Les Gelb jumps the gun on the mid-November NATO summit by reporting that the allies will set 2014 as the real end date for the Afghanistan war effort. This conforms to Hamid Karzai’s stated deadline, which few took seriously when he announced it last July. More important, it conforms to the U.S. political schedule–Obama won’t [...]
The NYT‘s excellent Peter Baker writes today about the silver lining for Barack Obama if the Congress should go Republican. A GOP Congress, after all, could be a useful foil for an embattled Democratic president (much as Bill Clinton stepped on the back of the Gingrich-Dole Congress as he climbed back to popularity after 1994). [...]
There are some stories that are magnets for idiocy. The Juan Williams story is one of them: It was idiotic for Williams to say that he gets nervous when Muslims board airplanes. It was idiotic for NPR to fire Williams for saying something stupid. It was idiotic for Britt Hume to say that NPR fired [...]
For more, see TIME’s White House Photo Blog.
A bit more on those dueling NYT and WSJ estimates of outside group spending and what to make of them: The Journal‘s figures include state and local spending, which in the case of a public employee union like AFSCME, would account for quite a lot of political activity. That’s one reason why the NYT‘s number, [...]
You may have noticed that the front pages of today’s New York Times and Wall Street Journal seem to paint rather different portraits of who’s spending what in the midterm election campaign. According to the Journal, the giant public-employee union AFSCME (or “the bureaucrats union,” as an email just in from a conservative group puts [...]
Who knew that conservatives loved Juan Williams so much? Williams, who was fired from National Public Radio this week for what the non-profit, quasi-government funded organization called bigoted statements against Muslims, was probably best known to conservatives as one of two liberal foils on Fox News Sunday’s weekly roundtable. That show must be much more [...]
The New York Times provides some new details into the sources of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s money: These records show that while the chamber boasts of representing more than three million businesses, and having approximately 300,000 members, nearly half of its $149 million in contributions in 2008 came from just 45 donors. Many of [...]
