The Left Anchor

The title really does says it all. In his most recent column, David Brooks makes it clear that Obama must select an old white man as his VP:

My first thought on the running mate question is that to balance his ticket, Barack Obama should pick a really old white general. Therefore, he should pick Dwight Eisenhower. John McCain, on the other hand, needs to pick someone younger than himself. Therefore, he also should pick Dwight Eisenhower.
Continue Reading…

OK, so I lied. Due to overwhelming requests, we’re gonna do one more, Mark Warner. This is the thirteenth entry in our series profiling Barack Obama’s most likely candidates for the vice presidential nomination. Now we’ve got an even baker’s dozen. You can view the rest of our profiles here. If you’ve got a choice that wasn’t profiled, send it in; if it looks good, we’ll post it. Since we’ve added this final profile, we’re going to postpone our final analysis until the weekend. Don’t forget to come join us next week as we make our way through the contenders for cabinet positions. And vote in our poll. It runs through June 4th.
Continue Reading…

OK, now this is just crazy. Scientists have developed a system by which monkeys can control a robotic arm using only their thoughts. Clearly these must be those monkeys who became super-intelligent following their forays into outer space in the earliest days of the space program. Once again, The Simpsons called it first.
Continue Reading…

This is the twelfth and final entry in our series of profiles regarding Barack Obama’s most likely candidates for the vice presidential nomination. You can view our previous entires here. Come back next week as we take a detailed look at the possible candidates for an Obama cabinet. Your favorite candidates that did not appear in our two week long series here, may very well show up in our cabinet profiles. Tomorrow I will boil down all that we have learned and make my predictions. Don’t forget to vote in our poll.
Continue Reading…

Our vice presidential profile series has been successful beyond my wildest dreams. The Left Anchor is currently drawing 3,000 hits a day, and will cross the 13,000 lifetime hit threshold later this evening. I thank everyone who has visited the site to look at our VP profiles, and hope you continue to visit. As near as I can tell, there is no site which has bothered to go so deep into the vice presidential candidates.
Continue Reading…

As with all great ideas, once someone thinks of one, it’s hard to imagine why it took so long to come up with it. Today’s big idea comes from a 16 year old boy in Waterloo, Ontario. He’s invented an ingenious way to dispose of plastic bags using a concentrated strain of bacteria.

“Almost every week I have to do chores and when I open the closet door, I have this avalanche of plastic bags falling on top of me,” he said. “One day, I got tired of it and I wanted to know what other people are doing with these plastic bags.”
Continue Reading…

The actress apologizes to China for suggesting that “bad karma” may have been responsible for the recent earthquakes there. Now if only she’ll apologize to the rest of us for Basic Instinct 2.

The media are having a field day with McClellan’s new book. Over at Kos, BarbinMD collects some choice nuggets showing just how shocked the media is with McClellan’s “revelations” of White House media manipulation:

From MSNBC:

We begin with the bombshell book from former White House press secretary Scott McClellan. The tell-all, What Happened inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception. In it, McClellon claims, among other things, that the president used propaganda to sell the war in Iraq.
Continue Reading…

This is the ninth entry in our profile series of Barack Obama’s most likely candidates for the VP slot. The previous profiles can be viewed here.

If there’s one thing doing this series of profiles has taught me, it’s that I have been poorly informed about the various options available to Obama. Case in point: Janet Napolitano. I had heard the name before in the context of a possible vice presidential candidate, but she was never among the top few I was considering. But as I’ll demonstrate through the rest of this post, she posts some of the most impressive numbers in the field.
Continue Reading…

This is the eleventh in our series of profiles on Barack Obama’s most likely candidates for the vice presidential nomination. You can view our other profiles here.

Brian Schweitzer is among the names mentioned most often as a possibility for the vice presidential slot on an Obama ticket. He was elected governor of Montana, a state slowly trending blue, in 2004 by a margin of four points over his competitor, former Secretary of State Bob Brown.
Continue Reading…