Libertarian Bets $1M His GPA Tops Obama's

Libertarian candidate could play spoiler, but lacks key resources

(NEWSER) - Bob Barr’s former GOP colleagues have been beseeching the Libertarian Party presidential nominee not to run against John McCain. “Please don’t do it,” Barr happily recounts being told. They fear he could do to McCain what Nader did to Gore in states such as Georgia, Alaska, and Colorado, the New York Times reports. But those prospects are anything but certain. More»

Vanity Fair excerpts new biography

(NEWSER) - President Obama must be just thrilled his old girlfriends kept their letters. Vanity Fair today publishes an excerpt of Barack Obama: The Story, a biography written by Washington Post reporter David Mariniss. The excerpt focuses on the 20-something Obama's relationships with Alex McNear and, later, Genevieve Cook, when he studied at Occidental College and then Columbia, notes CBS News . Some snippets:

• Obama letter to McNear: "Remember how I said there's a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—(TS) Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance.” ( Daily Intel has some fun with this one.)
• Another from Obama to McNear: "Caught without a class, a structure, or tradition to support me, in a sense the choice to take a different path is made for me. The only way to assuage my feelings of isolation are to absorb all the traditions [and] classes; make them mine, me theirs."

Then-Harvard Law student hosted 'Black History Minute' on TBS

(NEWSER) - Want to revisit the Barack Obama you once knew and loved... oh, 20 years ago? Yes, it's a ways back, but it's still fascinating to see the 29-year-old Harvard Law Review editor giving a short spiel on TBS. He had longer hair and, you guessed it, not a wisp of gray when he spoke about the groundbreaking African-American lawyer Charles Hamilton Houston on the "Black History Minute," USA Today reports. (For a more recent Obama video, see him discuss what he forgot during his first 2 years as president .) More»

Elena Kagan's wanted to be a Justice for a long, long time

(NEWSER) - Elena Kagan posed for her high school yearbook photo wearing a judge's robe and holding a gavel. At 17, she already knew she wanted to be a Supreme Court Justice. “That was a goal from the very beginning,” a classmate at her Upper West Side New York high school for standout students tells the New York Times . Since then she's charted what the Times calls a “careful, some might say, calculated path,” showing plenty of talent, but little ideology. She's "one of the most strategic people I’ve ever met, and that’s true across lots of aspects of her life,” a law professor tells the Times. “She is very effective at playing her cards in every setting I’ve seen.” More»

Law school network continues to propel Obama's rise

(NEWSER) - Barack Obama has tapped his Harvard Law School connections to staff his transition team, with 20 of his classmates among the dozens of grads shaping the next administration, Politico reports. “The numbers seem very large to me,” said one presidential historian (from Princeton) about what looks like the most crimson administration since that of JFK, Harvard College '40. More»