World

Ladbrokes has cut Hillary’s odds, but she’s still in the lead. McCain now cut from 4/5 to 1/5 to win GOP nomination.  For all the odds – and expert analysis – head to Americano.

A classic, touching American story by my friend Nancy Trejos in the Washington Post’s magazine: SAT ON THE AVIANCA FLIGHT FROM BOGOTA TO PEREIRA, my forehead pressed against the window, staring out into the clouds. It was September 11, 2007, and I was flying over Colombia, my father’s homeland. I had been there only once before, at 13, when I accompanied my father to visit my grandparents and other relatives in Pereira, his home town. They hadn’t seen my dad since he left for the United States 25 years earlier. They welcomed him back as a hero then because, unlike them, he had made it to America and created a

I don’t trust the St Barack stuff either, but there’s no point in doubting that Obama has something his rivals don’t. There’s a clarity that comes to the Democratic race when one views it from a distance (in this instance, the best part of 4,000 miles). Yes Obama is inexperienced, yes a good deal of the talk about how he would unite the country is wishful thinking, yes there are times when he seems a little too keen to bathe in the symbolism of his campaign and yes, god knows how he would actually do as President. But all of these  concerns – perfectly legitimate though they may be –

Would John Edwards want the Vice-Presidency in return for playing kingmaker in the Democratic primaries? Perhaps not. After all George HW Bush is the only sitting 20th century Veep to have reached the top job absent assassination, death by natural causes* or the boss being forced from office (Nixon of course was defeated in 1960, but being Veep didn’t harm him). Megan asks: The VP slot seems to be a lot less important than it used to be.  Thoughts on why this is? The obvious answer is that the Vice-Presidency has rarely been very important but that, contra the idea that it is a graveyard post, it is probably more

One of the penalties of a three week blogging hiatus is that one misses stuff. For instance, I hadn’t realised Barack Obama’s favourite TV show was The Wire. The Las Vegas Sun reported: Michael Kostroff, an actor who was in town to volunteer for Obama and had a chance to meet him, told the Sun that Obama’s favorite TV show is his own: HBO’s “The Wire,” which chronicles Baltimore’s violent drug culture and the police who quixotically try to stop it. Obama told the Sun his favorite character is Omar, a stick-up artist who steals from drug dealers and then gives the loot to poor people in the neighborhood. “That’s

Don’t get too excited. Blogging hiatus may not be entirely done with… Apart from anything else, finding more than 2,500 items on one’s RSS feed is enough to weary any sensible fellow. Also, I’ve been struck down with flu (cure: hot whisky and lots of Wodehouse, especially the Blandings Castle novels). Anyway, this, from the always estimable Matt Welch made me smile today: When I was back there in elementary school, I thought Thomas Jefferson was a total sellout for buying Louisiana from Napoleon, because it contradicted his lifelong beliefs about the exercise of executive federal power. Yes, that’s what I was like at age 10.