to gambling, Americans are on a roll. In 1960, there was not a single state lottery in the country. Now there are 43.
And casinos? Once they were the exclusive marks of sin cities like Las Vegas and Atlantic City. Now they’re all over, and promoted like motherhood and apple pie. Have a [...]

The news from Turkey, even before last week’s House committee vote on Armenian genocide: U.S. standing with a key ally since the Cold War is in the cellar. Turks, who feel they stood with the U.S. again and again for decades, now say they see the United States as a major threat.
If this relationship collapses [...]

Iraqi scholar Kanan Makiya was a passionate, powerful advocate of American intervention in Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein. He laid Saddam’s crimes before the world, begged for action, dreamed of the democracy that could be.
He promised George Bush in the Oval Office that American soldiers would be greeted with “sweets and flowers” in [...]

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf won a messy and still legally disputed election over the weekend. Looks like another term for the U.S.-backed strongman. Maybe he’ll take off his military uniform, or maybe not.
Just to add to the confusion, a U.S.-backed rival to Musharraf, Benazir Bhutto, may return now from exile. Meanwhile, a battle in Pakistan’s [...]

Senator Chris Dodd wants to be president. He’s already spent 6 years in the U.S. House, and 27 years in the Senate. A Washington outsider he’s not. But in an election where experience might really matter, Dodd says he’s your man.
He draws strength from his family history, stretching back to his dad’s days as a [...]

The images out of Burma — out of “Myanmar” — last week were stunning, exotic, inspiring, all over the Internet … and then they were gone.
Red-robed Buddhist monks first padded in single file, cordoned by hand-holding young civilians. Then they marched in the thousands, chanting “democracy,” surrounded by Burmese crowds. Then came beatings and barbed [...]

After warnings of a possible crackdown from Myanmar’s military junta, thousands of monks and other protestors continued to march, demanding an apology for the beating and arrest of monks in a protest several weeks ago, and the rollback of steep fuel price increases.
Guests:
Simon Montlake, East Asia correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s trip to New York has turned into a doozy. The city where Fidel Castro called JFK “ignorant,” Yasser Arafat packed a pistol on his hip, and Nikita Khrushchev banged the UN podium with his shoe, has gone after Ahmadinejad with a vengeance.
“Bearded blowhard” said the New York Post. “Petty, cruel dictator” [...]

Death and taxes are the two sure things, they say. In the last week, the storm’s been brewing on the tax front. Former Fed chair Alan Greenspan re-emerged to say he never meant to sanction all of George W. Bush’s big tax cuts and the GOP-led spending that rolled right on.
Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson told [...]

Iraq has the world’s third largest proven reserves of oil, and they’re barely tapped. This week, the price of oil reached $82 dollars a barrel — the highest in history. And Alan Greenspan says in his new memoir that, at least for him, the U.S. invasion of Iraq was “largely about oil.”
Iraq’s ocean of oil [...]

Conservative legal hot shot Jack Goldsmith was tapped for a key job in the Bush Justice Department in part because of his “get tough” reputation on terror.
But within hours of getting inside as head of the Office of Legal Counsel — the office that sets legal boundaries for the presidency — this conservative top gun [...]

Noam Chomsky may be the world’s most widely-read super critic of American policy, but even his books got a boost in sales last month when Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez waved one on the floor of the UN General Assembly and implored gathered heads of state to read it. A boost as in Number One [...]

Maverick Californian Republican Pete McCloskey’s bio sounds like a page from history, and it is.
He graduated from high school the year World War II ended. A highly-decorated US Marine, McCloskey led bayonet charges in the Korean War.
He joined the US Congress in 1967, tangled with Richard Nixon over the war in Vietnam.
McCloskey retired years ago [...]

With all the hullabaloo in Washington over Dubai port operators and Iraq war woes, President Bush may glad to get out of town this week - and he’s getting way out of town, to India and Pakistan.
Half a world away, booming India is emerging as a new partner and a new challenge — as a [...]