U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul of Kentucky is reaping an online fundraising bonanza today, as a “money bomb” for his campaign efforts exploded from supporters of his father's 2008 presidential campaign.

The CIA outsourced its assassination program to controversial security company Blackwater Worldwide, according to the New York Times for August 20. The assassination program never got to the point of actually carrying out assassination missions, but the New York Times and other news sources reported that Blackwater had received a multimillion-dollar contract to draw up the program and provide training.

President Obama is expected to revise his fiscal 2009 deficit estimate to $1.58 trillion, which is down from the $1.84 trillion estimate earlier in the year. Nearly all of the difference is based upon the Obama administration not using the $250 billion “placeholder” he had built into his budget for a second round of bank bailouts under the TARP program.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney is writing a memoir, and has claimed in that memoir that President George W. Bush “had gone soft” on a variety of issues during his second term, according to the August 12 Washington Post.

Congressmen are on what they call their summer recess or "district work period" right now, and angry constituents are competing with “AstroTurf” leftists that are being planted at these town meetings to generate the appearance of support for more government control of healthcare.

Rand Paul officially opened his campaign for Kentucky’s open U.S. Senate seat August 5. Paul is a medical doctor and the son of Texas Congressman Ron Paul, and he is clearly following in his father’s ideological footsteps.

On August 3, everyone in the White House press corps was pretending President Obama hadn’t already broken his campaign promise not to back tax increases upon the middle class. The whole White House press corps was agog with speculation over comments by Obama’s top two financial appointees on Sunday-morning talk shows that broad tax increases are on the horizon for the middle class.

President Obama selected Massachusetts senior Senator Ted Kennedy to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom July 30, supposedly the highest civilian honor the United States government gives.

The Obama administration has picked up the Bush administration’s policy of denying justice to detainees rather quickly, using the tactics of delay as the Bush administration had done. But in the case of child-combatant Mohammed Jawad, U.S. District Court Judge Ellen Huvelle may not allow it anymore.

President Bush considered ignoring the long-standing and explicit prohibition against using military forces within U.S. territory, the New York Times reported on July 25. The deployment of military forces against U.S. civilians was banned by the Posse Comitatus law, which was enacted shortly after Civil War reconstruction ended. President Bush reportedly considered using military forces to arrest five suspected terrorists near Buffalo, N.Y., in September 2002, despite the law.