Pat Dollard

The Hill: President Obama’s economic team is looking for ways to accelerate the agonizingly slow economic recovery, but the top White House spokesman on Thursday said a large spending measure is not being considered.

Fox News: A new website sponsored by the NAACP and left-leaning media operations is seeking videographers and bloggers who will search out “racism” and “extremism” among Tea Partiers. Teapartytracker.org will feature tweets, interviews with people at rallies, blog entries and a picture of a t-shirt they say someone spotted at a rally that reads “Blacks [...]

Arizona Republic: Sheriff Joe Arpaio has been sued by the U.S. Justice Department for allegedly refusing to cooperate with a civil-rights probe into police practices and jail operations.

NEW ORLEANS, La.(AP) – A mile-long oil sheen spread Thursday from an offshore petroleum platform burning in the Gulf of Mexico off Lousiana, west of the site of BP’s massive spill. Coast Guard Petty Officer Bill Coklough said the sheen, about 100 feet wide, was spotted near the platform owned by Houston-based Mariner Energy Inc. [...]

Click: It’s well-established that Christopher Hitchens is an atheist (penning a book “God Is Not Great” is a dead giveaway). But since his cancer diagnosis, some have wondered if he’d begun to have second thoughts about his stance on religion — especially since so many people have been praying for him (on the Web, some [...]

Politico: Control of the U.S. Senate increasingly appears to hang on the fate of an unlikely trio of Democratic incumbents who were elected along with Bill Clinton in 1992, hail from liberal-leaning states and have lived mostly charmed political lives. At the start of the year, few observers thought the Senate was up for grabs, [...]

The Hill: Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Thursday that regulators’ central task in overhauling the financial system is ending the notion that there are some firms too big to fail. The nation’s financial regulators are in the early stages of implementing a wide-ranging overhaul effort enacted by President Obama in July. “The most important [...]

Haaretz: The Israel Defense Forces on Thursday warned of a possible wave of attacks as Hamas militants try to sabotage Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, which formally opened in Washington on Wednesday. The warning follows two drive-by shootings on Israeli targets in the West Bank this week, which killed four Israeli civilians and wounded two more. Hamas [...]

The Hill: Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair spends more than 100 pages of his newly released memoir defending the war in Iraq. Blair, who was criticized for his decision to stand by President George W. Bush and send British troops to the region, covers the topic throughout three chapters of his book, A Journey: [...]

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JERUSALEM, Aug. 29 (UPI) — Washington is funding an ad campaign in Israel featuring billboards of Palestinian officials asking: “We are partners — what about you?” The campaign launched Sunday includes the faces of senior Palestinian Authority officials Saeb Erekat, Jibril Rajoub and Yasser Abed Rabo, and Riad Malki, Palestinian foreign affairs minister, Yedioth Aharonoth [...]

Politico: In states far from the Mexico border — from liberal Massachusetts to moderate Iowa — Democrats and Republicans in gubernatorial races are running on strict anti-illegal-immigration platforms, pledging to sign an array of tough enforcement measures into law come January.