WASHINGTON -- Now that the presidential contest is looking ever more like a two-man race, the country can't help but marvel: John McCain, once a longshot, wouldn't lie down. Barack Obama, the new kid, charmed voters. And Hillary Rodham Clinton, an early favorite, has yet to surrender.

But Arlyn J. Imberman would say clues to the nomination fight were in plain sight, every time a candidate wrote a thank-you note, inscribed a memoir or autographed a pair of boxing gloves. More...

LOGAN, W. Va. – Even if Hillary Clinton beats Barack Obama in Tuesday’s West Virginia primary by the huge margins predicted by polls, the victory won’t go very far towards chipping away at Obama’s lead in pledged delegates in their race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

It could, however, give Clinton’s sputtering campaign one last chance to alter – or at least mute – the prevailing narrative that Obama’s nomination is inevitable. More...

May 13, 2008 | CHARLESTON, W. Va. -- The day before the West Virginia primary, Barack Obama finally got around to making just his third visit to the state as a presidential candidate (if not his third visit to the state, period). He stuck around for less than half a day, giving a speech that made it clear that he, for one, has already moved on to the general election. On his way out of town, he stopped for the now-obligatory visit to a local bar, where he shot some pool and cheerfully admitted he expects to lose in a landslide to Hillary Clinton on Tuesday. Polls have her up by 30 or 40 points; the only question is whether turnout is massive enough to help her cut deeply into his national lead in the popular vote. More...

If the cable news pundits and editorial page writers of America are to be believed then the race for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination is over and Barack Obama is the winner.

The Clinton die-hards battling on through the last handful of primaries from West Virginia to South Dakota must be starting to feel like those Japanese soldiers who used to turn up on Pacific islands decades after the end of the Second World War, still refusing to believe it was really over. More...

In 2000, I boarded John McCain's campaign bus, the Straight Talk Express, and, in a metaphorical sense, never got off. Here, truly, was something new under the political sun -- a politician who bristled with integrity and seemed to have nothing to hide. I continue to admire McCain for those and other reasons, but the bus I once rode has gone wobbly. Recently, it veered into the mud. More...

As if Iraq was not enough to worry about, some important political developments in Lebanon, and even in the Yemen have raised the temperature of the Middle East . . . More...

SOUTHAVEN, Miss. — Hoping to hang on to a Congressional seat in a tight special election here on Tuesday, Republicans in this mostly white and very conservative district are trying to make the vote more a referendum on Senator Barack Obama than on the candidates themselves. More...

After the National Intelligence Estimate last November which reported that Iran had no nuclear program since 2003, many of us breathed a sigh of relief. It was official: When it came to attacking Iran, the administration hadn’t a leg to stand on.

But, as with Iraq, it was used to that. Once anointed lame duck, it didn’t skip a beat and continued to stumble forward. More...

Even before the House passed a new plan last week to prevent foreclosures, President Bush threatened to veto the bill, calling it “overly burdensome.” The bill is not burdensome enough. More...

I knew it was bad, but I didn't know just how bad. Colonel Ann Wright, retired U.S. Army, grabbed the audience's attention at a panel called Women in the Military, hosted last month by Women Center Stage in New York City, when she said that one in three women in the military is sexually abused by her male colleagues. Ann wants to see huge signs displaying this statistic in every recruiting office, to let young women know what to expect if they sign up. More...

Eighteen American war veterans kill themselves every day. One thousand former soldiers receiving care from the Department of Veterans Affairs attempt suicide every month. More veterans are committing suicide than are dying in combat overseas. More...

You very likely own stolen goods. The gas in your car, the circuits in your cell phone, the diamond in your ring, the chemicals in your lipstick or shaving cream — even the plastic in your computer may be the product of theft. Americans buy huge quantities of goods every day that are literally stolen from some of the world’s poorest people. These thefts are permitted — indeed encouraged — by an archaic rule of international trade that violates the most fundamental rule of capitalism: to protect property rights.

Tracing these stolen goods back to where the thefts occur lands us in some of the most wretched places on earth. What these countries have in common is an abundance of natural resources and plentiful political violence and corruption. All suffer from what Joseph Stiglitz and Jeffrey Sachs call “the resource curse.” Here dictators and insurgents sell off the country’s resources to foreigners, terrifying the people into submission while keeping the wealth for themselves. More...

WASHINGTON - The May 3 election of Democrat Don Cazayoux in a Louisiana congressional district that had been Republican for decades might be followed by the victory of Democrat Travis Childers in Mississippi’s heavily Republican First Congressional District. More...

In a briefing today, Brigadier General James Milano, the Deputy Commanding General for Multinational Division Baghdad, said that the American-built wall dividing Sadr City is now 80 percent complete (see map). More...

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration repeatedly ignored corruption at the highest levels within the Iraqi government and kept secret potentially embarrassing information so as not to undermine its relationship with Baghdad, according to two former State Department employees. More...