Sarah Palin has spent most of this month out of state, campaigning with Senator McCain, and has endorsed neither Senator Stevens nor his opponent. But that has not stopped both candidates from trying to benefit from her enormous popularity in Alaska, which has only grown since she joined the McCain ticket.
Defying state law, the Republican administration has decided to hide a hard-fought race for the United States Senate at the bottom of the ballot, where they clearly are hoping some voters will overlook it. Their proposed design is not only illegal. It shows a deep contempt for Mississippi’s voters.
John McCain is not actually running for president. He’s running for Senate majority leader. All his passion is directed at defects in the legislative process. Listening to him talk, you get the definite impression that the two great threats of the 21st century are Islamic extremism and the Senate appropriations committee.
Senator Biden has become widely recognized as a respected voice on foreign policy, the two Iraq wars (against the first, for the second), the Balkans conflict and global AIDS prevention. From his perch as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, he has aggressively criticized President Bush for his unilateralist approach.
This week was a week of number twos on a variety of fronts. In the US, Joe Biden became Barack Obama’s new sidekick, while in Australia, the minor parties in the Senate geared up to take on their new roles as second fiddles. Meanwhile, in the entertainment world, ‘Stargate Atlantis’ was cancelled and replaced by ‘Stargate Universe’.
Senator Biden is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and is familiar with foreign leaders and diplomats around the world. Although he initially voted to authorize the war in Iraq — Senator Obama opposed it from the start — Mr. Biden became a persistent critic of President George W. Bush’s policies in Iraq.
The F.B.I. has a long history of abusing its authority to spy on domestic groups, including civil rights and anti-war activists, and there is a real danger that the new rules would revive those dark days. Clearly, the Bush administration cannot be trusted to get the balance between law enforcement and civil liberties right.
Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the Federal District Court here rejected arguments by Mr. Stevens’s lawyer, Brendan Sullivan, that the senator needed to be in Alaska to campaign for re-election. Judge Sullivan suggested that he might conduct the trial in Washington from Monday to Thursday, to allow Senator Stevens to go back to Alaska on weekends to campaign.
Even in confessing to preening, former senator John Edwards was preening. His diagnosis of narcissism was weirdly narcissistic, or was it self-narcissistic? Given his diagnosis, I’m sure his H.M.O. would pay. The creepiest part of his creepy confession was when he stressed to Woodruff that he cheated on Elizabeth in 2006 when her cancer was in remission. His infidelity was oncologically correct.
The political theater in the Senate has diverted the nation from the intellectually rigorous debate over energy policy it needs to have (and should have) in an election year, while sparing lawmakers from developing serious policies that could help set the country on a more energy-efficient and environmentally sound course.