This is election season. The White House is working overtime to change what aides call the “parameters” of the electorate, that is the voting demographics in November. President Obama needs the Democratic base–liberal ideologues, blacks, Hispanics, young people–to get excited again, to volunteer again, to turn out again. So what does Press Secretary Robert Gibbs [...]
If a lawyer, a car dealer or a lobbyist gives you a document you don’t understand, chances are he is misleading you. The proper response is to take a moment to figure out what is going on. Which brings us to the Google-Verizon White Paper on Net Neutrality that was released Monday with great fanfare [...]
Today’s Tuesday and that means voting. Colorado, Connecticut and Minnesota are holding primaries and Georgia’s GOP gubernatorial races holds a run off. By tonight we’ll know if another incumbent scalp, that of Colorado’s Michael Bennet, has been claimed or if the throw-the-bums-out mentality this cycle is abating somewhat. Here’s a primer on today’s fun from [...]
The usual suspects are whinging about SecDef Robert Gates’ plan to eliminate the Joint Forces Command and reduce the number of Pentagon bureaucrats and contractors. Actual military experts like Abu Mook don’t seem very upset. JFCom mostly existed to expedite inter-service relations–the sort of thing that’s nice but not exactly crucial. Actually, the most important [...]
In the new issue of Vanity Fair, White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer is quoted making the following observation: “What they teach you on the first day of press-secretary school is to worry about blowing something up by giving attention to it. … ‘Don’t blow something up.’” He goes on to explain that those rules [...]
It wasn’t exactly a red-hot newsmaking weekend, but my former colleague Jon Chait noticed the same thing I did from the Sunday political talk shows — namely House Republican leader John Boehner’s awkward attempt to reconcile his critiques of Barack Obama’s fiscal responsibility with his support for extending the Bush tax cuts, which are set [...]
After a much ballyhooed endorsement e-mail for Andrew Romanoff in June, Former President Clinton went dark in Colorado’s contested Democratic Senate primary: no more e-mails, no campaign events, no fundraisers, nada. The initial gesture was assumed to be simple reciprocity for Romanoff’s support of Hillary Clinton in ’08 and Clinton’s own spokesman said 42 wouldn’t [...]
The House ethics committee has released its charges against Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters of California, who, along with New York Democrat Charles Rangel, faces an ethics trial this fall that surely has Chris Van Hollen popping the Rolaids. In the new print issue of TIME, Jay and I have a story about how corruption, an [...]
