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The meme of the day in journo-world is that President Obama has stumbled at the outset of the general election campaign. The evidence for this? Well, uh, there isn’t very much, really–except that a few Democrats have criticized his campaign’s attacks on Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital and that Obama’s fundraising is merely humongous, instead [...]
Apparently, Massachusetts voters don’t mind that Elizabeth Warren foolishly identified herself as a Native American early in her academic career–it was, apparently, a case of family pride and wishful thinking about a Cherokee ancestor. That’s good. Warren may be the best public figure when it comes to explaining the depredations of the financial industry and [...]
In another demonstration of diplomatic silliness, the Pakistanis have convicted the doctor who helped us find Osama bin Laden of treason and sentenced him to 33 years in prison. This helps to clarify which side the Pakistanis are actually on. Hint: it’s not ours. I’ll have more about this in my print column tomorrow.
The New York Times is reporting that Iran may be about to open its Parchin military facility to international inspections. This is a biggish deal, but not a complete breakthrough. Parchin is where Iran may have been conducting experiments on weaponizing its nuclear fuel; there has been speculation that the facility housed a chamber to test [...]
Alec MacGillis of the NewRepublic has been doing some fine campaign reporting this year and here he offers a smart look at what may be the most important state of all in November–Ohio. The most striking part of the piece for me, one that illuminates an essential conundrum for Barack Obama, occurs when MacGillis goes [...]
As the Jeremiah Wright ad campaign zooms into the dustbin of history, it must be noted that Mitt Romney promptly and firmly did the right thing. He denounced it: “I want to make it very clear: I repudiate that effort,” Romney said at a news conference. “I think it’s the wrong course.. . . I hope that our [...]
My colleague Fareed Zakaria has a really smart column today about Germany’s role in the Greek debt crisis–and guess what? He’s not bashing the Germans for fiscal austerity. He’s praising them for the compassion they’ve shown, at a stiff cost to German taxpayers, to keep the Greeks afloat. For me, though, the most interesting thing [...]
There’s a front-page story in the New York Times about the possibility that a right-wing super PAC will launch a racially charged attack against President Obama centering on his relationship with the dreadful Rev. Jeremiah Wright. This is the campaign that John McCain famously, and honorably, refused to launch in 2008. I suspect it probably [...]
It looks like Iran is going to make a serious proposal at next week’s round of nuclear talks in Baghdad. But the true test for President Obama will be whether he can hold his coalition together to continue economic sanctions until the Iranians agree to the most important item on the agenda–intrusive inspections of Iranian facilities [...]
