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Plus: Why a vote for McCain is not a vote to overturn Roe.

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Anyone who has watched rivals needle each other in a pickup basketball game will recognize what is happening right now between Barack Obama and John McCain. It starts with bumps, shoves, maybe a few elbows—and then suddenly it's a windmill of fists, torn shirts, and a lot of bad words about mothers. On Thursday, the presidential race reached a whole new level of nasty.

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John McCain is trying to pull a Jessica Seinfeld. Few Americans (less than 20 percent) want to return to an America in which abortion is almost always illegal, and if they knew McCain's true views on the subject, most would not vote for him. So the candidate is doing exactly what Mrs. Jerry Seinfeld did in her popular cookbook, Deceptively Delicious. He's sneaking a little of his bad-tasting reproductive rights stance into the meatloaf of his candidacy—not by hiding it, but by trading on his reputation as a maverick. Seinfeld's contention was that if your kids don't like asparagus, you should just whirl it up in the blender and bake it into some meatloaf. The children won't know the difference until it's too late.

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When it comes to the economy, Barack Obama’s campaign seems oddly lethargic.

The conflict in the Caucasus may be an omen. Will nationalism kill globalization again?

The history of the pursuit of universal health care in America is one of missed chances.

Know-nothingism the insistence that there are simple answers to every problem has become the core of Republican policy.

Even a slow-mo economic crisis can do a lot of damage if it goes on for a year and counting.

The skirmish over drilling is the opening to a much bigger fight over environmental policy.

The housing bill that passed in Congress last week is another attempt to fix the financial system without resolving its underlying flaws.

The prospect for the economy isn’t V-shaped, it’s L-ish: rather than springing back, we’ll have a prolonged period of at best slowly improving performance.

While Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are problematic institutions, they aren’t responsible for the mess we’re in.

Wednesday was the first major health care victory that Democrats have won in a long time. And it was enormously encouraging for advocates of universal health care.

Other politicians besides George W. Bush share the blame for the economic mess we’re in but most of them are Republicans.

The Wesley Clark affair revealed something important about John McCain. Now we know what a McCain administration would represent: namely, a third term for Karl Rove.

We could do a lot worse than a rerun of the Clinton years. But Barack Obama’s most fervent supporters expect much more.

Why are politicians so eager to pin the blame for oil prices on speculators? Because it lets them believe that we don’t have to adapt to a world of expensive gas.

Why should ever-increasing homeownership be a policy goal? How many people should own homes, anyway?

MY LAST POST....This is it: my final post for the Washington Monthly. Starting tomorrow I'll be blogging at Mother Jones. Here's the URL to bookmark:http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drumAlso starting tomorrow, this blog will be taken over by Steve Benen of the Carpetbagger Report...