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Today, I present my handy guide to choosing a presidential candidate. I call it the Asteroid Test. Imagine this scenario: A mile-wide asteroid is hurtling toward Earth. Scientists say a collision is imminent and that it will obliterate life on the planet. Now ask yourself this: What would each presidential candidate do? (Disregard my own candidacy, which is strictly a Flip Side phenomenon.) Here's how I see some of our presidential hopefuls reacting when I run through the asteroid exercise: • Joe Biden: He would speak at great length on how to solve the crisis. His plan might not work,...

It's hard to imagine that Scott McClellan's allegations that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were involved in the false exoneration of Karl Rove and Scooter Libby in the Valerie Plame case will be treated as anything but another footnote in the truth-challenged history of the Bush administration. It will be the spring of 2008 before McClellan's book is published -- deep into a presidential race -- and we'll eat the paper this isn't printed on if either Democrats in Congress or Michael Mukasey will be willing to go to the wall then in a serious investigation of what really...

TOM TANCREDO: Illegal immigrants. MITT ROMNEY: It's becoming too cold for flip-flops. MIKE HUCKABEE: Splenda. RON PAUL: The Internet. HILLARY CLINTON: A successful question-planting season. JOHN EDWARDS: No after-school detention for being tardy. FRED THOMPSON: The writers' strike. Maybe now somebody will have time to give him something interesting to say. JOE BIDEN: No time limit on Thanksgiving Day toast. JOHN MCCAIN: Not being tied up this holiday. BARACK OBAMA: The Obama girl. CHRIS DODD: A foxy wife. RUDY GIULIANI: November isn’t Gay Pride Month. DENNIS KUCINICH: Wife’s tongue stud.

In politics, the surest path to irrelevance and powerlessness is to be taken for granted by one party and written off by another. That's the road Latinos are on, thanks to major blunders by the Republicans campaigning for president. In June, all but California's Duncan Hunter blew off an invitation to address the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. In September, a debate on Spanish-language television had to be postponed after all but Arizona Sen. John McCain refused to commit. After taking criticism for the snub, Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson and Mitt Romney have committed to taking part...

Summary: At a Democratic debate in Philadelphia, Sen. Hillary Clinton ducked some questions and gave misleading answers to others. She falsely implied that the reason White House documents about her communications with her husband haven't been released is due to bureaucratic delays, and she avoided saying whether she would ask Bill Clinton to clear their release from the National Archives. She avoided a yes-or-no answer to whether she supports giving New York driver's licenses to illegal immigrants and at one point denied saying the idea made sense, when in fact she said less than two weeks earlier that it "makes...

A look at the Sunday morning chat circuit ... Former Sen. Fred Thompson visits NBC's "Meet the Press." Of special note, the program is reaching its 60th anniversary. It debuted on Nov. 20, 1947, and is the world's longest-running TV program. It airs at 9 a.m. on WESH-Channel 2. Former President George H.W. Bush will talk to "Fox News Sunday." It airs at 9 a.m. on WOFL-Channel 35. Sen Joseph Biden will take questions on CBS' "Face the Nation." It airs at 10:30 a.m. on WKMG-Channel 6. Another guest will be Mark Penn, who is a strategist for Sen. Hillary...

Homosexual EGALE Group Cancels Ontario Party Leaders' Debate Due to Lack of Interest by Hilary White TORONTO, September 6, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Ontario's leading homosexual lobby group has cancelled a planned leaders' "debate" due to lack of interest by leaders. The three main political parties in Ontario declined to attend the event that EGALE hoped would mimic one staged by their counterparts in the US. A pair of homosexual activist organisations in the US staged a political stunt last month in which most of the Democrat hopefuls for the presidential nomination were grilled by a panel to see which one...

Former vice president Al Gore's pronouncement that he is likely to endorse one of the Democratic candidates for president before the primary season is over has set off a slew of speculation about who his choice might be. Truth is, the courting of the "Goreacle" began many months ago. Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) and Gore huddled in Nashville in December, and Gore has also met with former senator John Edwards (N.C.). Gore and Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (Conn.) conferred as recently as last week. Not surprisingly, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) has not met with Gore. Neither has Sen. Joseph...

The press — or some of it — at least some of it have put Barack Obama on the road to oblivion. When the candidate responded, at the July 23 CNN/YouTube Democratic debate, that he would meet with rogue foreign leaders during his first year in office, much of the media excoriated him — even though his statement was met with applause, and a subsequent poll showed a large majority of Democratic voters agreed with him. Michael Goodwin of the New York Daily News even wrote recently that Obama “is starting to get that last call feeling. He has to...

Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards is getting the endorsement of two unions, the United Steelworkers and the United Mine Workers of America, on Labor Day. Edwards is scheduled to be in Pittsburgh, home of the Steelworkers' international headquarters, for a Monday rally and will accept the endorsements there. "The members of the Steelworkers Union and the Mine Workers union are some of the country's hardest-working, bravest, most courageous workers," Edwards said. "It is their tireless hard work which has helped build a stronger America that benefits all of us. I honor what they do every day." The former senator from...

Fidel Castro is an ingrate. That must be what Sen. Christopher Dodd is thinking now that Cuba's communist tyrant has endorsed a Democratic ticket of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama. "The word today is that an apparently unbeatable ticket could be Hillary for president and Obama as her running mate," he wrote in a column Tuesday in Cuba's Communist Party newspaper, Granma. He also had nice things to say about two of his favorite stooges: Jimmy Carter, for trying to normalize relations between the United States and Cuba during his feckless presidency; and Bill Clinton, for his part in...

I told you it was only a matter of time until the politicians started talking BAILOUT for people that bit off more than they could chew. They can’t have it both ways (or can they). They can’t have 70% ‘home ownership’ (more like home mortgageship) on one hand, and then use taxpayer money to say that nobody loses a house on the other. The thing is, 70% of the population probably shouldn’t be owning a house, and certainly not at the prices that many of them paid. The coming ‘foreclosure boom’ is going to realign the home ownership percentages to...

America was founded on the premise that men should live without tyranny from oppressive rulers and laws. It is a battle that never really ends. Tyranny has two equally dangerous and deadly sisters creeping into America’s social fabric and both are endowed with deep skullduggeries. Now America must fight terrorism with equal determination and skill as it once did against rising tyrannies. Unwittingly, America may be losing to an equally serious enemy right on her own home field. Pop culture, liberal trends and moral relativism are becoming the norm for millions each year and the trend may be out-pacing any...

America was founded on the premise that men should live without tyranny from oppressive rulers and laws. It is a battle that never really ends. Tyranny has two equally dangerous and deadly sisters creeping into America’s social fabric and both are endowed with deep skullduggeries.

WHO WON THE DEM YOUTUBE DEBATE? Biden 10% 2,213 Clinton 14% 2,955 Dodd 5% 990 Edwards 5% 989 Gravel 7% 1,624 Kucinich 11% 2,388 Obama 41% 8,860 Richardson 8% 1,723 Total Votes: 21,742

The mainstream media's bias is usually less blatant than this. In "Will Her Face Determine His Fortune?" the Sunday New York Times "profiled" Jeri Thompson, the "trophy wife" of Fred D. Thompson, "the grandfatherly actor and former Republican senator from Tennessee whose second wife is almost a quarter-century his junior." (He's 64, she's 40.) After noting her "youthfulness, permanent tan and bleached blond hair" and pointing out "her most dramatic (campaign) statements have been sartorial, like gold-lame wedge sandals on a campaign stop, or a plunging neckline for a Washington dinner," the Times got surrogates to cast aspersions on her...

Under the righteous-sounding banners of “equal opportunity,” “inclusion,” and “diversity,” the political Left embraces racial discrimination as legitimate public policy -- so long as the discrimination is practiced on behalf of the minorities that the Left axiomatically considers victims of an irredeemably oppressive America. Thus the Left reacted apoplectically to last Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling that public school systems may not achieve or preserve racial integration through measures that take explicit account of students’ racial backgrounds. Specifically, the Court’s split decision invalidated programs in Seattle and Louisville (Kentucky) that sought to maintain “diversity” in local schools by factoring race into...

NASHUA, N.H. - Aiming to create the first generation in which all Americans serve their country, Democratic presidential hopeful Chris Dodd is offering a range of initiatives to encourage — and in some cases compel — community service. "All Americans should serve our country," the Connecticut senator said in remarks prepared for delivery Saturday. "Endowed as we are with so many gifts, is it too much to ask that we each give something back to this remarkable place?" He proposes making community service mandatory for all high school students, doubling the size of the Peace Corps by 2011 and expanding...

{{{{DRUDGE POLL}}}} WHO WON THE DEM DEBATE IN NH? Biden 7% 488 Clinton 12% 901 Dodd 5% 383 Edwards 6% 413 Gravel 8% 591 Kucinich 10% 737 Obama 38% 2,759 Richardson 14% 995 Total Votes: 7,267

Another Dem candidate hires 'nasty' blogger After Edwards flap, White House-hopeful signs staffer with colorful Web trail A little more than three months after profane, anti-Catholic writings led to the resignation of Sen. John Edwards' campaign blogger, a man hired to head another Democratic presidential candidate's Web enterprise is under scrutiny for his past Internet postings. Matt Browner-Hamlin, the new official campaign blogger for Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd, frequently used explicit language in scathing diatribes that vilified his political opponents, according to documentation by blogger Ian Schwartz. [Editor's note: Schwartz's documentation can be seen here. Warning: obscene language] Among Browner-Hamlin's...