Brooks Kraft forwards this photo as grist for our regular 1,000 Words feature:
The actual caption:
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How A Republican Civil War Took Over My Home District
The current race for the congressional seat in my home district – New York’s 23rd – is being billed as a test case for the future of the Republican Party. The Conservative candidate Doug Hoffman appears to be pulling even or ahead of his opponents – GOP establishment candidate Dede Scozzafava and Bill Owens, running on the Democratic …
The New YouTube Populists: Michele Bachmann and Alan Grayson
In his book, The Populist Persuasion, Michael Kazin defines populism this way:
a language whose speakers conceive of ordinary people as a noble assemblage not bounded narrowly by class, view their elite opponents as self-serving and undemocratic, and seek to mobilize the former against the latter.
America has, of course, been rife with …
Did David Plouffe Wear A Wire?
I’ve been in the quote scribbling business now for more than a decade, and I am consistently humbled by just how hard it is to get right. I can be sure I heard something correctly, even just a sentence, and the tyranny of just a few seconds between hearing and scribbling will mangle the result. Compare my delayed notes to the audio tape, …
Does Focus on the Family Fund Abortions?
It does if you hold the organization to the same standard it uses to insist that health reform would result in publicly funded abortions.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the fungibility argument that many pro-life groups and politicians have employed to oppose health reform. The problem, they say, is that if any insurance plan that …
O’Reilly
Greetings from Pakistan. I arrived to learn that Bill O’Reilly claimed I was “afraid” to talk to him about the hateful crap his colleagues at Fox are peddling. Sorry Bill, I was aloft, not afraid. Actually, I’ve enjoyed the times O’Reilly has had me on his show. He’s also a Mets fan, which counts for something with me.
But, please. …
Kerry Nails It
John Kerry gave a good, detailed speech about Afghanistan policy today. His sense that McChrystal’s 40,000 request is too much, too soon is especially noteworthy. I hate to make predictions, but just this once: I still think Obama will approve 20-25,000 troops–two brigades to secure Kandahar city and environs, plus three to train the …
1,000 Words: Pink Ribbon Edition
From CBS Radio Correspondent Mark Knoller’s Twitterfeed.:
Ahmadinejad the Moderate?
The usually excellent David Sanger has a very frustrating piece of analysis in the NY Times today. He reports that a public debate has erupted in Iran over whether to accept the west’s nuclear non-proliferation offer:
For days now, Iran’s leadership has been fighting over whether to take that deal, with political opponents of
…
Perfect Pitch
Vice President Joe Biden had an absolutely perfect response to Dick Cheney’s utterly predictable and entirely wrong foreign policy speech this week:
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had a blunt response on Friday to the latest broadsides from former Vice President Dick Cheney: “Who cares?”
Exactly so. The national security policy …
The J Street Controversy
Jeff Goldberg has a good interview with Jeremy Ben-Ami, the leader of J Street–which is a liberal Israel-advocacy group that has been under vicious assault from right-wing Jewish extremists (who’ve conducted a disgraceful campaign to discourage elected officials from attending J Street’s upcoming convention).
Ben-Ami seems perfectly …
Nonsense
A report is circulating among the wingnuts that I had a peek at Barack Obama’s senior thesis. It is completely false. I’ve never seen Obama’s thesis. I have no idea where this report comes from–but I can assure you that it’s complete nonsense.
Update: Michael Ledeen now has apologized to me on his blog, claiming that he, Limbaugh and …
OutFoxed?
Let me be precise here: Fox News peddles a fair amount of hateful crap. Some of it borders on sedition. Much of it is flat out untrue.
But I don’t understand why the White House would give such poisonous helium balloons as Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity the opportunity for still greater spasms of self-inflation by declaring war on …