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WASHINGTON, (AP) -- President George W. Bush will be judged on what he did. He will also be remembered for what he's like: a fast-moving, phrase-mangling Texan who stays upbeat even though his country is not. For eight years, the nation has been led by a guy who relaxes by clearing brush in scorching heat and taking breakneck bike rides through the woods. He dishes out nicknames to world leaders, and even gave the German chancellor an impromptu, perhaps unwelcome, neck rub. He's annoyed when kept waiting and sticks relentlessly to routine. He stays optimistic in even the most dire...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court took aim at one of its favorite targets Tuesday, criticizing a California-based federal appeals court for its ruling in favor of a criminal defendant. The justices threw out a decision by the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of Michael Robert Pulido, who was convicted for his role in robbing a gas station and killing the defendant. ...The high court said in an unsigned opinion that the appeals court ruling affirming the federal judge's action used faulty reasoning. ...Last month, the court overruled the 9th Circuit in an environmental...

Sacramento, Calif. (AP) -- Republican state lawmakers on Tuesday blocked the Democrats' $17 billion proposal to address part of California's fiscal meltdown, leaving the state on track for a cash derailment this spring. Assembly Speaker Karen Bass said she was disappointed that termed-out Republicans refused to step out of their ideological corners and accept a combination of $8.1 billion in cuts and $8.1 billion in tax increases. She said leaders would return next week to take up the challenge again. "We only have a couple of months before the state runs out of cash," said Bass, a Democrat. "And we...

Anchorage, Alaska (AP) -- Alaska's incoming senator is bullish on gun rights, wants to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling and believes less government is better. And he's a Democrat. But "definitely different than a New York Democrat," says Mark Begich. "I'm from Alaska." Begich, the 46-year-old, two-term Anchorage mayor, will take office in January after narrowly defeating 85-year-old Ted Stevens, the longest serving Republican in the history of the Senate. Part of Stevens' undoing in his bid for a seventh term was his conviction on federal felony charges last month. With Republican Gov. Sarah...

Jacksonville, Fla. (AP) -- Barack Obama looks and acts like a guy who expects to win. Just look at his election eve schedule. While John McCain rushed around to seven states for last-minute campaigning on Monday, Obama didn't appear before voters until after 11 a.m., the first of just three events for the day. Before that, he did radio interviews from his hotel room — then he headed out in sweat pants and a ball cap for a 45-minute workout at a gym. "What is the one thing at this point that has you a little bit concerned?" he was...

Barack Obama isn't the only one hoping to make a huge leap in importance and influence on Election Day. A Washington think tank with close ties to Obama and former president Clinton is about to publish a 50-chapter book on how to run a new Democratic administration. The Center for American Progress already has produced a 26-page document, widely distributed among Obama aides, describing what the last five presidents did on each day of his transition. And if Obama wins the presidency Tuesday, the group stands ready to fill top federal positions with some of its staffers, many of whom...

Barack Obama has pulled ahead in enough states to win the 270 electoral votes he needs to gain the White House — and with states to spare — according to an Associated Press analysis that shows he is now moving beyond typical Democratic territory to challenge John McCain on historically GOP turf. Even if McCain sweeps the six states that are too close to call, he still seemingly won't have enough votes to prevail, according to the analysis, which is based on polls, the candidates' TV spending patterns and interviews with Democratic and Republican strategists. McCain does have a path...

Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens' conviction Monday on corruption charges gives Democrats a late boost in an improbable drive to win the 60-vote Senate supermajority they want as they look ahead to the new Congress. Until the jury rendered its verdict, Stevens had been in a close race with his opponent, Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich, in a state that hasn't sent a Democrat to the Senate in a generation. Now Begich becomes the favorite as Republicans walk away from the 84-year-old Senate veteran and Democrats and their political allies waste no time trumpeting his conviction. "Alaskans deserve better than a convicted...

Nashville, Tenn. (AP) -- Here is a foolproof way for politicians to score points with evangelical voters: Attack the media, an institution widely seen as lacking conservative Christian voices. Republican presidential hopeful John McCain and his evangelical running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, have done just that at times during the campaign, with repeated jabs at the "liberal media." One way to change this perception, some church leaders, social commentators and journalists say, is for mainstream news organizations to employ — and keep — more evangelicals in their newsrooms. "Journalism has become more of a white-collar field that draws from elite...

Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin tells audiences the election is about the "truthfulness and judgment" needed to be president. But the Alaska governor often stretches the truth herself. She has exaggerated the nature of Barack Obama's personal ties to a former 1960s radical and falsely claimed the Democratic presidential candidate plans to raise most people's taxes. On Tuesday, she tried rebutting the Illinois senator's criticisms of Republican presidential candidate John McCain over health care and Social Security. She said Obama was misleading and wrong, but she herself told less than the full story. To be sure, most of Palin's...

Des Moines, Iowa (AP) -- Republican presidential candidate John McCain, once renowned for his jocular sessions with journalists, appeared irritable and at times sarcastic in an interview in which he defended running mate Sarah Palin's experience and campaign ads critical of rival Barack Obama. Meeting Tuesday with the editorial board of The Des Moines Register, McCain was asked why he picked the Alaska governor, someone "who doesn't have a lot of experience." "Thank you, but I disagree with your fundamental principal that she doesn't have the experience," McCain replied before citing Palin's work as a PTA member, city council member,...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is no stranger to criticism. He gives as good as he gets. But two recent critiques of his opinion in the landmark decision guaranteeing people the right keep guns at home for self-defense are notable because they come from respected fellow conservative federal judges. The judges, J. Harvie Wilkinson of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., and Richard Posner of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, take Scalia to task for engaging in the same sort of judicial activism he regularly disdains. Wilkinson was interviewed...

WASHINGTON, (AP) -- A Republican group launched a new effort Wednesday to turn Jewish voters away from Barack Obama, an ad campaign that compares the Democratic presidential candidate to Pat Buchanan but offers scant evidence of their similarities. The Republican Jewish Coalition is running an ad in dozens of Jewish newspapers that says Obama and Buchanan have views on Israel that are "dangerous, reckless and wrong." It quotes Buchanan as saying his views on Israel are a lot closer to Obama's than they are to those of GOP presidential nominee John McCain. "Concerned about Barack Obama?" the ad says over...

If there were any doubts that the sidekick was stealing the show, they were put to rest when Sarah Palin took off for Alaska with a wave from the tarmac by John McCain. His crowds suddenly dwindled. The exuberant cheering heard day after day during two weeks of joint appearances went away. And the Republican presidential candidate's schedule began to resemble the lightness of May instead of the full throttle of September. Meantime, Palin's campaign plane taking her home to Alaska was so crowded it had to let off some cargo to get the weight down. This was a striking...

It's happening around the coffee machine at work and the dinner table at home. Your hear it at football games, cocktail parties and on supermarket lines. It's consuming unmeasurable chunks of cyberspace. It's the Sarah Palin Conversation, and these days it can seem to be the only one we're having — especially women, for whom it's becoming increasingly passionate and partisan. We're having this conversation whether we love her or hate her.

The Bush administration is facing a new headache, this time in Latin America, as two leftist governments it can't ignore booted the U.S. ambassadors this week. Simmering ideological tensions between President Bush and the populist presidents of Bolivia and Venezuela boiled over this week in twin diplomatic spats that threaten U.S. counternarcotics operations in the region and possibly American energy supplies. The administration says it wants to get along with the growing number of leftist leaders in the Western Hemisphere, but Bolivian President Evo Morales and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez are having none of it, essentially responding with the time-honored...

So much for hugging in church. A day after Barack Obama and John McCain exchanged an embrace during a faith forum at a California megachurch, Obama called the U.S. economy a disaster thanks to "John McCain's president, George W. Bush," and chided his Republican rival's campaign team for trying to make him look unpatriotic and weak.

WASHINGTON, (AP) -- Forget the war for the White House for a moment. Among young people, Barack Obama appears to be beating John McCain in the battle for "cool." "Obama is a tad cooler than McCain on probably 57 fronts," said Emily Goulding, 25, of Los Angeles. "Obama's better looking than McCain, Obama's more stylish than McCain, Obama's more fit than McCain. He refers to better music than McCain."

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As we wait with bated breath for the Associated Press to come down from the mountain with its own rules for "fair use for bloggers," Patrick Nielsen Hayden gives us a sense of what the AP considers fair use (found via Boing Boing). Apparently, for quite some time, the AP has had up a page that lists out prices for quoting AP text. I will quote the list prices, and hope I don't get a DMCA takedown: 5-25 words: $ 12.50 26-50 words: $ 17.50 51-100 words: $ 25.00 101-250 words: $ 50.00 251 words and up: $ 100.00 Oh,...