The long election season made a star out of baseball statistician Nate Silver, who used his particular skills to create fivethirtyeight.com, a site devoted to analysing polling data and trends. Yesterday his site predicted a 98.1% probability of an Obama win. Today we find out if he and his numbers ...

I succumbed and watched this one..from start to finish. And was pleasantly surprised. This one, of the 200 or so "debates" so far, actually hewed closer to the ideal format in which the candidates would be free to ask each other questions and argue. Bob Schieffer of CBS moderated the debate. ...

Writes Aari Johri -Move over Bushisms – we now have Palinisms. And while Katie Couric and Tina Fey are doing all they can to keep our sense of humor up in these dour times, a number of columnists/talk show hosts are doing their bit too. Here is a ...

Over the course of the last election season, flip-flops went from being an item to carry on your summer vacation to a weapon of political destruction. Republicans successfully painted Senator John Kerry as a “flip-flopper” and the candidate did not help matters by issuing absurd statements like “I was for ...

An aide for Senator McCain inadvertently provided fodder for late night comedy when he pointed to his Blackberry and stated that the Senator was responsible for it. It is not an exaggeration to say that a gaffe along similar lines successfully smeared Al Gore 8 years ago( remember who invented ...

By Vidya Pradhan Carly Fiorina just went on record saying that none of the candidates was capable of running a corporation. In her words - I don't think John McCain could run a major corporation. I don't think Barack Obama could run ...

By Vidya Pradhan   Investment in quality education and a vision for increasing the competitiveness of future American workers is a crucial long-term issue that often gets forgotten in the immediacy of political campaigning. (Though one education legislation has been in the news recently for all the wrong reasons. A ridiculous and deceptive ad by the McCain campaign accused Obama of creating legislation to teach sex to kindergarteners. The facts? Obama supported, not sponsored, a bill whose purpose was primarily to make kids aware of the dangers of sexual predators.)   Here are the two candidates’ views on education.

This is the second article on the candidates’ positions on the economy. The first dealt with their taxation policies. (UPDATE October 6th, 2008 : a graphic from the Economist - The link to the entire article can be found here.) It is hard to get a sense of which Presidential candidate is good for the economy from the campaign agendas – so much of it is pure pandering for the political season. However, here is an excerpt from an article in the International Herald Tribune that might surprise you – “Simply put, the United States economy has grown faster, on average, under Democratic presidents than under Republicans.” That said, here are the two candidates’ positions and plans for the economy.

By Vidya Pradhan Senator McCain’s pick of Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate on Friday did exactly what it was supposed to do – take the attention away from the high of the Democratic convention and create a media buzz that still has the wires humming on Sunday. Frank Rich opines in today’s New York Times, “The main reason McCain knuckled under to the religious right by picking Palin is that he actually believes there’s a large army of embittered Hillary loyalists who will vote for a hard-line conservative simply because she’s a woman.” Only time will show if that belief holds water, but there is no doubt that Senator Clinton’s candidacy empowered millions of women voters and made their voices heard. Women, who have always been more reliable voters (they make up 54 percent of the population, 55 percent of registered voters and 60 percent of the electorate), are only now waking up to the power they have as a voting bloc. Will they exercise their power to put one of their gender in the White House next year? Or will they take a closer look at each of the candidates’ voting records and position on women’s issues? We lay them out –

The state of the US economy is always a politically charged issue but never more than this year as the dreaded d(epression) and r(ecession) words are freely used by both economists and talking heads on TV. This is what Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke had to say in his February 17th state of the economy speech –  “…the outlook for the economy has worsened in recent months, and the downside risks to growth have increased. …The softer labor market, together with factors including higher energy prices, lower equity prices, and declining home values, seem likely to weigh on consumer spending in the near term." No surprise then, that the presidential candidates have made restoring economic luster a significant plank of their stump speeches. Even John McCain, who once said( in an unguarded moment that he probably now regrets) “The issue of economics is something that I've really never understood as well as I should” is talking the talk now on balancing the budget and bringing the burgeoning trade deficit under control. To make the two candidates positions on improving the state of the US economy a little less opaque, we have decided to separately discuss three aspects of this issue – taxation, job growth & economic relief and balancing the budget. Today’s article covers the candidates’ tax policies. In an environment where the federal budget deficit is huge and Social Security payments are expected to increase substantially, taxation as a revenue source becomes crucial. Nearly all of the tax cuts established since 2001 are set to expire by 2010.