On Monday morning, I attended the opening session of the Campaign for America's Future annual ProgFest, and as I noted at Mother Jones, the crowd was much smaller than previous years--the price of success, naturally. Moreover, the Obama White House showed the progs little love. Neither Barack Obama nor Joe Biden are speaking at the three-day gathering, and only three administration officials are dropping by. That's not a lot.

One of those three was Jared Bernstein. The opening panel was supposed to feature him and Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. I thought that could be a hot face-off. Stiglitz is critical of the Larry Summers-led economic bailouts of the Obama administration; Bernstein, a liberal-minded, working-class-oriented economist, would have to support administration policies. For policy wonks, this could have been Ali vs. Frazier.

Days ago, new Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu told The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg that if the United States doesn't stop Iran from going nuclear, he will. (See here and here.) Right after that, General David Petraeus told the Senate armed services committee that "the Israeli government may ultimately see itself so threatened by the prospect of an Iranian nuclear weapon that it would take preemptive military action to derail or delay it."

So it seems that as President Barack Obama contends with a variety of financial crises (bad economy, bad banks, bad automakers, etc.) and wars in Iraq (contracting) and Afghanistan (expanding), and North Korea (with its me-want-attention missile launch), he's also going to have to deal with pressure from Israel and its hawkish allies in the United States to move on Iran.

The first signal from the Obama administration, though, is encouraging for those who do not believe now is a convenient time for another war--especially one that could shut down the flow of oil to a global economy already in much trouble. On Tuesday, Vice President Joe Biden was interviewed by CNN's Wolf Blitzer, and this exchange ensued:

At a Washington dinner party I attended recently, much of the evening was consumed by a discussion concerning why President-elect Barack Obama has apparently chosen Hillary Clinton to be his secretary of state. No one had a good answer. Team of Rivals run amok? Had there been a deal between the two of them: I support you, and you give me state? That doesn't make sense, given that Hillary Clinton had in the past few weeks been trying to negotiate some sort of position for herself in the Senate leadership. One (absurd) possibility was heading up a special Senate task force on health care reform. Why would she be shopping for a Senate leadership post if she had cut a deal with Obama earlier?

When I ran into a television news anchor over the weekend, I asked her what she thought was behind the Clinton pick. This TV person who is in the mix of all political stories. She shrugged her shoulder and said, "I have no clue." And she meant it.

Frustrated that I had no good inside lead on what had prompted this action, I called a person who is close to Joe Biden. I assumed that this person had spoken about the pending Clinton appointment to Biden about the Clinton appointment--or at least to people around Biden. Certainly, the Biden camp would be in the know, right? After all, Biden has a big interest in who becomes secretary of state.

It happened. Here's what I posted at MotherJones.com....

So who's a real American now?

With his decisive triumph over Senator John McCain, Senate Barack Obama made obvious history: he is the first black (or biracial) man to win the presidency. But the meaning of his victory--in which Obama splashed blue across previously red states--extends far beyond its racial significance. Obama, a former community organizer and law professor, won the White House as one of the most progressive (or liberal) nominees in the Democratic Party's recent history. Mounting one of the best run presidential bids in decades, Obama tied his support for progressive positions (taxing the wealthy to pay for tax cuts for working Americans, addressing global warming, expanding affordable health insurance, withdrawing troops from Iraq) to calls for cleaning up Washington and for crafting a new type of politics. Charismatic, steady, and confident, he melded substance and style into a winning mix that could be summed up in simple and basic terms: hope and change.

After nearly eight years of George W. Bush's presidency, Obama was the non-Bush: intelligent, curious, thoughtful, deliberate, and competent. His personal narrative--he was the product of an unconventional family and worked his way into the nation's governing class--fueled his campaign narrative. His story was the American Dream v2.0. He was change, at least at skin level. But he also championed the end of Bushism. He had opposed the Iraq war. He had opposed Bush's tax cuts for the rich. He was no advocate of let-'er-rip, free market capitalism or American unilateralism. In policy terms, Obama represents a serious course correction.

And more. In the general election campaign, McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin, turned the fight for the presidency into a culture clash. They accused Obama of being a socialist. They assailed him for having associated with William Ayers, a former, bomb-throwing Weather Underground radical,who has since become an education expert. Palin indirectly referred to Obama's relationship with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who once preached fiery sermons denouncing the United States government for certain policies. On the campaign trail, Palin suggested there were "real" parts of America and fake parts. At campaign events, she promoted a combative, black-helicopter version of conservatism: if you're for government expansion, you're against freedom. During her one debate with Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden, she hinted that if her opponents won the White House there might come a day when kids would ask their grandparents what it had been like to live in a free country. At McCain-Palin rallies, supporters shouted out, "Communist!" and "terrorist!" and "Muslim!" when the Republican candidates referred to Obama. And McCain and Palin hurled the standard charges at Obama: he will raise your taxes and he is weak on national security.

Put it all together and the message was clear: there are two types of Americans. Those who are true Americans--who love their nation and cherish freedom--and those who are not. The other Americans do not put their country first; they blame it first. The other Americans do not believe in opportunity; they want to take what you have and give it to someone else. The other Americans do not care about Joe the Plumber; they are out-of-touch elitists who look down on (and laugh at) hard-working, church-going folks. The other Americans do not get the idea of America. They are not patriots. And it just so happens that the other America is full of blacks, Latinos, gays, lesbians, and non-Christians.

McCain, Palin and their compatriots did what they could to depict Obama as the rebel chief of this other un-American America. (Hillary Clinton helped set up their effort during the primaries by beating the Ayers drum.) Remember the stories of Obama's supposed refusal to wear a flag pin or place his hand over his heart for the Pledge of Allegiance? The emails about Obama being a secret Muslim? The goal was to delegitimize Obama, as well as the Americans who were moved by his biography, his rhetoric, and his ideas. It was back to the 1960s--drawing a harsh line between the squares (the real Americans) and the freaks (those redistribution-loving, terrorist-coddling faux Americans).

It didn't work.

How uninformed is Sarah Palin? I don't mean to suggest she is dumb in the sense of intelligence ability--though she may be. But despite the fact she has good campaign skills--which could be on display during her debate with Joe Biden--Palin is dumb in the sense of don't-know-much-about-history or anything else. Ignorance, you might call it. Sure, she must know plenty about Alaska issues, but she seems to be awfully unfamiliar with anything beyond that.

Take the latest clip from her interterview with Katie Couric. What drew the most attention was her inability to name any other Supreme Court decision other than Roe v. Wade. It may be elitist to say this, but she looked the fool, trying to answer the question ("What other Supreme Court decisions do you disagree with?") without citing any specific decision. (Dred Scott, anyone?) The subsequent chortling among commentators and bloggers was warranted.

But what struck me was this exchange:

Couric: Do you think there's an inherent right to privacy in the Constitution?

Palin: I do. Yeah, I do.

Couric: The cornerstone of Roe v. Wade.

Palin: I do. And I believe that individual states can best handle what the people within the different constituencies in the 50 states would like to see their will ushered in an issue like that.

As my colleague at MotherJones.com, Kevin Drum, pointed out, many conservatives do not accept that the Constitution contains a right to privacy and argue that it's judicial activism to see such a right in that grand ol' document. Is Palin breaking with this traditional conservative position?

I doubt it. She probably didn't know better. But her convoluted explanation of her position demonstrates she doesn't understand the basics of the Constitution. First she says there is an inherent right to privacy in the Constitution, then she adds that this right is dependent on what "different constituencies in the 50 states would like to see."

A federal right is not dependent on the "will ushered" in the 50 different states. Otherwise, what good are any of the rights outlined in the Bill of Rights? Sometimes a state may act in a way that is seen by some as a restriction on a constitutional right--say, imposing gun control measures--but then the matter goes to the federal courts for resolution. In the United States, a right guaranteed in the Constitution is not open to 50 different interpretations.

Palin is running for a position in which, if she wins, she will have to take a vow to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution" (per Article II, Section I of the Constitution). Is it too much to expect her to understand that document and its history?

Here's a review of Sarah Palin's speech I posted at MotherJones.com.

The speech was the easy part. But she did it well.

Delivering the most anticipated vice presidential acceptance speech in modern political history, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin accomplished the mission. She talked family, biography, policy, and John McCain. Especially John McCain the POW. And--Democrats beware--she demonstrated she's handy with a rhetorical stiletto and can slice Barack Obama and Joe Biden, while flashing a stylish smile.

The 44-year-old Palin did not wipe out questions about her experience. She did address allegations she had abused her office while serving as a small-town mayor and as a governor. She did not defend her more extreme social positions, such as her support for teaching creationism. But in politics, performance counts for much. And for a little-known politician who had been hunkered down for days, as negative stories and rumors flew about, she had a helluva opening night. Next, Palin will have to face the media--one of the targets of her speech--fielding presumably tough queries about her actions (and life) in Alaska and her foreign policy experience (or lack thereof). But for the night, she held her own--and showed that she has the potential to be a fierce and effective critic of the Obama-Biden ticket.

Palin came on right after former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani had trash-talked Obama, and she began with an obligatory maneuver: praising John McCain as a hero, and doing so multiple times. She quickly dealt with the, uh, family issue, noting that "No family ever seems typical...our family has the same ups and downs of any other." Not quite. But it sounded good.

After comparing herself to Harry S Truman and hailing small-town Americans (like herself), she lit into Obama. "A small-town mayor," she said, "is sort of like a community organizer except that you have actual responsibilities." (When Giuliani earlier referred to Obama's days as a community organizer, he drew laughs and hoots from the delegates.) Palin claimed that Obama had written memoirs but not laws, that he has given speeches on the Iraq war but has never used the word "victory"--except when "talking about his own campaign." Obama, she said, was more worried about the rights of terrorists than defeating terrorists. And what will Obama do once he has finished "turning back the waters and healing the waters"? Raise taxes, reduce the strength of America, and do nothing to increase drilling. (The delegates repeated their favorite chant of the evening: "Drill, Baby, Drill"). "The American presidency," Palin said, in another dig at Obama, "is not supposed to be a journey of personal discovery." She grinned the grin of a smooth put-down artist.

Palin, a self-described "hockey mom," laid on the populism--the Republican version of populism--noting how she had confronted entrenched interests in Juneau (she got rid of the governor's jet and chef), praising factory workers and small farmers, citing her husband's membership in the steelworkers' union, bashing the elite Eastern media, and denouncing the "permanent political establishment" of Washington, many of whom were in the hall as McCain supporters, donors, and aides. (After the speech, Republican pollster Frank Luntz said he believed Palin has the potential to connect with working-class voters.)

Decrying the Democrats as tax-hikers and national security weaklings, while blasting Washington, is the usual fare for Republicans. But Palin read her lines with flair and confidence. And--can we be frank?--she looked darn good doing so. She was with the program: this election is not as much about change, hope, or issues as it is about the measure of one man. "Biden and Obama," she said toward the end of her speech, "say they are fighting for you....There is only one man in this election who has ever really fought for you...in places where winning means survival and where defeat means death." He is, she continued, "the kind of fellow whose names you will find on war memorials in small towns across America--except he came home." And, she noted, he possess "the special confidence of those who have seen evil and have seen how evil is overcome....That is the kind of man America needs." It's some ticket: a made-in-small-town-America working mom and the man who goes off to war to protect her way of life.

Palin's case for McCain was as effective a pitch for the GOP candidate as any made at the convention. And her attack on Obama was drenched with panache. After she was done, her family--including her pregnant teenage daughter's fiancé--joined her on the stage, and then McCain walked out. "Don't you think we made the right choice for the next vice president of the Untied States?" McCain exclaimed with glee. McCain and his aides were entitled to conclude that Palin had been misunderestimated by her critics and foes.

They also were entitled to believe that Palin would be something of a babe-magnet for the party's base. Days ago, Tom DeLay, the former House majority leader, told me that by picking Palin, McCain had electrified social conservatives, who had not been jazzed by the prospect of voting for McCain in November. But at his church, this past Sunday, DeLay's parishioners told him they now were excited about the ticket. Palin's performance on Wednesday night can be expected to reinforce and boost social conservatives' enthusiasm for the McCain-Palin ticket. The social cons have a new champion.

Political experts say that veep picks ultimately do not determine outcomes in presidential elections. And that's probably true. Yet on Wednesday night, Palin displayed plenty of potential. (Joe Biden had reason to say to himself, "This debate's gonna be a challenge.") Though rumors still swirl and unanswered questions about her official actions in Alaska remain, Palin might end up an asset, not a liability, for McCain. She has to meet the press and withstand the ongoing and intense media scrutiny that only began a few days ago. She has to handle that debate with Biden. She has to prove her mettle on the harsh campaign trail. But while pundits before the speech were pondering how the McCain campaign could put lipstick on this (seemingly) pig of a choice, after the speech was over, it was clear, for at least the moment, that with Palin there's more lipstick than pig.

Soon after I wrote yesterday's posting--in which I questioned whether the Democratic convention was producing enough red-meat attacks against John McCain--I ran into Senator Dick Durbin, the Illinois Democrat and No. 2 in the Senate. I asked whether the Obama people planning the convention had made the slightest of strategic errors by not striking at McCain in a harsher manner. No, no, no, said Durbin, who has been one of Barack Obama's most enthusiastic supporters in Democratic officialdom. "They're cutting ads right now that will be a lot sharper," he noted, referring to spots that would come out after the convention. "We need to come out of here with a positive message."

Well, we'll have to see how strong those ads are. But on Thursday night, the main speakers at the convention generally stuck to the usual practice: praise McCain's heroism, courage and service to the country and then say the problem with him is that he has a few bad ideas. Joe Biden, who as veep-mate is supposed to be the lead attack dog, went on about how McCain's courage "amazes" him and noted that his friendship with McCain transcends politics. As I've written before, this strategy of heaping praise on McCain the man and then questioning McCain's ideas may place the Dems in a corner. McCain attacks Obama for being a traitor. He says Obama is so ambitious he is willing to lose a war to win an election. That's a damn ugly charge. It's a vicious indictment of Obama's character. What do the Obama-ites do? They say McCain is a man of solidity but they disagree with his policy notions. Not very even, right?

So don't the Dems then have to ratchet up? Show voters he's a phony maverick or a warmonger or completely out of touch (with the Internet, the economy, take your choice)? After all, if the choice for the voters is a good man with some bad ideas or a bad man with some good ideas, wouldn't many choose the former?

Hours after Biden's speech, I found myself in a hotel restaurant at closing time with an assortment of reporters and political ops. I raised this point, and a Democratic political consultant (not the one I mentioned yesterday) disagreed. This person said that there had been a loot of private polling done on the Democratic side that indicates that on-the-fence voters would not buy a direct slam on McCain and that they would not absorb any negative information about him unless the attacker paid tribute to McCain's military service. The consultant was adamant on this point. S/he maintained that the polling did show that voter perceptions of McCain could be changed to benefit Obama, if the attack was crafted the right way and McCain was not merely blasted.

I don't have access to this empirical data. It could be overwhelmingly convincing. (My table-mate did not reveal who had done this polling.) But if the Democratic assault on McCain has to be nuanced and tempered with praise, that could be quite tricky for the Obama campaign to pull off. It's clear that the McCain attack on Obama ain't gonna be subtle. Not next week in St. Paul. And certainly not in the weeks after that.

For my review of the third night of the convention, click here.

A piece on Biden I posted at Mother Jones.....

In the end, Barack Obama used unconventional means to announce a conventional choice for his running-mate.

Via a three A.M. text message sent to the cell phones of his supporters, donors and volunteers, Obama's campaign declared that he had chosen Senator Joe Biden, the Delaware Democrat, to be "our" veep nominee. (Three in the morning--was this a dig at Senator Hillary Clinton or just a coincidence?) With this I'll-let-you-know-first gimmick, Obama had snagged millions of cell numbers and email addresses his campaign can use in the weeks ahead to motivate voters and push them to the polls on Election Day. So in purely tactical terms, his running-mate rollout was indeed pioneering and widely successful. What remains to be seen, of course, is whether he made a smart pick by attaching his campaign for change to a fellow who has worked Washington's ways in the Senate for 35 years.

Sometimes going conventional is not the wrong course. During the past weeks of veep-frenzy, Biden's assets and liabilities have been dissected repeatedly. He possesses extensive foreign policy experience (which Obama does not). He can do straight-talk relatively well for a senator (while Obama has been accused of not fully connecting with working-class voters). Then again, Biden has suffered in the past from both verbal diarrhea and gaffe-itis. I've attended many committee hearings in the Senate when Biden turned a question into a long-winded monologue that drove people in the room to want to shout, "Question, Senator, do you have a question?!!" And there are times when Biden's mental filter has switched off and he has said the dumbest thing, such as when he famously called Obama "the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy." (The Daily Mail headlined its account of Obama's pick this way: "Obama names 'gaffe-prone' Joe Biden as his running mate.")

But Biden is a smart legislator who has shown that he can suppress his own faults when he must. He had a good campaign this past year as a presidential candidate. He won few votes but performed well at the debates and demonstrated he could keep his infamous verbosity under control. At the confirmation hearing for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, while other Democrats got bogged down in legal jargon practically indecipherable to the average person, Biden peppered Roberts with straightforward questions about Roberts' claim that he merely wanted to be an umpire on the bench who calls constitutional balls and strikes. "Much as I respect your metaphor," Biden countered, "it's not very apt, because you get to determine the strike zone. The founders never set a strike zone." It was the best moment of the hearing.

On foreign policy, Biden has always been an activist, thinking and engaging with the issues and crises generating headlines and those that don't make the evening news. He has a fancy for cooking up proposals. And even if he devises ideas that may raise objections--such as his plan to partition Iraq--he often deserves credit for the effort. (He issued his proposal for splitting up Iraq at a time when the Bush administration was doing nothing but "staying the course.")

One of Biden's better moments came in the run-up to the war with Iraq. In the fall of 2002, the Bush administration, claiming Saddam Hussein had amassed loads of WMDs that he could hand to al Qaeda for attacks against the United States, was demanding that the House and Senate grant Bush the authority to invade Iraq whenever he wanted. Rather than cave to Bush, Biden, the chairman of the foreign relations committee, worked with Republican Senators Richard Lugar and Chuck Hagel to craft an alternative: a resolution that would allow Bush to attack Iraq only for the purposes of destroying Iraq's WMDs and only after seeking UN approval. If the UN withheld permission, Bush would have to come back to Congress and prove that the threat was so "grave" that only military action could eliminate it. This was a wily legislative maneuver that could have averted a war. (And Biden told me and Michael Isikoff during an interview for our book, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, that he had received backdoor encouragement from Secretary of State Colin Powell.) But Biden's bipartisan measure was ultimately derailed by a fellow Democrat: House minority leader Richard Gephardt, who essentially accepted the White House's blank-check approach. After Gephardt did that, Republican senators told Biden, How can we be to the left of Dick Gephardt? "I was so angry," Biden later said. "I was frustrated. But I never second-guess another man's political judgment."

Biden went on to vote for the Iraq war resolution. Which demonstrated his Washington-ness. He had tried for something better. When that failed, he, too, accepted the prevailing notion. But his pre-vote effort to create a much more limited resolution will afford the Obama-Biden ticket a small measure of cover when its foes point out that Obama's main charge against John McCain (he supported the Iraq invasion) can also be applied to his running-mate.

The main rule in veep-picking is this: First, do no harm. Among Obama's conventional options, each had obvious problems. Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana stood side-by-side with McCain in fervently advocating the war in Iraq prior to the invasion. Governor Tim Kaine of Virginia is another political newbie on the national stage with no foreign policy cred, and he has yet to rack up many accomplishments. As for Senator Hillary Clinton, with her on the ticket, the election would be as much about the Clintons as about Obama and McCain. Depending on your view, that's either a big winner or political hell.

Biden comes with decades of baggage. There are thousands of Senate floor votes for GOP oppo researchers to sift through. He's had more than one plagiarism scandal. Hailing from a solidly Democratic state, he brings no Electoral College votes with him. But he has the talent to be both Obama's attack dog and his top foreign policy adviser. And though vice presidential nominees tend to have no true impact on the final results, Biden has the potential to be a fierce campaigner for and with Obama--that is, if he can be the better Biden for the next ten weeks.

By tapping Biden, Obama does little to reinforce his core themes of change and hope. He does not amplify his Washington-is-broken and postpartisan messages. He does not boost his claim that his campaign is a movement. He does not increase the excitement factor or accentuate the historic nature of his candidacy. But then Obama himself has already provided much of that. And it's possible that the American electorate can only absorb so much unorthodoxy in a presidential election. With Biden, Obama may have passed the do-no-harm rule. But that won't be known until the election is over.

Is it time to take Mike Huckabee seriously? Recent polling in Iowa shows that the former Arkansas governor has become the first second-tier candidate of the 2008 race to elbow his way into the first tier. In the Hawkeye State, Huckabee is essentially tied with Rudy Giuliani for second place in the Republican race, with Mitt Romney still maintaining a lead over both of them. An ordained Southern Baptist minister, Huckabee has been crusading for president as the real-deal social conservative. He does have a legitimate claim to the title. Unlike Giuliani and Romney, Huckabee has always opposed abortion rights. Unlike Fred Thompson, he has never lobbied for an abortion rights group. Unlike John McCain, he has not taken potshots at the leaders of the religious right. (McCain did so during the 2000 campaign.) Huckabee is a personable and thoughtful fellow. He has seriously discussed health care matters, and he once pardoned Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards (for reckless driving in Arkansas in the 1970s). For good cause, there appears to be a Huckabee bubble--or bubblelette--in Iowa.

Which brings me to angels.

A few weeks ago, Huckabee, as did other GOP presidential wannabes, spoke at the NRA's "Celebration of American Values" conference in Washington, DC. He entertained the crowd of gun enthusiasts with stories showing his love of hunting and his appreciation of firearms. And he tossed in a theological angle:

To watch mallards come in a flock, cut their wings and land but a few feet in front of you on a cold winter day near Stuttgart, Arkansas, is just about as close to heaven as I think one can get on this Earth. And as one who believes, because of my faith, that I'm going to Heaven, I'm pretty sure there will be duck hunting in Heaven, and I can't wait.

This remark later caused Jon Stewart to quip that Huckabee was saying that our heaven must be duck hell.

Huckabee then went on to recount the time he was in antelope hunting contest in Wyoming. Under the rules of this hunt, each member of a three-person team only got one shot. The day was cold and windy, and several inches of snow fell. After several hours of stalking prey in the cold, Huckabee had his chance: an antelope was 250 yards away, just at the edge of his range as a shooter. This is what happened:

I decided that one way or the other, this hunt is about to be over, because I can't stand any more of this cold. And somehow, by the grace of God, when I squeezed the trigger, my Weatherby .300 Mag, which has got to be the greatest gun, I think, ever made in the form of a rifle -- for my sake in hunting, I've never squeezed the trigger and not gotten something -- did its work, and somehow the angels took that bullet and went right to the antelope, and my hunt was over in a wonderful way.

Angels guided his bullet into the animal.

I know that it's easy for the non-religious to sneer at that sort of explanation for a good shot. But Huckabee's account raises a question: does he truly believe that angels intervene in such matters as antelope hunts, that angels spend their (presumably precious) time helping people kill bucks?

Probing a political candidates' religious beliefs can be a dicey matter. But anyone campaigning to be president is asking to be awarded tremendous power--the power to start wars, the power to really mess things up, the power to destroy the planet. It does not seem unfair to ask him or her how he or she views the world--including its metaphysical workings. I'd like to know if a politician truly believes his everyday actions--say, his golf swing--is influenced by angels. That does tell us something about the person.

Perhaps there are voters who would be happy to have a fellow in the Oval Office who has angels helping him when he shoots at an antelope. Imagine what angels could do with an air strike against a thuggish regime developing nuclear weapons. But other voters might find such a literal belief (or dependency) on angels off-putting.

In either case, I say voters have the right to know.

Consequently, I have twice sent Huckabee's campaign an inquiry in this regard. Several days ago, I emailed this question to his media people:

Does Governor Huckabee believe that angels literally intervene in the affairs of human beings and that such intervention includes hunting events?

So far...no response.

I'm not in Iowa these days tracking the candidates, but I encourage political reporters there who see Huckabee to ask him about angels. After all, if those angels can help him bag an antelope on a snowy ridge in Wyoming, perhaps they can help him round up caucus-goers in frosty Iowa come this January.

THE PARTY OF LARRY CRAIG. What is it with Republicans? From KIRO-TV in Seattle:

OLYMPIA, Wash. -- A Republican state legislator who repeatedly voted against gay rights measures resigned his seat Wednesday amid revelations he had sex with a man he met at an erotic video store while in Spokane on a GOP retreat.

But in police reports, Curtis said he was being extorted by a man he had sex with in a Spokane hotel room. The other man contends Curtis reneged on a promise to pay $1,000 for sex.

That reminds me. Whatever happened to Senator David Vitter, the Republican senator from Louisiana and married man who acknowledged calling the escort service of the DC Madam? Nothing. Vitter, who once argued that Bill Clinton had to be impeached for his immoral actions, is still in good standing within a party that professes fidelity to family values. Maybe the Republicans are too busy defending marriage to worry about Vitter.

A BIDEN BUBBLE? During Tuesday night's Democratic presidential debate, Senator Joe Biden had the best moment of the night. And, no, it was not when he slammed Rudy Giuliani for knowing nothing about foreign policy. I explain here.