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Kennedy hires insider to soothe critics By BEN SMITH & GLENN THRUSH | 12/15/08 7:19 PM EST Caroline Kennedy’s trial balloon candidacy for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Senate seat was springing a few leaks over the past few days — so she’s made her ambitions more explicit and hired one of New York’s top political consultants to gain some altitude. After a week of coy courtship and low-key feelers, Kennedy began working the phones in earnest Monday — and signed up major Democratic fixer Josh Isay, who has deep connections to New York powerhouses Sen. Charles Schumer, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and...

December 10, 2008 Categories: Transition Blagojevich questions censored on Transition site President-elect Barack Obama's Transition today launched "Open for Questions," a Digg-style feature allowing citizens to submit questions, and to vote on one another's questions, bringing favored inquiries to the top of the list. It was suggested when it launched that the tool would bring uncomfortable questions to the fore, but the results so far are the opposite: Obama's supporters appear to be using -- and abusing -- a tool allowing them to "flag" questions as "inappropriate" to remove all questions mentioning Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich from the main pages...

Ben Smith: Perhaps the best way to see him is as a neutral in the (lopsided) battle between machine and reformers in Illinois. That's the stance he took in a defining battle, the 2006 contest for the presidency of the Cook County Board of Commissioners. Reformers fault him for failing to support their champion; but he didn't endorse the machine favorite either. He stayed on the sidelines, and kept his focus on the White House. You can accuse him of cowardice for that, or you can grant him that he had decided to devote himself to larger causes and ambitions...

Though Obama has built his campaign upon being the first “black” candidate (entirely ignoring the white half of his family tree as if it doesn’t even exist), the questions over whether or not he is African or Arab, Christian or Muslim, seems to have a very simple answer… Yes - all the above! Those who have not spent much time with a world globe lately might have forgotten that Africa is made up largely of Arab nations and Arab Muslim people. Egypt, Libya, Sudan, Morocco, Algeria and Niger are all Arab nations on the African continent. Across the Red Sea...

Barack Obama's appearance in Denver won't be the first convention speech framed by Greek columns. Republicans who are mocking Obama's appearance haven't mentioned it, but George W. Bush accepted his own nomination in 2004 on a set with a similar neoclassical theme, with columns rising on either side of him, as the pictures above and below show.