Biden

Funny how,  as Greg Sargent at The Plum Line notes today, the Obama administration hasn’t yet taken a position on pending legislation that would curtail its ability to rely on the “state secrets privilege.”
As I’ve been reporting here, the Justice Department has been relying heavily on the privilege to try to dismiss cases that could [...]

MSNBC  and Roll Call are reporting that moments ago on the Senate floor, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) read a letter from Vice President-elect Joe Biden, announcing his retirement from the Senate. Biden had has been a senator from Delaware since 1972.
Last month, a Biden spokesperson said the vice president-elect intended to remain in [...]

As political reporters wait for the release of the Obama-Biden transition’s report on its interactions with the office of disgraced Democratic Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, it’s hard not to wonder about the timing.
The release is expected later today at 4:30 p.m. EST. Taking at face value the transition team’s assertion that the U.S. attorney’s office [...]

Noting that George Bush Sr. pardoned the Iran-Contra clan on Christmas eve of 1992, Democrats.com is warning that his son could do something very similar Wednesday: pardon Dick Cheney and the rest of the administration officials who authorized and encouraged the torture and humiliation of “war on terror” detainees.

Following a meeting in Chicago about energy policy and climate change with former Vice President Al Gore and Vice President-elect Joe Biden, which was likely planned to be the big news story of the day, President-elect Barack Obama instead found himself talking about the shocking arrest of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
While seated at a table [...]

Building on Laura’s recent piece about progressives finding a foothold in the Obama White House — if not necessarily the administration as a whole — Joe Biden just announced his chief economics adviser will be the progressive Jared Bernstein of the progressive Economic Policy Institute. No one really knows what sort of influence the Vice [...]

Chuck Hagel is NOT happy with this line of reasoning. But Biden wants that ‘SNL’ invite.

The Obama campaign just rolled out a new YouTube video with Natalie Portman rallying young Americans. But she’s not asking them to vote for Obama.
Instead, the campaign tapped Portman to push young people who already support Obama to press their parents to do the same. It’s part of a larger effort by the Obama [...]

A new poll (PDF) conducted by ABC and The Washington Post found one of the McCain campaign’s recent attacks on Sen. Barack Obama does not appear to be resonating with voters.
Sixty percent of likely voters said Sen. Barack Obama’s connection to former Weatherman William Ayers is “not a legitimate campaign issue,” compared with 37 percent [...]

For a random person with no role in the presidential election, William Ayers has drawn plenty of political attention lately. We try to focus on real issues here at The Washington Independent, but this site has still plunked down a few paragraphs on Ayers, and one from Matthew DeLong actually anticipated the Obama campaign’s [...]