Sam Boyd

Mitt Romney will deliver a speech on Mormonism tomorrow after much debate within his campaign. The speech is thought to be a risk, but may be necessary to counter Mike Huckabee‘s faith-based surge in Iowa. Huckabee, meanwhile, is condemning a 527 that has been attacking other candidates on the phone and in direct mailings on […]

There’s a lot of great commentary on the blog today about Mike Huckabee. There are two things, though, that I think we have to deal with which we haven’t fully addressed. First, Huckabee could easily be the nominee (at least one poll has now shown him leading in Iowa and another shows him within striking […]

The LA Times has a good (not quite great) story on how the major Republican candidates’ plans to help the uninsured don’t… you know… help the uninsured. The piece focuses on preexisting conditions and, despite an odd peg to the Republican candidates’ own histories of cancer, it does a good job of explaining the issue. […]

Here’s a wacky idea: how about a reporter for a major newspaper writes a piece looking at where candidates from a party stand on a certain issue–illegal immigration perhaps. Wouldn’t that be nice? In fact, that’s exactly what McClatchy has as the lead article on its Washington bureau website (which you should be reading). The […]

Just in case you weren’t convinced, he refused to say yesterday whether he’d pardon Bernard Kerik, his mobbed-up and now freshly indicted former police commissioner. This is not only crazy on a policy level (what possible justification could there be for a pardon?), it’s crazy on a political level, too — for obvious reasons. It […]

An article in today’s LA Times provides some much needed (and sadly rare) skepticism about the government’s recent chest-pounding about rising cocaine prices: Price bumps in U.S. street cocaine prices have occurred before, touted by U.S. law enforcement officials each time as evidence that counter-narcotics policies were working. But the increases often proved temporary and […]

The Financial Times, which I’ve started reading for its international coverage now that it’s free and all, has a whole piece today on Joe Lieberman‘s continuing belligerent-guy-at-the-end-of-the-bar routine. I’d, of course, been aware of it for a while, but I was still taken aback by how he is finding new ways to out-neocon the necons […]

Jamie Kirchick, who recently and to my delight spent a whole post denouncing me as part of the “indecent left,” argues that Barack Obama is embracing “partisan identity politics.” What does that mean? I have no idea. Kirchick, writing on the blog of the neoconservative magazine Commentary (which amusingly has almost the exact same favicon […]

The LA Times reports today on seizures of surprisingly sophisticated homemade submarines used to transport drugs into the U.S: Over the last two years, Colombian authorities and the U.S. Coast Guard and Navy have seized 13 submarine-like vessels outfitted for drug running. The five seized by American authorities were en route to Mexico or Central […]

Saturday was exactly one year from the 2008 elections. Hard to believe it’s still that far away. On the other hand, Iowa is less than two months away which seems surprisingly soon. –Sam Boyd