Obama: Surge Doesn't Meet Long-Term Goals  —  In An Exclusive Interview With Katie Couric, Illinois Senator Defends Position On Troop Buildup … Katie Couric: Sen. Obama, first of all, you have not been to Iraq since 2006.  What did you learn on your recent visit that surprised you?  Or what was new?

SEN. JOHN EDWARDS CAUGHT WITH MISTRESS AND LOVE CHILD!  —  Vice Presidential candidate Sen. John Edwards was caught visiting his mistress and secret love child at 2:40 this morning in a Los Angeles hotel by the NATIONAL ENQUIRER.  —  The married ex-senator from North Carolina …

McCain Meltdown  —  John McCain said this today in Rochester, New Hampshire: … This is the ninth presidential campaign I've covered.  I can't remember a more scurrilous statement by a major party candidate.  It smacks of desperation.  It renews questions about whether McCain has the right temperament for the presidency.

Vanity Fair Covers The New Yorker  —  We here at Vanity Fair maintain a kind of affectionate rivalry with our downstairs neighbors at The New Yorker.  We play softball every year, compete for some of the same stories, and share an elevator bank.  (You can tell the ones who are headed …

“Wall Street Got Drunk”: ‘Banned’ Bush Video Surfaces  —  An ABC-TV outlet in Houston, and now the Houston Chronicle, have posted a video taken at a political fundraiser for Pete Olson, featuring George W. Bush last week — capturing some embarrassing/revealing moments after, he noted, he had asked cameras to be turned off.

Pickens Tells Offshore Drilling Advocates: 'You're Going To Get A Rude Awakening'  —  Testifying before Sen. Joe Lieberman's (I-CT) Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, conservative Texas billionaire T. Boone Pickens explained his plan to dramatically decrease oil usage by greatly expanding wind power electricity.

Obama Campaign Prints German-language Flyers for Berlin Rally  —  This is pretty extraordinary.  A candidate for the American Presidency is using flyers printed in German to turn people out for his campaign rally in Berlin on Thursday.  This flyer can be found on a bilingual page on BarackObama.com advertising the event:

The Fannie Mae Gang  —  Angelo Mozilo was in one of his Napoleonic moods.  It was October 2003, and the CEO of Countrywide Financial was berating me for The Wall Street Journal's editorials raising doubts about the accounting of Fannie Mae.  I had just been introduced to him by Franklin Raines …

Too young for the No. 1 job?  —  Barack Obama is too young to be president.  Yes I know he is 46 and the Constitution sets the presidential age qualification at 35 or higher, but Obama has said that we ought not to interpret the Constitution woodenly and formalistically.

Obama: Israel's a friend of Israel  —  During Sen. Barack Obama's remarks to the press today in Amman, Jordan, he meant to assert that the United States would continue to strongly support Israel.  But this is how that sentence came out as he answered foreign policy questions on a broad range of subjects:

Flight carrying members of Congress makes emergency landing  —  HOUSTON — A Continental Airlines flight carrying seven members of Congress from Houston to Washington was forced to make an emergency landing after it lost cabin pressure Tuesday afternoon.  —  Flight 458 was bound …

Gore's nutty idea  —  He's a former vice president of the United States, Nobel Prize winner and best-selling author, so the lavish news coverage of Al Gore's latest brainstorm was inevitable.  Less understandable is why an idea so irresponsible - in economic terms, in fact, just this side of deranged - attracted so little ridicule.

Tory MPs abandon Republicans to back Barack Obama  —  Almost a third of Tory MPs willing to publicly express their preferences in the US presidential election are prepared to jettison their party's historic links with the Republicans and back Democrat Senator Barack Obama.