It’s obviously just a conversation piece, meant for water-cooler fodder, but it’s Friday afternoon, and I kind of like mulling over conversation pieces like these. London’s Telegraph likes to run occasional lists about American politics. It’s latest installment counts down the most influential political pundits in the country. With the internet revolution and the growing […]
I hesitate to even mention this, in part because it’s a classic non-story, and in part because I suspect the target of the story would much prefer that people stop talking about. But once in a while, I assume readers want to know what the political world is buzzing about and today’s topic du jour […]
The DNC’s “100 years” ad targeting John McCain drew the predictably ire of the Republican Party this week, with McCain allies arguing that McCain doesn’t want to keep the war going through 2108, he’s just willing to leave U.S. troops in Iraq there indefinitely to help maintain the peace. Now, as I noted the other […]
At first blush, there’s no obvious reason to explain why Barack Obama is, according to exit polls, struggling with Catholic voters. He’s opposed the war in Iraq; he’s presented an ambitious plan to combat global warming; he’s taken a progressive attitude on capital punishment and immigration, emphasizes “social justice,” and while he’s pro-choice, Obama has […]
A couple of weeks ago, the Politico’s Jonathan Martin reported that a key aspect of John McCain’s general-election strategy is to “drive a triangulated contrast among himself, the Democratic nominee and President Bush.” Reuters reports today that we’re starting to get a sense of what this strategy looks like in practice. Slowly but surely, Republican […]
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: * The Indianapolis Star, Indiana’s largest newspaper, endorsed Hillary Clinton this morning. The Star’s editorial board seemed disappointed that Clinton has “pandered more to voters,” but the paper nevertheless concludes that she “is […]
Throughout the 1990s, Sidney Blumenthal was an effective and articulate advocate, defending the Clintons from scurrilous attacks launched by right-wing pseudo-journalists. In the 2008 presidential campaign, Blumenthal has apparently decided that those right-wing pseudo-journalists’ smears deserve to be taken seriously after all. Yesterday, Peter Dreier, a professor at Occidental college, broke what appears to have […]
The U.S. Attorney Purge scandal may be over, but the Bush administration hasn’t changed its habit of ridding itself of those guilty of independent thinking. The battle over dioxin contamination in this economically stressed region [of Michigan] had been raging for years when a top Bush administration official turned up the pressure on Dow Chemical […]
The “academic cornerstone” of Bush’s education policy is a flop. But in this case, the failure is even more embarrassing that it appears at first glance. President Bush’s $1 billion a year initiative to teach reading to low-income children has not helped improve their reading comprehension, according to a Department of Education report released on […]
When Hillary Clinton first embraced John McCain’s idea for a temporary gas-tax holiday, I assumed she’d probably stumbled upon it by accident. Maybe, I thought, she was feeling a little desperate, and decided a little conservative pseudo-populism might be worth a point or two in Indiana. It never occurred to me Clinton would use the […]