Like Salon’s Tim Grieve, I noticed that one can peruse the last day or so of Think Progress posts and discover some fascinating insights into the minds of Republican lawmakers. For example, there’s Sen. Sam Brownback’s (R-Kan.) solution for the crisis in Iraq. One of the key recommendations of the Iraq Study Group was direct, […]
Rep. William “Cash in the Freezer” Jefferson (D-La.), much to the Democrats’ dismay, won re-election fairly easily over the weekend, beating State. Rep. Karen Carter (D) in a closely-watched run-off election. Jefferson, who is under a federal criminal investigation and seems likely to get indicted, managed to parlay disgust with Bush administration into a defense […]
Some days, the Bush administration more closely resembles a bad Saturday Night Live sketch than anything close to an effective branch of the federal government. Consider this jaw-dropper, for example. When the State Department recently asked the CIA for names of Iranians who could be sanctioned for their involvement in a clandestine nuclear weapons program, […]
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: * One of the three undecided House races from this year’s midterm elections appears to have wrapped up. The AP reported this morning that Republican Rep. Deborah Pryce has narrowly defeated Democrat Mary […]
The New York Times had an interesting item yesterday on how the Iraq Study Group report is contributing to the great GOP crack-up over the war, noting that “deep fissures among Republicans over how to manage a war that many fear will haunt their party — and the nation — for years to come” are […]
Time’s Karen Tumulty wrote one of the better, more even-handed pieces on Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) presidential campaign that I’ve seen in a while. It not only skipped over false-but-obligatory praise for the senator’s “maverick” tendencies, the article even went to so far as to point out a major substantive hurdle — his inconsistencies. After […]
[tag]Barack Obama[/tag] was in [tag]New Hampshire[/tag] yesterday for his first swing through the first primary state, and like everyone else, I was anxious to see how it went. Granite State voters aren’t easily impressed, they’ve seen plenty of buzz-worthy politicians come and go, and after a couple of generations of vetting would-be presidents, they’ve come […]
I have to assume that White House Press Secretary Tony Snow no longer wants to be taken seriously. He just doesn’t care. He’s got the cool job, he’s getting to do some campaigning for far-right Republicans, and he’s a bit of a celebrity … so if his answers don’t coincide with reality at all, it’s […]
It would be a gross exaggeration to suggest that every person to ever run for president in U.S. history has been a wealthy white Protestant male. We’ve had some Catholic candidates (Al Smith, Kennedy, Kerry), some Mormon candidates (George Romney, Hatch), some Jewish candidates (Lieberman, Specter), some African-American candidates (Jackson, Sharpton), and some women candidates […]
Back in August, we learned from former Ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith that the president, shortly before he ordered the invasion of Iraq in 2003, did not understand the religious differences at the heart of Iraqi society. As Galbraith explained, Bush met with three Iraqi Americans, who quickly realized that the president was unfamiliar with […]