” I think the interrogations were in violation of the Geneva Convention against torture that we ratified under President Reagan. I think that these interrogations, once publicized, helped al Qaeda recruit. I got that from an al Qaeda operative in a prison camp in Iraq who told me that. I think that the ability of [...]

I should come as no surprise that many Democrats pray for Sarah Palin to be the candidate in 2012, but many smart GOPers realize how much damage she could do to the brand.
That’s why we’re seeing pieces like this latest rather lengthy Vanity Fair exposé.
Read the rest over at True/Slant.

One moderate Republican apparently wasn’t enough.
From CNN:
Conservative host Rush Limbaugh said Tuesday he isn’t sorry to see Arlen Specter leave the GOP — and that many Republicans wish the Pennsylvania senator would take a few others with him when he goes.
“A lot of people say, ‘Well, Specter, take [Sen. John] McCain with you. And his [...]

I do feel bad for the guy, but with the internet providing the means for anybody to easily donate to a campaign, the game changed and McCain’s public finance laws couldn’t change with it.
From Wash Times:
“No Republican in his or her right mind is going to agree to public financing. I mean, that’s dead. That [...]

As I’ve said in the past, I am generally in favor of reforming the Electoral College system so that states allocate their voters based on what’s come to be called the District Method.
Under this method, candidates get one Electoral Vote for each Congressional District that they win in a particular state and the candidate who [...]

And while there seem to be no details about what he actually wants in the plan, there is one very important thing he doesn’t.
From HuffPost:
Sen. John McCain is putting together a major economic plan that will be structured, in some ways, off of Newt Gingrich’s famous Contract With America.
In an email obtained by the Huffington [...]

And so it begins…
“Close them down, get them out of business. If they’re dead, they ought to be buried,” Sen. Richard Shelby, the Ranking Republican on the banking committee, told ABC’s This Week. “We bury the small banks — we’ve got to bury some big ones, and send a strong message to the market.” He [...]

In 2008, both major presidential candidates promised to curtail earmarks. The only one who has yet to blink on the issue lost his fight today to reign in the excesses of the new spending bill.
John McCain just can’t win.
The story:
The Senate voted overwhelmingly to preserve thousands of earmarks in a $410 billion spending bill on [...]

On a strategy for troop withdrawal and residual presence in Iraq, at least:
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), President Obama’s campaign opponent, went to the White House Thursday for a briefing on the president’s plan for a timetable for a troop drawdown in Iraq. Before heading down Pennsylvania Avenue, he said he was already largely on board.
McCain [...]

“I’m here tonight to say a few words about an American hero I have come to know very well and admire very much — Senator John McCain. And then, according to the rules agreed to by both parties, John will have approximately thirty seconds to make a rebuttal.”
- President-elect Barack Obama’s intro to his [...]

McCain did it a couple days ago when the RNC released an ad essentially trying to raise questions about the language Obama used during press conferences, and today Gingrich sounds the same alarm.
From Politico:
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is denouncing Republican attempts to link President-elect Barack Obama and disgraced Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich.
Senator John McCain [...]

I never understood why Republicans were so hot to talk about Reverend Wright in the general election when so much had been said in the primaries, but many in the GOP are still slamming McCain for not “getting tough.”
Well, guess what? McCain’s own people said that “getting tough” could have destroyed him.
From Politico:
John McCain’s top [...]

A new report from the Senate Armed Services Committee places significant blame for abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay on former Sec. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
The report’s executive summary, made public by the committee’s Democratic chairman Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan and its top Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, said Rumsfeld contributed [...]

More evidence that Joe Wurzelbacher knows little more than what his gut tells him:
Wurzelbacher told conservative radio host Glenn Beck that he felt “dirty” after “being on the campaign trail and seeing some of the things that take place.”
Recalling a conversation he had with McCain about the $700 billion financial industry bailout in September, [...]

It’s a bit of a snoozer, and outside groups created numerous Wright ads that had absolutely ZERO effect, but let Republicans keep telling themselves that McCain lost because he wouldn’t play tough and run this.

At the end of the day, this election didn’t come down to character. McCain’s campaign tried to make it about that [...]

Two CBS reporters, one who covered Obama and one who covered McCain, talk about it…

I do think one of the biggest reasons McCain started seeing more negative coverage in the last half of the campaign is he went negative and cut off press access, so the press were left to report on nothing but the [...]

Dan Gilgoff at Politico writes that very little has changed in the evangelical political world:
Evangelicals are still much more concerned with so-called wedge issues than any other demographic group. A Barna Group poll found that 40 percent of evangelicals chose their presidential candidate based on his position on “moral issues,” compared with 9 percent of [...]

Why?
Well, this surely isn’t the only reason, but he’s up for reelection in 2012 and Napolitano was seen as his chief rival. Now, for all intents and purposes, she’s off the table unless she wants to leave the DHS after a few years and start running for the Senate. That’s certainly not unthinkable, but definitely [...]

Well, my home state definitely took its sweet damn time announcing this, but now it’s finally official that we picked Mac, which means we’ve picked the loser for only the 2nd time in the past 100 years.
Here’s more…
The narrow McCain Missouri victory, by just 3,902 votes out of 2,888,000 cast, means that Missouri sided [...]

John McCain is back in the Senate and apparently getting ready to run for his seat again in 2010:
WASHINGTON – The red-and-blue Senate trolley rolled up to the Capitol basement Tuesday, a lone senator in the front seat checking a piece of paper before slipping it back into his jacket pocket.
“Welcome back,” Sen. McCain, someone [...]