The view from a row in front of where Joe was sitting:
I, too, was struck by the quiet power of Obama’s speech. Quiet, literally. He didn’t have any of the hokey theme music the others did. His supporters didn’t even have any signs to wave. At some points during his speech, the crowd got so quiet that the only sound you heard was the …
Well, this is pretty interesting. Six Democratic candidates for president making, in effect, their Washington debuts…I want to take a look at the texts before I comment in much depth on this, but I’ve got to say that Obama, Edwards and Clinton–in chronological order–made the biggest impression on the crowd, and on me. (Dodd, Clark …
Fred Kaplan, as usual, has the middle east mess exactly right.
The court spent all much of the day dealing with evidentiary issues. When we broke for lunch at 12:30, a reporter sitting next to me estimated that the jury had heard actually testimony for a grand total of seven minutes so far. There’s a tendency to assume testimony is more exciting than the legal minutiae that happens when the jury’s …
Uh-oh. Clinton’s interview with Karen raises several red flags.
1. NAFTA–“We inherited it.” Oh, come on. Now, if I remember correctly, Hillary was opposed to the President spending political capital on NAFTA passage in September of 1993–she wanted him to devote all his energy to her health insurance plan. So an argument can be made …
From all the references to getting thrown under a bus, putting one’s “neck in a meat grinder,” and, today, having one’s “feet planted in cement,” you’d think U.S. v Libby was a mob trial.
This White House does have a certain wise guy aspect (you’re either with us or against us), and the defense’s case rests on portraying 1600 …
Several readers were wondering what I was doing at the National Review’s conservative summit last week. Here’s the answer.
I interviewed Hillary Clinton yesterday for a story that appears in the latest issue of TIME (fuller transcript here). Two things stood out to me. First, that Senator Clinton has distanced herself significantly from her husband on the issue of free trade. Here, for instance, is what she had to say about NAFTA, one of Bill Clinton’s …
I just heard that General Petraeus has asked the very well respected Colonel H.R. McMaster to be part of his Iraq team. McMaster wrote a terrific book about Vietnam and successfully attempted to use counterinsurgency tactics in Tal Afar last year (although as with Petraeus in Mosul, the success diminished after McMaster’s team left). …
I was airborne this morning and missed the first part of General George Casey’s testimony before the Armed Services Committee, but apparently John McCain gave Casey a tough time.
I know there’s belated sympathy for Casey. He’s obviously uncomfortable with Bush’s new strategy in Iraq. But that doesn’t mean Casey wasn’t an utter failure …
There was much less dish in the afternoon’s testimony, and lots of the same kind of niggling that has made the defense so unpopular with the audience. A significant portion of the cross examination today dealt with whether it might be POSSIBLE that Matt Cooper meant to type an “n” when he really typed an “r”… and thus, could it be …
Eric Alterman at war with the teachers unions! I’ve long believed that the NEA and AFT were harmful to children, as functionally reactionary as Southern suburban Republican legislators–in fact, I’m sure Alterman has criticized me about my anti-teachers-union harangues at some point or other (before his own kids started going to public …
There’s this from the estimable Roger Simon at Politico. I always thought Edwards’ nicey-niceness was gaggingly dreadful in 2004. He did John Kerry no favors by refusing to dispute him on the issues in the primaries. It’s good he’s speaking his mind now. Especially when he takes these positions with Simon:
To reduce carbon emissions,
…
