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Behold, a miracle: Public anger over $4 gas is forcing at least some of our political class to confront their energy contradictions. Last week, Republicans Jim Walsh of New York and Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland -- two longstanding opponents of offshore drilling -- asked for a mulligan. We can now add John McCain to the roll: In a speech in Houston yesterday, the Senator finally came out in favor of increasing domestic energy supplies. This is progress, even if it did come dressed in some of Mr. McCain's familiar policy confusions. In the past, the Republican has been a chief...

Washington - Republican presidential hopeful John McCain blasted US dependence on foreign oil for effectively bankrolling undemocratic regimes and called Tuesday for the United States to allow greater exploration off its own shores. McCain said that money for oil was going to hostile states and supporters of terrorism in the Middle East, leaving the US in a dangerous and vulnerable position. 'Oil revenues are enriching the enemies of the United States and potentially limiting our own options in containing the threat they present,' McCain said in a broad speech on energy policy in Houston, Texas. Energy has quickly become a...

Energy Policy: While Democrats want to continue to outsource our energy supplies to the likes of Hugo Chavez, John McCain wants to repeal the federal ban on offshore drilling. The energy tide is turning.McCain has rightly called rising energy costs due in large part to restricted domestic supply a national security issue. On Monday, he previewed a Tuesday speech in Houston and said that as commander in chief he would end the federal ban on offshore drilling first enacted in 1981 and continued by every president since. We "must embark on a national mission to eliminate our dependence on foreign...

WASHINGTON (AFP) — Democrat Barack Obama Tuesday accused White House rival John McCain of "posturing" as the Republican, tapping voters' anxiety about sky-high fuel prices, called for offshore oil drilling. In a speech later in the Texas oil capital of Houston, the Arizona senator was to call for a 27-year-old moratorium on offshore exploration to be lifted -- reversing his own support for the ban when he ran for president in 2000. McCain was again to push for a summer suspension of federal taxes on gasoline, to ease a little of the pain at the pump for voters already reeling...

In a campaign year marked by flare-ups surrounding comments that have offended one group or another, John McCain and Barack Obama have moved on to the next sensitive battleground: the question of McCain’s advanced age. As some Republicans see it, Democrats are deliberately talking in code about the presumptive 71-year-old GOP nominee as part of an attempt to highlight his age.“It is code; there is no question it is,” Ed Rollins, a Republican strategist who helped lead President Ronald Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign, said when age surfaced as an issue. “They are trying to raise doubts.”MSNBC host Joe Scarborough repeatedly...

A runaway metaphor is not the worst sin in the world. But if former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig really is a potential national security adviser under President Obama, he's doing his potential future boss no favors when he talks like this: Richard Danzig, who served as Navy Secretary under President Clinton and is tipped to become National Security Adviser in an Obama White House, told a major foreign policy conference in Washington that the future of US strategy in the war on terrorism should follow a lesson from the pages of Winnie the Pooh, which can be shortened to: if...

Sen. John McCain called yesterday for an end to the federal ban on offshore oil drilling, offering an aggressive response to high gasoline prices and immediately drawing the ire of environmental groups that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee has courted for months. The move is aimed at easing voter anger over rising energy prices by freeing states to open vast stretches of the country's coastline to oil exploration. In a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, nearly 80 percent said soaring prices at the pump are causing them financial hardship, the highest in surveys this decade. "We must embark on a...

Climate change is never going to rise to the status of a top-tier political issue" is how one top climate-policy expert recently described the political lay of the land to me. Just take a look at the results of a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. The top issue for voters (27 percent) was job creation and economic growth. Right behind was the war in Iraq (24 percent). Then came energy and gas prices (18 percent). Far down the list were the environment and global warming, at a minuscule 4 percent. So despite all the media attention on global warming...

RLINGTON, Va. (AP) - Sen. John McCain said Monday the federal moratorium on offshore oil and gas drilling should be lifted, and individual states given the right to pursue energy exploration in waters near their own coasts. With gasoline prices rising and the United States chronically dependent on foreign oil, the Republican presidential contender said his proposal would "be very helpful in the short term resolving our energy crisis." McCain also suggested giving the states incentives, including a greater share of royalties paid by companies that drill for oil, as an incentive to permit exploration. Asked how far offshore states...

Because the mainstream media is acting as the cheerleader and campaign manager of Mr. Obama, the public has not been getting the truth - or getting it but too little and too late. ... There's one fraud bigger than Mr. Obama: the mainstream media that are busy selling him instead of reporting on him. Both Mr. Obama and his party are not right for America at this time. A piece circulating on the Internet cataloged exactly what Mr. Obama and his party stand for and where that would take us. Here is that catalog with some additions and minor editing...

(IsraelNN.com) Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama's comment and subsequent backtrack on an "undivided Jerusalem" has turned the capital into an election campaign issue, the New York Jewish Week reported. Sen. Obama later softened his statement, saying that the status of the city will be decided by Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA). Orthodox Union (OU) political director Nathan Diament commented, "Sen. Obama made it an issue by highlighting it in the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) speech, so now it’s not just the issue, but whether the candidates, both Obama and [Republican presidential candidate Senator John] McCain, speak...

One week into the general election, the polls show a dead heat. But many presidential scholars doubt that John McCain stands much of a chance, if any. Historians belonging to both parties offered a litany of historical comparisons that give little hope to the Republican. Several saw Barack Obama’s prospects as the most promising for a Democrat since Roosevelt trounced Hoover in 1932.“This should be an overwhelming Democratic victory,” said Allan Lichtman, an American University presidential historian who ran in a Maryland Democratic senatorial primary in 2006. Lichtman, whose forecasting model has correctly predicted the last six presidential popular vote...

Many historians see little chance for McCain David Paul Kuhn One week into the general election, the polls show a dead heat. But many presidential scholars doubt that John McCain stands much of a chance, if any. Historians belonging to both parties offered a litany of historical comparisons that give little hope to the Republican. Several saw Barack Obama’s prospects as the most promising for a Democrat since Roosevelt trounced Hoover in 1932. “This should be an overwhelming Democratic victory,” said Allan Lichtman, an American University presidential historian who ran in a Maryland Democratic senatorial primary in 2006. Lichtman, whose...

WASHINGTON -- Eight years after a national debate over gun control helped keep Democrat Al Gore out of the White House, the National Rifle Assn. and its Republican allies are launching a new campaign to defeat Barack Obama. But this time, the issue that GOP strategists once relied on to provide crucial votes in close elections has lost much of its political punch. The NRA may have become a victim of its own success. Congress hasn't passed major legislation to restrict gun use in 14 years. Democrats -- scarred by past NRA campaigns -- almost never talk about the issue...

Democratic Sen. Barack Obama on Friday called for higher payroll taxes on wage-earners making more than $250,000 annually, a step that would affect the wealthiest 3 percent of Americans. The presidential candidate told senior citizens in Ohio that it is unfair for middle-class earners to pay the Social Security tax "on every dime they make," while millionaires and billionaires pay it on only "a very small percentage of their income." The 6.2 percent payroll tax is now applied to all wages up to $102,000 a year, which covers the entire amount for most Americans. Under Obama's plan, the tax would...

<p>In his St. Paul victory speech, Barack Obama pledged again to pull out of Iraq. Rather than "continue a policy in Iraq that asks everything of our brave men and women in uniform and nothing of Iraqi politicians. ... It's time for Iraqis to take responsibility for their future."</p>

John McCain has won the Iraq argument. The disagreement on Iraq between McCain and Barack Obama, indeed between Democrats and Republicans, was not about the future of American "neocolonialism" or about the candidates' sympathy for the Marines and soldiers eager to return home. It was about the strategic benefit of keeping active U.S. troops in the War. John McCain believed that a continued American troop presence would hasten Iraq's progress toward national security and political reconciliation. Barack Obama thought a speedy withdrawal would best achieve that goal. So there is no confusion on this point, let us consider the following:...

The disconnect between what Democrats are saying about Iraq and what is actually happening there has reached grotesque proportions. Democrats won an exhilarating electoral victory in 2006 pledging withdrawal at a time when conditions in Iraq were dire and we were indeed losing the war. Two years later, when everything is changed, they continue to reflexively repeat their "narrative of defeat and retreat" (as Joe Lieberman so memorably called it) as if nothing has changed. It is a position so utterly untenable that John McCain must seize the opportunity and, contrary to conventional wisdom, make the Iraq War the central...

The open borders of the United States amount to a national security exposure. This is a fact that cannot be debated. One has only to look at the number of foreign nationals attempting to illegally enter the U.S. through Mexico over the last several years. Since 2005, the Department of Homeland Security reports that more than 331,000 people from countries other than Mexico have been apprehended trying to cross the Southern land border. These individuals came from virtually every country in the world, including some with whom we have an adversarial relationship, such as Communist China, Iran and North Korea....

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Supreme Court ruling on Guantanamo Bay prison divided the two U.S. presidential candidates on Thursday but made it likely that one of them will have to decide what to do with its 270 inmates. The decision knocked out a key pillar of the Bush administration's antiterrorism policy. Democratic candidate Barack Obama hailed the ruling and his rival in the November election, John McCain, joined fellow Republican, President George W. Bush, in expressing concern about it. The ruling throws into turmoil the process Bush pushed through Congress in 2006 for trying terrorism suspects through military commissions. The...