The New Republic

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I've always thought that you can understand about 90% of what you need to know about a politician's beliefs by looking at who advises them. Charlie Crist now has a lot of Democrats working for him: Two of the major power players now steering the Crist ship are Eric Johnson, who was chief of staff for former Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.) and Josh Isay, the former chief of staff to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and co-founder of Knickerbocker SKD, the consulting firm. READ MORE >>

Next time I visit family and attend a Miami Dolphins game, perhaps I'll bring my own drinks. According to ESPN's "Outside the Lines," which reviewed health inspection records at 107 major league sport venues across the country, 93 percent of the vendors at Sun Life Stadium (where the Dolphins play) had "critical violations" of the health code. According to one report: READ MORE >>

There is localism, and there is yokelism. Which was the greater factor in Harvey Pekar’s mystique? I considered the question in an illuminating location this week. READ MORE >>

This is another chapter in the Madoff saga. As with most of my information on Wall Street chicanery and respectable thieving, this comes from my old friend Edward Jay Epstein, who knows more about the slippery things around us than anyone in my circle. By far.  By Edward Jay Epstein READ MORE >>

It takes terrible luck or astonishing talent for a congressional Democrat to be endangered this year. Still, there are a half-dozen Democrats who really could lose their seats a week from tomorrow. READ MORE >>

Elmore Leonard is perhaps the most cinematic novelist writing in the English language. This is partly due to his usual subject matter--strong men and beautiful women on the edge of the law--but still more to the fact that his books read very nearly in real-time. Unlike most crime writers, for whom no physical or emotional detail is too small, Leonard has an extraordinary gift for concision: In any given scene he tells you just enough for the scene to play, and nothing more. READ MORE >>

EVERY WEEKDAY, FROM three in the afternoon until seven in the evening, Randi Rhodes delivers her brief against George W. Bush. Much of it is standard anti-Bush fare: He stole the 2000 election, he wrecked the economy, he led the nation into a disastrous war under dishonest pretenses. But sometimes Rhodes takes her critique into less familiar territory. Citing a book titled George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, Rhodes alleges that in the 1940s Prescott Bush, the president’s grandfather, sold raw materials to the Third Reich. READ MORE >>

Now that a consortium of major newspapers has reported that George W. Bush would have won the Florida recount, his legitimacy is supposedly beyond dispute. "Even Gore partisans," asserts a Wall Street Journal editorial, "now have to admit that the former Vice President was not denied a legitimate victory by the Supreme Court." And this conclusion is not confined to Bush's amen corner. READ MORE >>