The New Republic

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FRIDAY, JANUARY 16, NEWTON, IOWA After a teeth-chattering ride on a propeller plane from Minneapolis, I arrive in Des Moines on Friday, three days before the Iowa caucuses. I was last here a week ago, and what a difference a week makes. Flights in are crowded with equipment from German, Japanese, and Dutch film crews. The rental-car agents at the airport buzz about catching glimpses of “Miss Paula Zahn.” Out on the roads, satellite trucks are a common sight. READ MORE >>

Joe Lieberman is sitting in the second pew at the Morris Brown African Methodist Episcopal Church here in Charleston, South Carolina. It's the morning after the senator revived his lifeless campaign with a strong performance at the Democratic debate two hours west in Columbia, and about 200 worshipers—mostly black, many on their feet—are singing and clapping to the gospel music of the J.A. Darby Mass Choir, which is belting out a jazzy version of the Christian hymn "Oh, How I Love Jesus." READ MORE >>

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The most depressing place to be on the day Saddam Hussein’s statue fell in Baghdad was probably the ballroom of the Wardman Park Marriott in Washington, D.C. This was the site of the largest Democratic campaign event to take place during the three-week war with Iraq, a candidate forum hosted by the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF). READ MORE >>

INTIMATE TREASURES, a sex shop in the resort town of Fort Walton Beach, is housed in a pink-and-blue, virtually windowless concrete building—just the kind of faux-cheery structure one finds in commercial strips throughout the Sun Belt. According to its website, the store specializes in sensual lingerie, erotic games, massage oils, and "videos, videos, videos." A few years ago a sales clerk at the store was charged with two counts of obscenity for selling allegedly beyond-the-pale pornography to undercover cops. READ MORE >>

A few hours before President Bush's big speech last Thursday announcing what is shaping up to be the most ambitious attempt to expand the federal government since Hillarycare, the White House quietly released an amendment to an obscure, Clinton-era executive order. The White House deleted from the original order a phrase defining America's air-traffic-control system as "an inherently governmental function." In other words, it was the first step toward privatizing the work of some 20,000 air-traffic controllers (the guys Ronald Reagan famously fired his first year in office). READ MORE >>

For all his “change-the-tone” rhetoric, there are some forms of bipartisanship President Bush will not tolerate. Just ask Mike Parker, the erstwhile head of the Army Corps of Engineers. Parker, a balding, rotund former Mississippi congressman with a bushy mustache and a heavy drawl, was on Capitol Hill two weeks ago testifying before the Senate Budget Committee. Republican Kit Bond, Democrat Kent Conrad, and Parker himself all agreed on one thing: The budget for the Corps proposed by the White House was a joke. READ MORE >>

George W. Bush and Ted Kennedy were aboard Air Force One last month, flying back to Washington from Boston--where they had just celebrated the signing of Bush's education bill--when the president gave the Massachusetts senator a dog bone. It wasn't just any canine biscuit. On it the president had scrawled a message to Kennedy's black Portuguese water dog, the senatorial pooch who was a constant presence during the yearlong education-bill negotiations: "To Splash, Great job on education. READ MORE >>

It's not often that the White House holds a press conference to announce a demotion. But that's what happened on October 9, when Tom Ridge, President Bush's new homeland security adviser, and Condoleezza Rice, his national security adviser, introduced the administration's newest anti-terrorism staffers. At a sterile ceremony in the fourth-floor briefing room of the Old Executive Office Building, Ridge and Rice announced that Richard Clarke, a pale, gray-haired man sitting on stage in an ill-fitting suit, would be the special assistant to the president for cyberspace security. READ MORE >>