Clinton Widens Lead in Poll  —  Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has consolidated her place as the front-runner in the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination, outpacing her main rivals in fundraising in the most recent quarter and widening her lead in a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Bush vetoes child health insurance bill  —  WASHINGTON (CNN) — President Bush on Wednesday vetoed legislation expanding a children's health insurance program by $35 billion over five years.  —  Bush exercised the veto at 10 a.m. ET before leaving the White House for a trip to Lancaster …

Limbaugh Makes His Case  —  On Monday evening, September 24, Rush Limbaugh was struck by a story that appeared on ABC's World News with Charles Gibson.  "A closer look tonight at phony heroes," Gibson said in his introduction to the report, which was about men who claim to be veterans but are not.

Kos Traffic Numbers Inflated by 60%  —  Yesterday, I had the good "fortune" of being frontpaged on Daily Kos.  The post sat atop the site for two hours.  According to Google Analytics, the link produced 1,164 visitors yesterday.  —  For the traffic behemoth Kos is portrayed as, that seems low …

Soldiers hunt dissidents in Myanmar  —  YANGON, Myanmar - Soldiers announced that they were hunting pro-democracy protesters in Myanmar's largest city Wednesday and the top U.S. diplomat in the country said military police were pulling people out of their homes during the night.

Pakistan Seen Losing Fight Against Taliban And Al-Qaeda  —  PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Pakistan's government is losing its war against emboldened insurgent forces, giving al-Qaeda and the Taliban more territory in which to operate and allowing the groups to plot increasingly ambitious attacks …

Control Your Own Health Care  —  Candidates for president have plans to get more people health insurance.  Some would compel us to buy it; others would use the tax code to encourage that.  Regardless, insurance is the magic that will solve our health-care problems.

From Errand to Fatal Shot to Hail of Fire to 17 Deaths  —  It started out as a family errand: Ahmed Haithem Ahmed was driving his mother, Mohassin, to pick up his father from the hospital where he worked as a pathologist.  As they approached Nisour Square at midday on Sept. 16 …

Rudy does end run around the right's leaders  —  Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the Republican frontrunner in national polls, has avoided meeting with the nation's most powerful socially conservative leaders, and instead is taking his appeal directly to conservative activists at the local level.

Escaping the Budget Impasse  —  Almost everyone knows that the next president will have to wrestle with the immense costs of retiring baby boomers.  Comes now a small band of Democrats and Republicans who want to do the new president a giant favor.  They want to force the new administration to face the problem in early 2009.