I am not a McCain fan, but this does not seem like a big deal.

If I'm traveling a lot for work, I can run up AmEx balances in excess of $10,000 in a month, and I'm just one person. If you use an AmEx in lieu of a checkbook to run a small business or a political campaign, you can easily run up much larger balances. If I were buying blocks of hotel rooms, paying catering services, and chartering the odd jet, I can certainly imagine I'd be running up a $100K+ balance.

Note that this is not necessarily revolving debt; my AmEx card requires me to pay my balance in full monthly, although there are some AmEx cards that allow the holder to carry a balance. I don't know what the disclosure reports require, but if they ask for your credit card balance as of date X, the fact that you will be paying off that balance when the bill comes in two weeks wouldn't be reflected in the report.

Posted at June 13, 2008 3:20 PM in response to Report: McCains Have Over $100,000 In Credit Card Debt

Does anyone else here list money which they give to their churches in the tax returns.

Yes, if you itemize deductions.

Posted at March 25, 2008 12:38 PM in response to Obama Releases His 2000-2006 Tax Returns, Demands Hillary Release Hers

I'm not really sure "Unanswered Questions" is really a fair description of what's going on here, because it suggests that the questions are unanswered because Sen. Obama has declined to answer them.

Examples:

(1) [I]t's unclear whether Rezko was actually doing a favor for Obama ... Obama has acknowleged, however, that Rezko's likely motivation for buying the lot was to curry favor with him

That seems answered.

(2) [T]here's the other big question, whether Obama ever did anything for Rezko in return for his purchase of the side yard or all those contributions. Obama has said that Rezko "never asked me for anything" and "I’ve never done any favors for him.” No substantial evidence has surfaced to contradict that claim.

That seems answered.

(3) It's still unclear exactly how Rezko came to buy the side yard.

If the question is what was the blow-by-blow of events in 2006, it doesn't seem that the Obama campaign is holding anything back. In any event, if the upshot of this question is to ask (1) in a different way, that was answered.

(4) It's not clear when Rezko bid on the property

Seems like a question for Rezko.

(5) Though Obama made his final offer in January of 2005, the purchase did not close for another five months. It's unclear why.

Is that a long time? It usually takes a couple months for a house to close. Does it matter?

Posted at March 3, 2008 2:54 PM in response to Obama and Rezko: TPM's Timeline

Do you know how much money these people made? I assume they were highly compensated and received hazard pay and bonuses for working in a war zone ...

Probably, although the whole kit and kaboodle wouldn't amount to much -- most of these same people could probably work at a law or lobbying firm in DC and make more, and many probably do so now. They weren't there for the money, they were there to build the Perfect Conservative Society That Will Once And For All Prove Those Liberals Wrong(tm).

In this particular instance, the problem with hiring incompetents isn't the unfairness to qualified applicants, but the results. If Bush had a hundred supercompetent cousins who spoke Arabic, and he wanted to hire them all and pay them a quarter million per year, that would have been perfectly fine with me.

Posted at October 11, 2006 11:37 AM in response to Response to Dan Senor's WashPost Op-Ed

What Google has done is to send out annoying letters, which is different than being sued. If you get sued you need a lawyer. If you get an annoying letter you need a wastebasket.

The reason Google is sending out these letters is not because Google is feeling all persnickety about people using its name that way. Google's probably actually glad people use their name that way, and they don't like paying people to write letters any more than the rest of us.

The reason Google is sending the letters is this: suppose I came out with my own search engine called "Alkali Google." If Google wants to sue me for trademark infringement, I could argue that Google is a generic term, and that Google has abandoned any claim to that term. Under the case law, one accepted way for Google to prove otherwise is to point out that they've sent a lot of annoying letters to media outlets urging them not to use the term in a generic way. (The makers of Kleenex and Jeeps send similar letters, and also put ads in journalism reviews.)

Arugably, that is a stupid rule of law: the validity of trademark claims should not turn on making people jump through arbitrary hoops. Nevertheless, that's the way things are. Blame the courts or Congress for this state of affairs, not Google.

Posted at August 15, 2006 9:20 AM in response to To Google or not to Google

The point here is, what? That dictators are the only social class consisting 100% of sane people?

Well, dictators also happen to be people who haven't died of childhood diseases. That's not because dictators are as a group immune from such diseases, it's because you can't become a dictator if you die at age 3.

Posted at July 9, 2006 6:50 PM in response to The Madman Theory of World Politics

As Kevin Phillips puts it "Republicans have an instinct for the jugular, Democrats have an instinct for the capillairies", and Ed's comment encapsulates exactly that instinct.

Republicans usually aren't after the jugular of their fellow Republicans.

Posted at May 3, 2006 4:02 PM in response to Playing Morpheus

That's a strawman.  He's not arguing that we should "cut them off." 

By way of analogy, I don't think the Cuba embargo is a good idea either, but there is a wide range of alternative policies we could implement that don't include, say, selling surface-to-air missiles to Castro.

Posted at March 1, 2006 9:36 AM in response to Dubai and Democracy

What's victimless about this?  Cunningham was effectively stealing taxpayer dollars.

Posted at March 1, 2006 8:50 AM in response to The Daily Muck

That's really incredibly stupid.  The reason that putting Japanese-Americans in interment camps during World War II was bad was that the internees were Japanese-Americans, not that America faced no threat from the nation of Japan.  If we had given the port contracts to Casey Kasem and Jamie Farr, no one would care.

Posted at February 27, 2006 2:28 PM in response to What Do Port Operators Do?