Today’s installment of campaign-related news items that wouldn’t generate a post of their own, but may be of interest to political observers: * Several news outlets report this morning that Fred Thompson will enter the presidential race soon. Thompson apparently dropped the pretenses during a conference call with supporters yesterday, urging 100 potential donors to […]
Whenever the “debate” over U.S. torture policies (that there even is a debate sends a chill down my spine) comes up, it’s generally unhelpful to focus the discussion on efficacy. We know torture is morally indefensible, which is why advocates prefer to move the goalposts — if we know whether torture works in acquiring valuable […]
CNN’s Lou Dobbs seems to have a problem with leprosy. It’s not that he’s contracted the disease, but his reporting on the subject keeps dogging him. In 2005, Dobbs reported that Mexican immigration, in addition to all of its other perceived problems, had generated an outbreak of leprosy in this country over the previous three […]
That New Yorker story on the implosion of the GOP is the gift that keeps on giving. President Bush has presided over a Republican Party in “collapse,” and Karl Rove’s strategy in the 2004 presidential election was “maniacally dumb” for focusing so heavily on the conservative base. The words, perhaps, of Howard Dean, the Democratic […]
These paragraphs, from an article in The Politico yesterday, are so common they barely register anymore. Giuliani has tried to appeal to social conservatives, embracing their agenda by pledging to appoint “strict constructionists” to the Supreme Court, using Justices John G. Roberts Jr. and Samuel A. Alito Jr. as examples. Conservatives expect “strict constructionists” to […]
Today’s edition of quick hits. * A variety of news reports indicated that Robert Zoellick has been tapped to replace Paul Wolfowitz at the World Bank. (More on Zoellick’s background) * Over the weekend, White House Political Director Sara Taylor announced her departure, citing a desire to work in the private sector. Taylor was one […]
Jonathan Schwarz was nice enough to email me about this over the weekend, but I wanted to hold onto it until today so it wouldn’t get lost in the holiday shuffle. Here’s the deal, Peter Eiser’s and Knut Royce’s new book, The Italian Letter, includes some discussion on Alan Foley, the head of the CIA’s […]
The NYT reported over the weekend that the Congressional Black Caucus Institute’s scheduled presidential debate for Democratic candidates is moving forward, despite being co-sponsored by the Republicans’ Fox News Channel. When the Dems’ top three candidates — Clinton, Edwards, and Obama — announced that they would not participate, citing the network’s partisanship, it looked as […]
National Review’s Michael Ledeen, who is also an AEI scholar and advisor to Karl Rove, became completely detached from reality today, blasting the “Sheehan-Reid-Obama-Clinton cult,” which Ledeen accused of trying to “disrupt military funerals” across the country. (via ThinkProgress) Even by the National Review’s standards, this is utterly ridiculous. The only coordinated effort to “disrupt […]
A week ago, I had an item suggesting the president doesn’t really care about the immigration deal he struck with congressional leaders. If he did care, he’d do what he did when touting his war policy and his plan to privatize Social Security: give enthusiastic speeches, use his Bully Pulpit, lash out at critics, etc. […]