The voice of Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.), claiming that women rarely get pregnant when they are the victims of “legitimate rape,” is now being featured in its first campaign advertisement of the election season.

But the ad is not on behalf of Democrat Claire McCaskill, whom Akin is challenging for Missouri’s U.S. Senate seat. Instead, it’s a radio spot airing in Massachusetts for Elizabeth Warren, who is challenging Sen. Scott Brown (R).

In the next week, the Obama campaign will redouble its efforts to woo women voters, as Republicans continue to distance themselves from Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin's controversial comments on rape and abortion.

The president’s campaign on Friday is releasing a Web video featuring several women who say they have left the GOP because of the party’s antiabortion stance.

Mitt Romney made a joke about his birth certificate at a rally here Friday that many in the crowd heard as a swipe at President Obama, who has been the subject of false theories about whether he was born in the United States.

Noting that he and his wife, Ann, were born in Michigan hospitals, Romney said: “No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this is the place where both of us were born and raised.”

While notorious Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio entertains the Republican Party convention diehards at a Tampa zoo next week, the real Old West show will have already taken place at the platform committee meetings.

The neo-conservatives have consolidated their plan for control of US foreign policy with the vice-presidential nomination of Paul Ryan.

Ryan is being briefed by Dan Senor, described mildly in the New York Times as "an expert on Israel and the Middle East." Senor, however, is anything but expert.

This Friday -- August 24 -- would have been the 90th birthday of the great historian and activist Howard Zinn, who died in 2010. Zinn did not merely record history, he made it: as a professor at Spelman College in the 1950s and early 1960s, where he was ultimately fired for his outspoken support of students in the Civil Rights Movement, and specifically the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC);