Kate Sheppard

Mitt Romney became the first Republican to air an attack ad “contrast ad” against one of his GOP rivals today with this new spot in Iowa, which goes after Huckabee on immigration: Call it “contrast,” “attack,” or whatever you’d like, but it’s a sure sign that the battle for the Republican nomination will be an […]

E.J. Dionne‘s op-ed in today’s Post argues that immigration is likely to play to Democrats’ advantage in the presidential election; voters who want a compassionate, practical solution to the immigration crisis will turn out to vote against the Republicans’ harsh rhetoric on the subject. But the opposite may be true in the congressional elections, as […]

Related to my post yesterday on the Related to my post yesterday on the Bush administration’s contempt for science and the prospects for a new administration, a group of leading scientists, academics, writers, and bloggers are calling for a presidential debate in 2008 focused specifically on science-related subjects. Topics would include the environment, medicine and […]

Should Should Barack Obama win the Democratic nomination, we can pretty much assume that the right-wingers will make a habit of “joking” about the “confusion” about his religion. We saw it with The Corner’s “Ah, the madrassah years” comment a few weeks ago, and today the Weekly Standard brings us a parody on Mitt Romney […]

The House Oversight and Government Reform is circulating a draft report on the Bush administration’s political interference with government climate change science. The report, put together after a 16-month investigation, brings together the information culled from 27,000 pages of documents from the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) and the Commerce Department, two investigative […]

In which he possibly In which he possibly disputes the 14th Amendment: And the Constitution, as Senator Thompson has indicated, indicates that those that are born here do become United States citizens by virtue of being born here. But if they’re born here from parents who come across the border illegally and bring them here […]

My Spanish is pretty decent, but not good enough to pick up everything in the rapid-fire, simultaneous translation at last night’s Univision debate. There was one point where Mitt Romney gave some backward answer to the question of why Latinos are abandoning the Republican Party, but I didn’t get the full quote. Migra Matters has […]

Last night’s rescheduled Republican Spanish-language debate on Univision was certainly an exercise in spin for the candidates. While they spent nearly a quarter of their last debate bickering about who would be the hardest on immigration, at Sunday’s debate the candidates tried to remain on less controversial ground. While they promised to increase border security, […]

Not to be missed, Mike Huckabee tries to prove his illegal-immigrant-hating cred with the release of his immigration policy, which his campaign has dubbed the “Secure America Plan.” The plan includes finishing construction of a border fence by July 1, 2010; “preventing amnesty” by giving undocumented immigrants 120 days to get out of the country; […]

In other environmental news, on the other side of the ever-warming planet, world leaders are debating what the next global pact should look like, and the United States is still unlikely to agree to the cuts that climate scientists from around the world say we need. UN Convention on Climate Change executive secretary Yvo de […]