President Obama speaks at a rally at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles October 22, 2010. (REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque)
—The early vote is showing that highly touted Republican enthusiasm. Democrats are happy with what they’re seeing in Iowa, Ohio and Indiana; incidentally, those are all places Democrats are poised …
The NYT‘s excellent Peter Baker writes today about the silver lining for Barack Obama if the Congress should go Republican. A GOP Congress, after all, could be a useful foil for an embattled Democratic president (much as Bill Clinton stepped on the back of the Gingrich-Dole Congress as he climbed back to popularity after 1994).
The …
In the ArenaUncategorized
There are some stories that are magnets for idiocy. The Juan Williams story is one of them:
It was idiotic for Williams to say that he gets nervous when Muslims board airplanes.
It was idiotic for NPR to fire Williams for saying something stupid.
It was idiotic for Britt Hume to say that NPR fired Williams because he appears …
For more, see TIME’s White House Photo Blog.
A bit more on those dueling NYT and WSJ estimates of outside group spending and what to make of them: The Journal‘s figures include state and local spending, which in the case of a public employee union like AFSCME, would account for quite a lot of political activity. That’s one reason why the NYT‘s number, which does not appear to …
You may have noticed that the front pages of today’s New York Times and Wall Street Journal seem to paint rather different portraits of who’s spending what in the midterm election campaign. According to the Journal, the giant public-employee union AFSCME (or “the bureaucrats union,” as an email just in from a conservative group puts it) …
Who knew that conservatives loved Juan Williams so much? Williams, who was fired from National Public Radio this week for what the non-profit, quasi-government funded organization called bigoted statements against Muslims, was probably best known to conservatives as one of two liberal foils on Fox News Sunday’s weekly roundtable. That …
–Via Ben Smith, Here’s one of the most incredible ads of the cycle from Citizens Against Government Waste:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTSQozWP-rM]
China has been a popular target of political posturing this year, most commonly in Democratic ads using Republican votes on trade deals or corporate taxes to accuse them of …
The New York Times provides some new details into the sources of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s money:
These records show that while the chamber boasts of representing more than three million businesses, and having approximately 300,000 members, nearly half of its $149 million in contributions in 2008 came from just 45 donors. Many of
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Bipartisan consensus may seem particularly evanescent these days, but here’s something the 112th Congress, split or not, can address: Government Sponsored Entity reform. The news today from the Federal Housing Finance Agency that mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could end up needing as much as $363 billion in government help by …
Per Ben Smith, here’s a new ad from a Tennessee Republican running for the House. Her dismay with cutting $500 out of Medicare “all to help pay for government control of medicine” encapsulates a contradictory message I haven’t heard so overtly since a man attending a town hall last year told a South Carolina congressman to “keep your …
Considering what may be the toughest foreign policy quandary of Barack Obama’s presidency, Andrew Exum of the Center for a New American Security reminds us of a famous credo:
“We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”
Exum continues:
George Bush said that on 11 September
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Kevin Lamarque of Reuters snapped this photo of President Obama at a Seattle doughnut shop today. What went down (courtesy of the pool):
