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I missed this on Friday, but there's been another poll out affecting the Washington Governor's race, and it's not good news for Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire.

Readers will recall that Republican Dino Rossi won the 2004 gubernatorial election according to two counts of ballots, but on the third count, Gregoire won by 133 votes (and note that the third count was allegedly plagued by massive electoral fraud).

Now, she's had 3 years to persuade those who didn't support her that...

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Yesterday, I had coffee with a friend who was asking me my views on the presidential race. It occurred to me that while I write pretty regularly about whatever bit of dodgy-ness, whatever fiasco, or whatever bit of idiocy is on that given day coming out of the Romney camp, and that I also write fairly regularly on news affecting the Giuliani camp, I don't write much about the state of the race overall, and how I see it panning out. I certainly haven't done so in the interim since the evident...

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Apparently, several Tory MPs are calling for a no confidence vote vis a vis David Cameron's leadership of the Conservative Party in the UK. I guess there are concerns that the Tories aren't doing too well even under popular Cameron's leadership, and the traditional base of the party is not happy.

I normally despise Ann Widdecombe, but she's got a point when she says that Cameron needs to give greater prominence to policies in areas like health (to be fair, she also said he needs to...

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So, my old chum and fellow Islington Conservative Boris Johnson MP has made it onto the shortlist of Tory candidates for Mayor of London. I'm not totally convinced that Boris can beat Ken Livingstone, but I'd hazard a guess that he'd fare better than the other Tory shortlisters.

Boris has caused a ruckus in the past with some less than friendly comments he's made about, well, things like Liverpool and Liverpudlians. However, he's a household name who regularly appears on one of my...

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OK, I'll come clean about it and publicly. I am not a Harry Potter fan. Not that I've ever actually read Harry Potter (because, well, I'm 29, not 8, so I don't see why I would).

So, scenes like this are just baffling to me.



Maybe I don't understand the Harry Potter phenomenon because I've never been a big fiction reader (I can probably count the number of fiction books I've read and actually enjoyed on two hands, and that's after spending four years of high school...

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Today, Romney said he was scaling back his plans vis a vis the Ames Straw Poll, not wanting to "overwhelm" anyone.

Fat chance. Can anyone think of a straw poll in recent memory that Romney has not "overwhelmed" by inundating it with "supporters" paid to vote for him? Clearly, that's what happened with the YRNC Straw Poll in Miami a couple weeks ago, it's what happened at CPAC, and its what happened at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference last year.

Romney's statement...

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If you didn't know already, John Sununu is my favorite Senator, and if he loses next year, I'm going to cry for days on end. So, I'm not happy about seeing polls like this. A new WMUR/CNN poll shows that if ex-Governor and 2002 Senate candidate Jeanne Shaheen ran again in 2008 against Sununu, she'd get 54%, and he'd get 38%.

That's bad news, however, it's not nearly as bad as what some polls a few weeks back were saying, which is good (in a sick and twisted way). Sununu may be...

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So, when I was in New York earlier this week, I was pleased to see reported in the paper at which I write, the New York Sun, that Harry Reid was essentially planning to park consideration of a big tax hike that Max Baucus (D-MT) and Charles Grassley (R-IA), as well as most of the Democratic party, want to push through.

To remind readers, this tax hike is one that would see private equity partnerships paying an extra 20% in tax. That's a big, bad tax hike, which is terrible in itself,...

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I returned from New York last night to see that the Democrats have crafted their new Farm Bill. Surprise, surprise, it looks pretty crap, overall.

The main thing that stands out to me about this bill-- and probably the thing that I instinctively am inclined to hate the most about it-- is its establishment of a ceiling of a very high $1 million in gross income, which, if exceeded, means a cut-off of subsidies. The administration had wanted a ceiling of $200,000, a much more sensible...

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What is this $1 million earmark that Jack Murtha's after? Money for a "Center for Instrumented Critical Infrastructure" (note: I have an MA and a law degree and I'm not sure I can figure out what the hell that means), apparently. And why aren't Democrats like Melissa Bean and Jim Matheson, who I actually had a fair amount of time for last year after they supported the vast majority of Jeff Flake's anti-earmark amendments, voting to strip it out of the bill in question?

Only two Dems...

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