I'm running a presidential prediction contest on the Drudge Retort today: President Obama will win re-election even though Mercury is in retrograde, claims Psychic Nikki. See if you can do better than this observer of the spirit world and enter the Drudge Retort's presidential prediction contest. The winner will receive a $50 Amazon.Com gift certificate and a life-size cardboard Joe Biden. To enter, post a comment here predicting the percentage of the vote that President Obama, Mitt Romney and Everybody Else ... read more

Glenn Kessler, the fact-checking columnist of the Washington Post, often employs logic that's more factually dubious than the claim he's covering. Here's his explanation for why he gives President Obama four Pinocchios for saying in ads that Mitt Romney wants to kill Big Bird: Romney may have been off base in suggesting PBS funding has much to do with the deficit, but that's no excuse for the Obama campaign to declare that means the demise of a popular children's character. According to the financials of ... read more

The Florida Republican Party recently began running a TV ad here that attacks former Gov. Charlie Crist, the Republican who left the party and became an independent during his unsuccessful 2010 Senate run. The ad shows old clips of Crist praising President George W. Bush and Sarah Palin and declaring he was "about as conservative as you can get." That statement turned out to be as true as Mitt Romney calling himself a progressive when he wanted to be governor of liberal Massachusetts. Crist endorsed President ... read more

Paul Ryan's speech at the Republican National Convention was breathtakingly dishonest, even by the extremely loose standards of honesty practiced by our politicians. The Wisconsin Republican Congressman, hailed often as a "straight shooter" by the media because of his budget plan, lied about that plan and other significant matters to the assembled delegates and the millions watching on TV. No lie was more brazen than the one he told about the GM auto plant that closed in his Janesville hometown. Ryan said, "A ... read more

I'm a big fan of Josh Marshall's political reporting at Talking Points Memo, but he makes a rookie mistake in a reader email he quotes this morning. MB, a regular correspondent on Wall Street matters, offers this bit of advice to Marshall: I know you raised some money from Marc Andreesen. I would bet Marc's fund and Bain Capital have some investor overlap. I'm sure you've already made that call, but I bet that Marc has no love lost for Romney as Marc is truly in the "job creation" business whereas Romney is a ... read more

I love the smell of democratic governance in the morning. I'm back in Washington, D.C., to meet with members of Congress and their aides as part of the Interactive Advertising Bureau's Long Tail Fly-In. Around 50 web publishers have paid our own way to come to D.C. to explain how Google AdSense and other contextual ad networks power small businesses. This is my third year attending the event. We spend one day talking shop about web publishing and learning about new web privacy legislation, then spend the next ... read more

Conservative media activist Andrew Breitbart died March 1 of "heart failure and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy with focal coronary atherosclerosis," the Los Angeles Coroner's Office revealed Friday afternoon. "No prescription or illicit drugs were detected," the office announced in a press release. Breitbart had spent two hours that evening at the Brentwood Restaurant in LA's Brentwood district and had drunk some alcohol but "he wasn't drinking excessively," Arthur Sando, a marketing executive he met there for ... read more