I interrupt my personal boycott of the artist formerly known as Glenn Beck because…I just can’t resist this. Here is what Beck said about his recent sojourns in the Holy Land:
“I love the Israelis, he said. “I love the Jewish people. But they drive me out of my mind when they talk over each other. They’re constantly talking!”
Beck
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There’s a tired fight raging in Washington between anti-government people who want spending cuts and pro-government people who don’t. Here’s a crazy thought: Maybe we should spend more on good things and less on dumb things. I’m in the pro-government camp, but I’d be thrilled to eliminate almost all of the $380 billion worth of …
Michael Cohen, the author of Live From the Campaign Trail: The Greatest Presidential Campaign Speeches of the 20th Century and How They Shaped Modern America, pens this response to Rick Perlstein’s Swampland column, “How …
I was flattered to learn from Joe Klein’s Aug. 15 column in TIME that Barack Obama is reading my book Nixonland. The book is about the “separate and irreconcilable fears” over the past 50 years that have come to define …
As the resident Fed bore, what interested me about Rick Perry’s attack on Ben Bernanke, aside from the additional evidence that the guy seems a few books short of a library, was his implicit acknowledgment that printing more money could help juice the economy. Presumably that’s why it would be so treasonous to do it before the …
O.K. The nonsense of the Iowa straw poll is behind us. We’ve had another GOP debate. We have one more candidate (Rick Perry) and one fewer (Tim Pawlenty). Here are some thoughts as the nomination contest gets going:
Tim …
As Adam mentioned, on paper, Tim Pawlenty fit the profile of the perfect Republican presidential candidate: A blue-state governor with blue-collar roots, a conservative evangelical with potential appeal to the Tea Party and establishment wings of the GOP. (Was his staff really that savvy? I’ll have to take Adam’s word for it.) But …
While Michele Bachmann seemed to get the better of poor Seth Myers Tim Pawlenty in last night’s Republican debate, I suspect her moment in the sun is about to wane. If you wish to be President, you just can’t get away with the gratuitous hooey she was slinging (which, indeed, is a well-established Bachmann pattern). No, Pawlenty did not …
I know President Obama is supposed to be an awful disappointment to environmentalists because he doesn’t talk enough about climate change, just like he’s an awful disappointment to progressives because he doesn’t say enough nasty things about bankers. But people who actually care about what Presidents do, as opposed to how they …
Persistent unemployment is tragic, not funny.
The Federal Reserve is boring, not funny.
The Fed’s impotence in the face of persistent unemployment is scary, not funny.
But the newsy statement from the Fed’s meeting …
I suspect that this piece by Drew Westen is going to cause a ruckus. Certainly, it will crystallize the concern in the Democratic Party about Barack Obama. A lot of us have been picking around the edges of the problem of Obama’s curiously unsatisfying presidency–I’ve written more than twice about the President’s failure to directly take …
Given its fabulously incompetent and quite possibly corrupt performance in the events leading up to the 2008 financial collapse, it takes a fair amount of chutzpah for Standard and Poor’s to downgrade US treasuries, especially after the debt ceiling deal proved that back-against-the-wall compromise can still be had in American politics, …
Right now, as I write this, CNN is interviewing Donald Trump about the debt ceiling deal. This is the same dude who pulled everyone’s chain last spring, “running” for President to boost his reality-show’s rating, by saying some of the most outlandish stuff imaginable about the President. And CNN is consulting him as someone who might …
