In a meeting with reporters this morning, James Carville, the former adviser to Bill Clinton, made an off-color joke about President Obama’s masculinity. “”If Hillary gave up one of her balls and gave it to Obama, he’d have two,” Carville joked.
This criticism, about Obama’s alleged lack of toughness, is a rising theme on the left, …
In the ArenaUncategorized
What do you do to amp ratings after you’ve won a big victory at the polls and the public has wandered off to start celebrating the holidays? At Fox News, the answer is obvious: you up the ante. Yesterday, we had Roger Ailes–unfair and unbalanced–calling the President a socialist, whose beliefs are at variance with the country’s. Today, …
An Ethics Committee lawyer recommended Rep. Charles Rangel be censured by his peers, citing violations that “undercut the public’s ability to have faith and trust in this institution.” In a hearing before the committee held two days after an subcommittee found Rangel guilty of 11 ethics violations, Blake Chisam, who is serving as the …
In the ArenaEconomy
David Ignatius has a good column today about the “carried interest” scam that allows hedge fund managers to be taxed at the capital gains rate of 15% rather than the normal top rate. My question is, Why is the President allowing the billionaire bad boys club to win this one? Even if he lost the battle, this would be a valuable fight to …
John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and Dick Lugar hold a media availability to discuss the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. (Douglas Graham/Roll Call)
–President Obama is running the full court press for lame duck ratification of START.
–The national security right jumps all over the Ghailani verdict. Sentencing still to …
In the ArenaUncategorized
By Nov. 2, it seemed clear that a bulging checkbook wasn’t going to be enough to save Meg Whitman’s gubernatorial bid in California. Polls showed her trailing by a half-dozen points during the campaign’s final week. It seems she went down fighting. The Fresno Bee reports:
Whitman invested $2.6 million of her own wealth in her
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The day after the election, President Obama announced that he and congressional leaders would sit down and hash things out on Nov. 18th. If you listen to Republicans on the Hill, that was a premature announcement: they’d liked to have been consulted first before picking a date. If you ask Democrats, that’s poppycock: Obama moved his …
Some dramas seem tailor-made for the Internet’s ephemeral obsessions, and the kerfuffle over the Transportation Security Administration’s new airport screening procedures is a perfect example. It’s got all the ingredients to feed a media circus: a whiff of government overreach, children prodded to tears, bold push-back, splashy protests, …
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QHSEhdT6-w&fs=1&hl=en_US]
“It’s all bad, as far as I’m concerned,” Michele Bachmann announced in April, in an appearance on Fox Business. “All this pork is bad. The old pork was bad. The new pork is bad.”
But she didn’t mean it. In an interview Monday with a homestate newspaper, she said she …
The Associated Press just called the last outstanding Senate race for GOP incumbent Lisa Murkowski. Murkowski, who lost her primary to Tea Party favorite Joe Miller, ran an historic write in campaign — the first successful one since Strom Thurmond in 1954.
As I’ve written before, Murkowski benefited from a sense of panic in the …
This Sunday’s New York Times magazine features a long “is she running?” story about Sarah Palin, by the estimable Robert Draper. I haven’t had a chance read it yet, but here’s a taste:
“I am,” Sarah Palin told me the next day when I asked her if she was already weighing a run for president. “I’m engaged in the internal
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