Barack Obama’s first public statement on the mosque plans near New York’s Ground Zero was perfectly scripted from a communications perspective. It was timed for a Friday night, the weekly news cycle’s black hole. He spoke before a Muslim audience at a dinner celebrating Ramadan. His statement was carefully scripted, and focused both on recognizing [...]
One good way to measure Obama’s performance as president, I think, is by the degree to which he meets this famous pledge: The easiest thing in the world for a politician to do is to tell you exactly what you want to hear. But if we want to finally solve the challenges we’re facing right [...]
Rep. Maxine Waters went on the offense with her defense against three ethics charges Friday morning with a 90-minute Capitol Hill press conference. Waters move to try her case in the court of public opinion comes three days after former Ways & Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel took to the floor in a defiant speech [...]
Alvin Greene, the Democratic party’s U.S. Senate candidate from South Carolina, was indicted Friday on felony charges for showing pornography to a South Carolina college student. That’s bad news for Greene, and Democrats generally. But all hope is not lost. Last night, according to the Columbia Free-Times, Greene gave a 23-second speech to the South [...]
A confession: I got a new BlackBerry months ago, but did not download the new TIME mobile app until last night. It is really good. Like better-in-some-ways-than-the-Time.com-homepage good. Much better than it used to be. Almost all of it is there–the stories, the photo essays, Swampland (though, frustratingly, without the comments). Check it out by [...]
On the one hand, it’s pretty hard to envision Barack Obama–whose candidacy was partly premised on reconciling America with the Muslim world–launching a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. On the other hand you have data points like Jeffrey Goldberg’s latest Atlantic opus, in which White House officials insist that “President Obama has by no [...]
–The Washington Post profiles Elizabeth Warren. The timing may be good. –Our colleague Michael Grunwald explores why Fed Chair Bernanke doesn’t have his foot on the monetary policy gas pedal. –Worth re-posting: Scherer makes very good points about the Rangel case and Congress’s modus operandi. –Carl Hulse writes porking power has become a liability. –Newly minted [...]
Bomber Boy Charles Krauthammer occasionally eschews right-wing hackery for principled, thoughtful positions that are at odds with his ideology. I remember, back in the day, when he used to do this all the time, having left liberalism behind and not yet been captured by the right. Even in the past year or so, he came [...]
