In South Carolina, Rick Santorum did well* in the first Republican debate, won the Republican straw poll and compared pre-kindergarten programs to fascist Italy. His grandfather left Italy, he said, because his uncle: …used to get up in a brown shirt and march and be told how to be a good little fascist. I don’t know, [...]
Two interesting stories in Monday’s Des Moines Register suggest that Republicans are worried about the effect an intense focus on social issues in the run-up to the 2012 Iowa caucuses could have on the party’s national image at a moment when Americans are overwhelmingly concerned about the economy. Iowa’s caucuses are dominated by evangelical conservatives [...]
If you think that Snooki has relationship problems because of overly strict drinking laws, or that the Bernie Madoff story is a cautionary tale about overly intrusive financial regulation, you’re probably a Florida politician. Because the geniuses who run the state have decided that its economic distress is the result of overly strict growth management.
Syria escalates full-scale crackdown. What John Boehner will tell Wall Street about the debt ceiling. Gas prices may have peaked.
A few weeks ago, the National Institute for Money in State Politics published a report showing a marked spike last fall in campaign contributions to Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller by lawyers and law firms that represent big banks after Miller announced he was opening an investigation into the nationwide mishandling of foreclosures by Bank [...]
The President talks to 60 Minutes:
Andrew Sullivan notes the similarity between The Wire and the actual intelligence campaign to get Bin Laden. But there were also striking similarities to the war in Iraq, oft-noted by some of my intelligence sources back when that war was flaming: In the tv show, the conflict between the slow-moving, hierarchical, unimaginative Baltimore police department [...]
Ft. Campbell, Ky. U.S. Special Operations officials used a scale model of Osama bin Laden’s Pakistani compound to brief President Obama on Friday, giving the commander-in-chief a detailed minute-by-minute account of how the assault that killed America’s most wanted enemy had unfolded days earlier, according to a government official.
On Monday, I temporarily suspended my longstanding jihad against the Army Corps of Engineers to defend the agency’s controversial decision to blow up a Mississippi River levee and flood 130,000 acres of Missouri farmland. The situation upstream remains scary, but it would be even scarier if the Corps hadn’t done its legal and ethical duty. [...]
