I agree with Al Roker. Don Imus should be fired. His comments were completely inappropriate and embarrassing. But he is not the only person who says completing inappropriate and embarrassing things.

Night after night, CNN’s Lou Dobbs says the most vile and embarrassing things about people who risk life and limb to come to this country to try to make some money to take care of their families. He manipulates the news, trivializes an important debate, browbeats guests and shows the worst face of America to the world.

President Bush and Senate Republicans are trying to cross the partisan divide to get something done with the congressional majority on immigration. But Lou Dobbs has made that difficult process even harder with his nightly diatribes. Read more...

OK, let’s get one thing straight: Calling anybody a “nappy-headed ho” is a racist remark. The question is: Should Don Imus be fired for saying it?

“Nappy-headed ho’s,” of course, is what Imus himself called the great Rutgers women’s basketball team. Then he just laughed when producer Bernie McQuirk said the Rutgers and Tennessee teams reminded him of the “Jigaboos and Wannabes.” Another racist remark.

Nor is it the first time Imus has gotten himself in hot water for racist remarks. Like the time he derided journalist Gwen Ifill as “a cleaning lady at the White House.” Read more...

So the pundit spin machines became almost caricatures of themselves: Senator Clinton “lost” the first primary on fundraising in the first quarter, raising “just” $26 million to Senator Obama’s $25 million.

But wait: Isn’t $26 million higher than $25 million? According to Dick Morris, Chris Matthews and a number of other Hillary Clinton non-fans, it’s not higher enough —given the “expectations” that she would do much better and Senator Obama would do much worse.

Clearly that’s true – she didn’t meet the pundits’ expectations (and clearly some in her campaign were impressed by how well Senator Obama did). But just keep in mind the following fact: Winning the expectations game is virtually impossible for Senator Clinton, no matter how well she does. Read more...

The most important item of information in the campaign-finance reports that have leaked so far is that Obama raised his $25 million from 100,000 donors while Hillary raised her $26 million from 50,000. And, to rub it in, Obama got 4,500 more donors the day after he announced his financial filing. At this stage of the game, the number of donors is more important than the amount of their donations. Nobody is really going to start spending media money massively this early, so the bank account sizes are really symbolic statements of a candidate's viability. The totals are to show off, not to spend.

But with twice as many donors, Obama can reload and add to his total much faster and more easily than can Hillary. Read more...

Were Hillary Clinton not running for president, Barack Obama would not be the attractive candidate that he is. Without a backdrop of her polarizing effect on our politics — what Obama calls the "slash and burn" style of partisanship — Obama would be as dull as Al Gore was reputed to have been. He would not excite support, much less passion. But his dignity, candidness and reasonableness contrast so dramatically with Hillary's scripted phoniness, artificiality, and shrill partisanship that he stands out by comparison.

Hillary is hot. Obama is cool. Hillary is divisive. Obama brings people together. Hillary invents herself. Obama is himself. Hillary shouts. Obama converses. By comparison with Hillary, he looks just great. By himself — on the screen without her — he would be bland. With her, he is a relief.

How odd it is that the first African-American candidate excites little passionate opposition because the first woman to run acts as his lightning rod!

Thomas Paine once wrote that in absolute governments, the King is law, and in free nations, the Law is king.

The fundamental problem is not that Alberto Gonzales lied, prevaricated, misrepresented or played Pinocchio when he falsely stated he was not involved in the decisions to fire the U.S. attorneys. Those actions were wrong and appropriate grounds for removal, but there is much, much worse.

Alberto Gonzales is a basically decent guy, a second-tier-quality lawyer elevated to great heights by blind obedience to the concept of absolute power and the unwise president who claims it for himself on matters that grossly violate the American notion of the rule of law.

Gonzales-ism is the problem, not Gonzales. Read more...

What is it with the Democrats and Fox News Channel? Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have now joined former Sen. John Edwards in dissing a debate sponsored by Fox along with — guess who — the Congressional Black Caucus Institute!

The Democratic National Committee has announced six debates for the 2008 season but did not list the Fox debate scheduled for Sept. 23. Instead they are taking part in another CBC debate sponsored by CNN in South Carolina. Reportedly pressure from liberal activists, including Jesse Jackson and moveon.org, is causing these Democrats to lose their head. Last month another Fox debate was scheduled for August in Nevada but that got the boomerang as well. Congratulations to Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), who had the wisdom to say the move was “unfortunate,” and to remind his fellow Democrats that Edwards and others participated in two debates Fox sponsored with the CBC during the 2004 primary campaign. Read more...

The Al Gore Environmental Express was in town a few weeks ago preaching the doom and gloom of modern environmentalism. According to his testimony, the sky is falling, the oceans are drying up and the earth is becoming infertile. And to top it off, according to Gore it is all the fault of American enterprise, this despite the fact Gore’s home alone accounts for over half of the energy used in Tennessee every year.

Now, it’s not that I don’t believe in the importance of the environment, it’s just that I’ve heard all of these gloom-and-doom prophecies before. After all, in the ’60s we were told that the world would undergo a famine and hundreds of millions of people would starve to death, and in the ’70s Europe’s distinguished scientists announced that we would run out of gold by the ’80s. Even a U.S. president was found drinking the Kool-Aid of environmental gloom and doom when he announced that “we could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the next decade.” (Although in all fairness, Jimmy Carter is a bit like a college sophomore when it comes to intellectual fads.) Read more...

After he has spent more than five years meticulously building a second presidential campaign, this one meant to carry him over the finish line, it's hard to believe Sen. John McCain's candidacy has stumbled so badly. With money drying up and poll numbers falling, McCain has found ever since the midterm elections of 2006 that his support for the Iraq war is a ball and chain following him wherever he goes. As he drags it around it drags him down but doesn't seem to hold back Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney, both of whom supported the recent troop increase right along with McCain.

On Sunday, McCain began a public-relations offensive he hopes will help redefine him as the right leader on the country's most difficult issue. With a Washington Post editorial, a "60 Minutes" interview and an upcoming speech at the Virginia Military Institute, McCain is making his case for finishing the job in Iraq. Though he has campaigned in primary states, McCain has not had much national visibility in recent months, and during this time polls have indicated a majority has begun to support a withdrawal from Iraq. McCain knows he is pushing a political boulder up the side of a mountain. He is asking voters not to agree with him but to trust his position and his leadership. With some luck and skill his new strategy just may help him. Read more...