Who would have guessed that, in the midterm election home stretch, the White House would spend more than a week talking about television commercials? And yet it’s been nearly impossible of late to hear an Obama administration official speak without getting a quick primer in the way independent conservative groups are running hundreds …
In the ArenaAfghanistan
Afghanistan: A New Balance
The long-awaited battle for Kandahar Province has begun and Time’s Jason Motlagh is there, at the heart of the fight in the same Zhari district where I embedded last April. There is a larger story here, about a change in emphasis by General David Petraeus, from counterinsurgency toward counterterrorism, that Fred Kaplan laid out here …
How The Punk Policy Wonk Rolls
It’s not unusual to break up with someone and still hold a grudge. The bad feelings can even be acted upon in age-old ways: Throw out the ex’s favorite stuff left, throw a drink in his face in a bar, write something nasty on a Facebook page, get your friends to stop talking to her, etc. But that’s not how this policy wonk rolls: He went …
In the ArenaRepublican Party
In the Bubble, Hermetically Sealed
Drudge is currently featuring this video of the President speaking in Ohio yesterday as his lead item, under the headline: The Panic of 2010. I don’t get it. I don’t see any panic there. Just a pretty good bit of campaign rhetoric. I mean, does Drudge actually think that Obama is panicking here? Or does he–or Breitbart, or whoever is …
The Affordable Care Act Gets Another Day in Court
Evoking the Continental Congress and Alexander Hamilton – and referencing Sen. Scott Brown’s election in Massachusetts – Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli emerged from a federal courtroom today sounding confident that the U.S. Supreme Court will ultimately find the Affordable Care Act to be unconstitutional.
Cuccinelli is …
Buck’s Gay Gaffe
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q46By22r1Ls]
Yesterday in a Meet the Press debate with Michael Bennet, Ken Buck misspoke. Badly. When asked by moderator David Gregory if he thought homosexuality is a choice Buck said he believed it is and went on to compare homosexuality to alcoholism.
GREGORY: Do you believe that being gay
…
Morning Must Reads: Sluggers
Republican Senate hope Rand Paul announces that he won’t shake hands with Democratic Senate hopeful Jack Conway after their U.S. Senate debate at the University of Louisville on October 17. (Photo by Jamie Rhodes/Getty Images)
–“Aqua Buddha” makes it into the Kentucky Senate debate and one of Jack Conway’s …
1,000 Words
For more, see the White House photo blog.
Pressure Chamber
Kevin Drum touches on something that I heard from a Democratic operative this week: That the White House offensive against the Chamber of Commerce is as much about shaping the campaign-funding debate ahead of the 2012 presidential election as it is about the 2010 midterms. Part of that may be about drumming up support for some kind of …
BlackBerry: Keep Our Phones Away From Your Body
I have used a BlackBerry every day since the middle of 2005, and like most men, I carry the BlackBerry in my pocket. Never thought twice about it, really. Turns out, I am a moron. I should have read the fine print. Here it is, from the BlackBerry website for my Blackberry 9000 phone:
To maintain compliance with FCC, IC, MIC, and EU RF
…
Tom Donilon, Serving Democratic Presidents For 30 Years
From President Jimmy Carter’s diary, Monday, August 11, 1980:
Monday evening the convention began. There were heated debates on the rules question. When the vote came we did better than we had anticipated, getting 1,935 votes–about a 700+ vote margin over Kennedy. He called me shortly afterward to say he was going to withdraw his name
…
Sarah Palin Continues To Run Away From 2012
The money quote of the trailer for Sarah Palin’s new TLC reality show is “I’d rather be doing this than in some stuffy old political office. I’d rather be out here being free.”
Either Sarah Palin has a poll that says Americans really want to elect a president who would rather be fishing, or the woman is not running for president. …
In the ArenaHarry Reid
Reidoubt
The excellent T.A. Frank reviews last night’s Reid-Angle debate and finds that the Senate Majority Leader has only a passing familiarity with English as it is spoken by his constituents. This is a chronic problem for Democrats, especially those who really care about the details of the legislation they are passing: they speak legislatese, …